Current Time in Xingning, China

Xingning lies in the north-eastern corner of Guangdong Province in southern China, administered as part of the prefecture-level city of Meizhou. It occupies a broad and unusually flat basin ringed by green hills, watered by the Ning River, a tributary of the Mei. The surrounding mountains kept the district somewhat apart from the coastal lowlands for centuries, and the fertile plain in the middle allowed a dense farming population to develop. The climate is subtropical, with hot summers, mild winters and heavy monsoon rain.

The city and its rural townships have a population of well over a million. Xingning has long been a centre of light industry, particularly knitwear, textiles, shoes and electronics, and it also produces rice, sugar cane, citrus fruit, tobacco and freshwater fish. A distinctive feature of the local economy is the strength of its connections abroad, since Xingning is one of the most important home districts of overseas Chinese communities, and investment and remittances from relatives in Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Mauritius and the Americas have shaped local development for generations.

The county was established more than sixteen hundred years ago, but the character of the district was formed by the arrival of the Hakka. These migrants moved south from central China over several waves between the Song and Ming dynasties, settling the hills and basins of the interior and preserving an older form of Chinese speech along with strong clan traditions. Xingning became one of the core Hakka counties, densely populated and famous for sending its sons overseas as traders and labourers when land became scarce. Hakka communities have produced an extraordinary number of scholars, revolutionaries and business leaders, and the district takes pride in that record.

The most striking sights are the traditional Hakka dwellings that dot the countryside. Unlike the round earthen buildings of neighbouring Fujian, those around Xingning are usually built as enclosed horseshoe-shaped compounds, with a semicircular ridge of rooms embracing an ancestral hall and a crescent-shaped pond in front. Some house several hundred people from a single clan and are centuries old. Shenguang Mountain, a forested park on the edge of the city, offers temples, walking paths and views over the plain, and old streets, ancestral halls and covered bridges survive in many villages.

Hakka culture is vividly alive here. Mountain songs, sung in call and response across the fields, are a celebrated local tradition, along with Han opera, lion dances and elaborate ancestral ceremonies at New Year and Qingming. The cuisine is hearty and famous throughout China, featuring salt-baked chicken, stuffed tofu, preserved vegetable with pork belly and rice wine brewed in every village.

Expressways link Xingning with Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Fujian, railways serve the region and an airport at Meizhou offers domestic flights. Local colleges and a strong network of schools reflect the Hakka emphasis on education, with major universities in the provincial capital.

Xingning is important as a heartland of Hakka culture and as a place whose people have carried that culture around the world.