FROM CHINA TO SIAM

The thickly populated, culturally dynamic Chinese littoral extending from Taiwan to Hainan follows a great southwestward-bending arc toward the Southeast Asian landmass. Along that thousand-kilometre seaboard have resided for millennia a string of Chinese ethnic minorities — the Hokkien, Taechiu, Cantonese, Hakka, and Hainanese — commonly referred to as Chinese “speech groups” in recognition of their most prominent individuating culture trait. Over the course of innumerable generations up to the nineteenth–twentieth centuries they were gradually but never fully absorbed into the dominant Han culture. It was only in the past century or so that the cultural distinctions among those various ethnic subspecies, most readily distinguishable in terms of habitat, dialect, and mutual antipathies, were sharply attenuated under the compulsions of Chinese nationalism, Communist ideology, and rampant industrialization.

Among that regional cluster of ethnic minorities, the Taechiu (or Teochew, Chiuchow, or Chaozhou, among other transliterations) historically occupied a comparatively inconsequential position. Inhabiting the resourcepoor, flood- and famine-prone Chaoshan Plain and Han River delta, a lonely prefecture straddling the borderlands between southern Fujian Province (the Hokkien heartland) and central Kwangtung (the Cantonese cradle), they may well have been among the region's autochthonous lowland peoples, pressed by later intruders into that relatively inhospitable ecological zone. Considered impoverished country bumpkins by their more sophisticated Hokkien and Cantonese neighbours, they eked out a living as peasant agriculturalists, sea-salt farmers, fisherfolk, food processors, and coastal traders (Chang 1991, pp. 29–31). Their intrepid maritime skills, coupled with their stubborn defiance of imperial Chinese rule, earned them a lasting reputation in government circles as recalcitrant smugglers, pirates, and renegades (Antony 2003, pp. 19–53; Supang 1991a). As one early nineteenth-century Western observer candidly noted: