Less than 10 km east of Chengdu, capital city of Sichuan Province in southwestern China, there is a small town called Luodai. The town is famed as a Hakka culture town; not only the houses are in ancient style, but the residents all speak the Hakka dialect and retain their traditional lifestyle.

Among Luodai's 23,000 inhabitants, 20,000 are Hakka people. Chen Shisong, director of the Sichuan Hakka Culture Research Center and a researcher of the Sichuan Academe of Social Sciences, said it's a rare case to have ancient customs well preserved in a place situated so close to a big city. And it's the only one in China. The residential areas in Fujian, Guangxi, Guangdong, Jiangxi and Taiwan, where Hakka culture has been retained, are mostly far away from metropolises.

The houses, courtyards and streets in Luodai are all in the architectural style of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) or the Republic period (1912-1949). Its landmark, the Guangdong Guildhall, occupies an area of 3,000 square meters. Constructed in 1747 by the Hakka people from Guangdong Province with pooled money, the house was where the Hakka people gathered, met relatives and friends, settled disputes and made sacrifices to ancestors and gods. It is one of the best preserved existing guildhalls in China.

The couplets hung in the main hall read: "Smoke the tobacco leaves and smell the earth of west Sichuan; Speak the Hakka dialect to review the ancient language of Central Plains." The words show how those earlier immigrants miss their hometowns and how determined they were to build new homes in a faraway land. Several other guildhalls, such as those of Huguang, Jiangxi and Chuanbei, also remain in good shape.

Dwelling houses built along the 1,000-meter-long main street are of Hakka style too. Inside these siheyuan, or four-side enclosed courtyards, there is always an open area in the middle and a main building decorated with carvings of turtle and flower. The roofs of the houses are all covered with cogon and small black tiles.

As to why the ancient Hakka culture could have been well preserved, Chen said that it's because the locals adhered to the tradition that "One should rather sell the land of his ancestor than forget the ancestor's language." Most of the residents here speak Hakka, Sichuan dialect and mandarin. But when one meets his or her clan people, one has to speak Hakka. When a woman who has married away to a non-Hakka community returns to her parents' house, she must speak Hakka, otherwise it will be considered as a betray of her ancestors. And a non-Hakka girl married to a clan man here must learn the language in one or two years.

Hakka still keeps some of the tones of ancient Chinese. Luodai people call their own language "local Cantonese." It is true that their Hakka remains the same as that spoken by the Hakka people in Meixian of Guangdong Province. The more than a dozen villages and towns in the Luodai area form a special "dialect island" in the Sichuan dialect "sea."

Among the residents in this area, 500,000, or 80 percent, are Hakka. The identity of a Hakka family is based on the way they write their ancestors' memorial tablets, the family's origin and whether they speak Hakka.

The Hakka people in Sichuan celebrate the Fire Dragon Festival. It's said the custom was brought here by the Liu family who migrated from Jiangxi Province. Till now, the Baosheng Village where the Liu family live is famous for making dragons and performing dragon dance, a skill passed down from generation to generation. And there is a systematic ceremony going with the dragon dance, including greeting the dragon, worshipping the ancestors, taking the dragon home and painting the dragon's eyes.

According to Chen, Sichuan has China's fifth largest Hakka population, 2.5 million. The Hakka are famous for their pioneering spirit. Some people of this clan migrated from Fujian, Guangdong and Jiangxi provinces to northwest Sichuan area 300 years ago. The history of Hakkas could be traced back to the early fourth century, when some Han people migrated from the Yellow River valley to the south; in the late ninth century and the 13th century, more people moved from the north to Jiangxi, Fujian, and the north and east areas of Guangdong. Xie Taowen, a researcher with the Sichuan Academy of Social Sciences, said, "It's something amazing that the Hakka culture, which has mingled with other cultures, could have avoided assimilation and kept its brilliant characteristic."

The Hakka culture in Sichuan also reflects the western region's vigor, which can play its role in the current campaign of western-region development. But experts worry that modernization and urbanization will sooner or later have impacts on the traditional Hakka culture and inevitably put the characteristic customs of Luodai in danger.

(China.org.cn by Chen Lin, January 28, 2003)