Hakka-Punti Wars
| Punti-Hakka Clan Wars | |||
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| Date | 1855 to 1867 | ||
| Location | Guangdong, China Pearl River Delta, particularly Taishan, Sze Yup | ||
| Caused by | Taiping Rebellion | ||
| Resulted in | Hakka were allocated their own independent sub-prefecture, Chixi (赤溪镇), which was carved out of south-eastern Taishan, while others were relocated to Guangxi Province, mass emigration | ||
| Parties to the civil conflict | |||
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| Casualties | |||
| Death(s) | 1 million+ | ||
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Punti-Hakka Clan Wars or Hakka-Punti Clan Wars refer to the conflict between the Hakka and Cantonese people in Guangdong, China between 1855 and 1867. The wars were fierce around the Pearl River Delta, especially in Taishan of the Sze Yup counties. The wars resulted in roughly a million dead with many more fleeing for their lives.
Hakka literally means guest family, and Punti literally means natives. The Punti are also referred to by the dialect they spoke, Yue Chinese. The origins of this bloody conflict lay in the resentment of the Cantonese towards the Hakka people whose dramatic population growth threatened the Cantonese people. The Hakka were marginalized and resentful in turn, and were forced to inhabit the hills and waterways rather than the fertile plains.
The existing Cantonese-speaking natives (, bendi) of these areas, known in Cantonese as "Punti", were protective of their own more fertile lands, and the newcomers were pushed to the outer fringes of fertile plains, despite having migrated legitimately, or they settled in more mountainous regions to eke out a living. Conflict between the two groups grew and it is thought that "Hakka" became a term of derision used by the Punti aimed at the newcomers. Eventually, the tension between the two groups (the Hakkas had by then been settled for several hundred years and could not be regarded as migrants in any sense) would lead to a series of 19th-century skirmishes in the Pearl River Delta known as the Punti-Hakka Clan Wars. The problem was not that the two groups spoke a different tongue. In fact, the "locals" comprised different peoples speaking several mutually unintelligible tongues, as was typical of the Chinese countryside all over southern China, but they would regard each other as "locals" or Puntis, but exclude the Hakka from such designation. (The Chinese bendi describes any native people in any location; the English term "Punti" describes the native Cantonese in Guangdong but not the emigrant Cantonese elsewhere.)
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Wikipedia