To study the Hakka, I decided to go to Taiwan ¹, which after mainland China has the largest Hakka population. It was a choice I arrived at after visiting the regions of mainland China called the homeland of the Hakka, realizing that my interest did not lie there, and continuing to survey other regions where research was feasible. As it happened, National Taiwan University was a school with a student-exchange program with Korea, and—whether or not choosing Taiwan as a field site for the Hakka was the right decision—I was selected for that program and was able to continue my investigation into the object of my research.

When I arrived in Taipei (臺北) in September 2006, the first people to welcome me were a law student at NTU named Xinting and her boyfriend Yizhang. NTU (臺大—Taiwanese people abbreviate National Taiwan University as "Tai-da") ran a partner program for foreign exchange students, and Xinting too had applied to go to Korea on exchange and was awaiting the result. As it happened, Yizhang, an engineering student at the same school, was a Hakka from Hsinchu (新竹, a northern Hakka region) in northern Taiwan. When I said I was interested in the Hakka, Xinting joked that Hakka men weren't very popular in Taiwan: the Hakka had a strong tendency toward zhongnan qingnü (重男輕女, meaning the same as male preference over female), and were conservative and patriarchal, which made them the worst as husband material in particular—so she'd have to wait and see whom she'd spend her future with. I speculated: Might Taiwanese women's avoidance of Hakka grooms be the same as the mindset of Korean women reluctant to marry the eldest grandson of a head family?

Many studies have revealed that in the Hakka's migration and pioneering life, Hakka women actively participated in farming and labor, and that Hakka women therefore hardly ever practiced footbinding (纏足, the custom of artificially making women's feet small, practiced in China after the Song dynasty, centered on Han Chinese women)² (¹Lee 2019, ²Ardizzoni, ³Ko 2005). The reason Hakka women came to keep "ordinary" feet like men's was to adapt to their harsh and difficult living environment, and so they shouldered as much labor as men, "equally." But might the discontent of Taiwanese women, including Xinting, stem from the fact that such intense labor was, in the end, compelled for the economic wealth and prosperity of the clan they married into? In 2008, at the point when I began fieldwork in earnest, I came to meet a Hakka family (composed of a Hakka couple and their son and daughter), and the wife embodied these Hakka characteristics herself. Lively and assertive, she was a Hakka from Miaoli (苗栗, a Hakka region in northwestern Taiwan) and the mistress of the Taipei (臺北) house where I stayed during my research period; when I said I studied the Hakka, she invited me and served me food. Her son and daughter were in the fifth and third grades of elementary school respectively, and she sent the younger daughter—rather than the older son—on many errands. For example, in preparing fruit, she taught that such work was a woman's to do at home by explaining the fruit-preparation process and having her take part in it—soaking peeled apples briefly in salt water to prevent discoloration before setting them on a plate, and so on. To the son, by contrast, once the fruit was ready, she conveyed the man's appointed role with the words "Come and eat now." She also emphasized the Hakka spirit of frugality and thrift, and the moment I dried my hands on an old, stiff, faded towel in the somewhat dim bathroom, I felt that spirit in my body. But the reason this situation and sentiment did not strike me as foreign at all is that I had grown up experiencing the sight of daughters-in-law mobilized to prepare food, unable to leave the kitchen all day at every ancestral rite, and of the sons and descendants assigned only the role of bowing before the laid-out ritual table and enjoying the eumbok and the food. I lacked the sense of purpose that criticism of reality must necessarily become an object of scholarship, and I did not particularly wish to research Hakka women as a subject.

Source from oftaiwan.org

Staying in Taiwan for a year as an exchange student, I lived at the school in Taipei during the semester and visited Taiwan's Hakka regions during vacations. Of Taiwan's population of 23.6 million, the Hakka account for 15%–20%, amounting to 4.2 to 4.7 million people (World Bank, 2025), and they are distributed across various regions: Hsinchu County (新竹縣) and Miaoli County (苗栗縣) in the north, Taoyuan (桃園, part), Taichung (台中, some mountainous areas) and Nantou (南投, some villages) in the center, and in the south Kaohsiung (Lak-kuei 六龜 and Meinong 美濃 in 高雄縣) and Pingtung (Liudui 六堆 in 屏東縣). The Hakka villages of each region differ in the Hakka dialects they use (in Taiwan there exist five Hakka dialects: Sixian 四縣, Hailu 海陸, Dapu 大埔, Raoping 饒平, and Zhao'an 詔安), and each region's social and cultural characteristics also exist differently.

In the case of the Liudui (六堆) region of Pingtung (屏東), during the Zhu Yigui (朱一貴) incident of 1721³, the Hakka villages organized seven battalions (營) to fight against the insurgent army that had risen under the banner of "oppose the Qing, restore the Ming" (反清復明), aiding the Qing government forces, and won. In the 60th year of the Kangxi reign (1721), to commemorate this, the title "righteous people" (yimin, 義民) was bestowed and the Zhongyi Pavilion (忠義亭) was erected (Record of the Rebuilding of the Zhongyi Pavilion, translated by the author).

Meanwhile, in the northern Hsinchu region—the hometown of the aforementioned Yizhang—the Qianlong Emperor's title "commend the loyal" (褒忠) honoring the Hakka who had fought and perished against the Lin Shuangwen (林爽文) incident⁴ that occurred between 1786 and 1788 during the Qing period, the construction of the Yimin Temple where their remains were interred, and, through this, the event by which the various clans of the north united and venerated them as a communal deity, played a central role in the formation of regional Hakka identity.

The Dai Chaochun incident (戴潮春 事件, 1862–1865) of the Miaoli (苗栗) region is recorded as the last of the "three great civil revolts" that occurred in Taiwan during the Qing period. When Dai Chaochun, a man of influence in the Changhua (彰化) region, led the secret society Tiandihui (a local-magnate organization) and rose up in 1862, threatening the Miaoli and Hsinchu areas, the Hakka clans of this region (the Shen 沈, Lin 林, Huang 黃, Chen 陳, and Liu 劉) put into operation powerful righteous-militia organizations to defend their villages and, together with the Qing government forces, suppressed the uprising.

Chen Lihua showed the process by which collective memory is reproduced through historical events and rituals, by way of the yimin faith (義民信仰) of the Taiwanese Hakka. In each region, the minority clan forces of Guangdong origin—who stood in conflict with the local forces of Fujian origin that had occupied posts as Qing officials and made up the majority, and who were in opposition to the many Fujian-origin forces—came to be recognized by the state as "righteous people" (yimin) by aiding the ruling Qing government forces in suppressing uprisings; as similar memories accumulated in each region, they formed a Hakka identity transcending clan boundaries and regional scope (Chen Lihua, 2015). Thus the events collected by the state are layered upon one another to make "our history."

「從來人生總有一死，死得其死，死後猶光。自昔諸匪叛逆有朱一貴、林爽文、戴萬生，渠魁者匪勢強橫，城池陷落；臺島孤懸海外，幾幾乎勢有難守者。我粵民義起扶官，不顧身家、不惜性命，血戰沙場，賊勢而蕩平之。捐軀報國，其身雖死，其名卓著，此可謂死得其死矣！ 雖耕鑿小民而為國勤王，尚知舍生取義，史冊中永垂不朽矣！」 (1905 重建義民廟碑記(甲))

(In life no one escapes death, but whoever meets a righteous death has glory that shines even after death. Since ancient times, among the traitors there were Zhu Yigui, Lin Shuangwen, and Dai Wansheng (an alias of Dai Chaochun); these ringleaders were strong in force and fell cities, and the island of Taiwan, isolated in the outer seas, came near to being impossible to defend. We people of Guangdong rose up in righteousness to assist the officials, heedless of our households and unsparing of our lives, shedding blood in battle on the field, and suppressed the bandit forces. Giving our bodies to repay the nation—though our flesh died, our names shine; this can be called meeting a death worthy of dying! Though but humble commoners who till and dig, in serving the nation and laboring for the king, we still knew to lay down life for righteousness, and shall remain immortal forever in the annals of history!)

The Hakka, with their image of strong women who take for granted and pass down discrimination between men and women within a Confucian, patriarchal culture; the Hakka who, amid regional power struggles, colluded with a "corrupt" central power to defeat a superior opponent from a position of disadvantage and were recognized by the state as "righteous people"—thus the Hakka formed a glorious identity. The sense of kinship I had at first felt—imagining that they must have suffered discrimination and hardship at the hands of the natives, ten thousand li from home in a foreign land—burst into an absurd, wry laugh. The Hakka were perhaps a wily old serpent strategically wielding that very "history of discrimination and hardship." With this, my "Las Casas–like attitude" ran up against its limits. Todorov pointed out that Las Casas morally idealized the Other and thereby erased them from reality, and that this attitude too fails to reach a genuine understanding of the Other (Tzvetan Todorov, 1982). To me, the Hakka had been "pure victims" and victors who had overcome life's adversities, but that adversity had been repeatedly revised through erasure and insertion, and that victory did not appear altogether just.

If so, then what about the Hakka do I actually want to study? Around the time when, facing the differing geographical backgrounds, the dissimilarity of local societies, and the differences among Taiwan's many Hakka regions, I could not get my bearings, a professor introduced me to the fact that a high-school classmate of his was living in a region called Zhao'an (詔安) and was probably Hakka. The Zhao'an Hakka I met in this way finally became the object of my research.