What does cousin in Hubei mean?

In our tradition in China, people who originally lived in the same county, city and province usually call each other "fellow villagers" when they meet in other places. In Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi and other places, "Lao Biao" is a dialect word with high usage rate. In dialect, "Lao Biao" means "fellow villager". Many people may have noticed that many Hubei people will affectionately call each other "old cousin" when they meet Jiangxi people. What is the reason?

In fact, people in Hubei call Jiangxi an "old cousin", which is related to a famous population migration in the history of China, which was called "Jiangxi filling the lake".

At the end of the Yuan Dynasty, different degrees of natural disasters occurred in southern provinces, with floods raging and poor harvests. Then, a large area of plague occurred in the Central Plains, especially in Hubei, Anhui, Henan and other places. At that time, the population of these places decreased sharply. The combination of these factors contributed to the uprising of peasant armies such as Zhu Yuanzhang and Chen Youliang and overthrew the rule of the Yuan Dynasty. At that time, the main battlefields of Yuan Army and Peasant Army were in Anhui, Hunan and Hubei, and the war further aggravated the population decline of Hunan and Hubei.

After Zhu Yuanzhang established the Ming regime, in view of the tragic situation of Hunan and Hubei, and in order to promote economic development, he made a decision: to move the population from Jiangxi, which is relatively densely populated, to Hunan and Hubei, in order to balance the population. From the early Ming Dynasty to the fifteenth year of Yongle, the Ming Dynasty used administrative power to force Jiangxi residents to move to Hunan and Hubei. According to historical records, in order to organize this large-scale population migration, the Ming government specially set up inspectors in the state capitals of Jiangxi, and the people of each state capital concentrated along the Le 'an River and Raohe River to reach Poyang Waxie Dam, and then distributed materials to the immigrants in a unified way. After that, arrange boats to transport the immigrants from Fanyang Lake to Hukou, and then go upstream along the Yangtze River to send them to Hubei and Hunan.

This great migration has a history of more than 30 years. With the passage of time, Jiangxi people who moved to Hubei and Hunan gradually adapted to the settled life in the place where they moved. But I still think I am from Jiangxi in my bones, which is why Hubei people call Jiangxi people "old cousins".