Why do Cantonese ancestors all come from Nanxiong Zhuji Lane?

In the Pearl River Delta, Nanxiong Zhuji Lane is almost a household name, because many people know that their ancestors moved there. In the records of genealogy and folklore, there are similar stories:

At the end of the Southern Song Dynasty (the ninth year of Xianchun), there was a beautiful concubine named Su (Hu) in the palace. One night, the emperor came to the palace where she lived. She made a mistake when playing elegant music. The emperor was furious and put her in the cold palace. Su Fei waited for an opportunity to escape and lived in the capital disguised as a tourist.

There is a rich man named Huang Chuwan in Niutianfang, Changbao County, Shixing County, Nanxiong region. He transported the grain to Beijing and stopped outside Hangzhou. He was preparing to sacrifice to the gods when a female music passed by. Huang Chuwan saw that she was fashionable and intended to tease, so the woman got on the boat, had a very congenial conversation with Huang, and revealed that she was willing to entrust her for life, so Huang took her back to the countryside.

Later, when the emperor remembered Su Fei and ordered her to be summoned, he was very angry when he learned that she had fled for a long time. He ordered Ministry of War Minister Zhang Qin (or Zhang Yingbin) to send a document to the provinces for investigation. Because there was no news all the year round, Zhang had to beat the emperor and stop tracing. Huang Chuwan didn't know that the woman he brought back was Su Fei. One day, Liu Zhuang, the housekeeper, ran away with him and spread the story to Beijing.

Ministry of War officials were afraid that the emperor would be poor again, and lied that there was an uprising among the people. They had a secret discussion with civil and military officials of various departments and decided to completely demolish Niutianfang area to eliminate the traces of Su Fei. Therefore, on the grounds that some people in Niutianfang, Changbao County, Nanxiong Prefecture rebelled against good people, they falsely spread the imperial edict and built a village in Niutianfang to station troops to suppress and defend the country.

Soon the official document of the Ministry of War was issued, and the local officials ordered all local citizens to move out. As a result, residents of 58 villages in Niutianfang, led by 97 people in Zhuji Lane, applied to the government for formal proper immigration documents and moved south one after another. These 97 people belong to 33 surnames. They are:

Luo, Zhan, Zheng, Zhang, Yin, Wen, Su, Xie, Chen, Mai, Lu, Tang, Wen, Hu, Zhao, Wu, Cao, Qu, Li, Liang, Wu, Feng, Tan, Cai, Ruan, Guo, Liao, Huang, Zhou, Li, He and Lu.

In addition, it is said that Hu Fei (or Su Fei) was expelled from the palace to hide the people because of Jia Sidao's rude remarks. After that, the investigation of the case led the citizens of Zhuji Lane to flee. Or Hu Fei went insane after leaving the palace and died in Nanxiong. The emperor thought she was hidden and ordered a search.

In order to prove the legitimacy of their ancestors' migration to the south, many genealogies also include relevant "official documents", among which the representative ones are as follows:

Nanxiong Mansion on Lingnan Road gave an early rescue: On January 13th this year, according to Gong Luogui and others in Zhuji Village, 14th regiment of Niutianfang, Shixing County, it was a natural and man-made disaster, and the people were killed, so it is still difficult to live in peace. Today, it was promulgated by the Ming dynasty, and the soil was built to build a village. I didn't dare to move to the government without permission because I thought there was no place to move nearby. I heard that the south was smoky and sparsely populated, and I could find my address.

On this basis, 97 people, including Cha Min Gong Sheng Luo Gui, were convicted of crimes other than the people. To this end, just make an offer and approve the departure. Where the land passes through Guanjin, this photo will pass by without stopping. When the parties arrive at the station, they have to go to the prefecture and county to register and hand in the telegram before they can report for execution. On the fifteenth day of the first month of Shaoxing, the payment is limited to April 24th.

Regarding the authenticity of these legends and official documents, the late famous historian Chen Lesu has made a thorough demonstration in the article "Zhuji Lane History". These are not historical facts, but they are not completely without evidence. Song Shi? According to Biography of Jia Sidao, in the eighth year of Xianchun (1272), Jia Sidao forced Du Zong to be the official of Hu Xianzu, the father of Hu Guimian, and made Hu Guimian leave the palace for Nepal.

This matter is recorded in books such as History of Dong Qiye and Legacy of Offering Spring. In the folk, Princess Hu (Soviet) became a person who fled the palace, dressed as a tramp, and returned to Nanxiong with her, causing Nanxiong residents to be forced to move south. However, when the Northern Song Dynasty collapsed, some officials, soldiers and China citizens moved south with the Dragon Queen, and fled from Hongzhou (now Nanchang City, Jiangxi Province) to Taihe County and then to Ganzhou (now Ganzhou City, Jiangxi Province).

A few months later, the dragon queen returned to Hangzhou, but a group of refugees stranded in Qianzhou continued to move southward, crossing Dayuling to Nanxiong and then southward to the Pearl River Basin. During the Southern Song Dynasty, Gannan's economy flourished and the number of young people increased. Moving south is a way out for the local landless poor. During the Song and Yuan Dynasties, with the southward migration of the Yuan Army, the soldiers, civilians and refugees loyal to the adherents of the Song Dynasty, including the descendants of immigrants who had moved from China before, moved from Nanxiong to the south again.

As for that kind of official document, it was naturally forged by later generations, because the same administrative divisions, official positions and systems did not conform to the reality of the Song Dynasty, and the official documents contained in various genealogies were also contradictory in time and content. However, these estimates reflect the migration process and the hardships on the way.

Whether the "Hu Fei (or Su Fei) disaster" really happened or not, and whether it was related to Nanxiong or not, an isolated event is that Fucheng can stimulate large-scale immigration and can last for hundreds of years. The real reason is still the thrust of moving out of Nanxiong and the pull of moving into the Pearl River Delta. China moved south several times in history, all of which were gradually promoted.

After Yongjia Rebellion, the first pseudo-residences of northern immigrants were still Jianghuai Plain, Jianghan Plain and Yangtze River Delta. However, from the Tang Anshi Rebellion to the Five Dynasties, the north of Nanling was almost a pseudo-residential area for northern immigrants. During the Northern Song Dynasty, the gap between teeth in the south of the Yangtze River was greatly improved. At present, many places in Zhejiang, Jiangxi and Fujian are sparsely populated, and the pressure of teething is increasing.

During the Southern Song Dynasty, in addition to the increase of teething in the mainland, a large number of northern immigrants moved in. This phenomenon is getting more and more serious, and the trend of infanticide is getting worse. Because other prejudices have made it difficult to find a large area with few teeth, moving south has become the only choice. Jin Jun Jin Bing invaded, Yuan Jun destroyed the Song Dynasty from north to south, and refugees affected by the war could only migrate from north to south. Crossing Dayuling was the most important north-south passage at that time. Nanxiong, located in the south of Dayuling, has naturally become a distribution center for southern immigrants. It's strange that a large number of immigrants have poured in here without a specific destination.

In the early years of the Northern Song Dynasty, teething in the Pearl River Delta was relatively rare. The original residents mainly lived around cities and platforms, and a large number of wasteland, beaches and sandbars have not been exercised. Immigrants from the north, either forced to make a living, or having the necessary financial resources and appeal, or mastering more advanced production modes, have built dikes to reclaim land. The construction of dikes cherishes the newly reclaimed cultivated land, avoids floods and expands the cultivated land without harming the interests of the original residents, which not only ensures the basic needs of immigrants, but also provides a prerequisite for their growth.

This kind of information is undoubtedly of great attraction to the refugees stranded in Nanxiong and the residents who moved out of the north, so new immigrants continue to move south. Based on Zeng and Zeng Xianshan's "Zhuji Rural Migration and Agricultural Growth in the Pearl River Delta in Song Dynasty" (Jinan University Press 1995), the dikes in the Pearl River Delta were mainly built after the Song and Yuan Dynasties, and more in the Southern Song Dynasty than in the Northern Song Dynasty. The dikes built in the Yuan Dynasty were vulgar in the Song Dynasty, indicating that the land continued to advance to the seaside, and there were 25 dikes that could be tested.

Xu's research cited in the book confirmed that the density of teething in the delta was only 0.2 households per square kilometer/kloc-0 in the Tang Dynasty, increased to 4.8 households in the Song Dynasty and 6.0 households in the Yuan Dynasty. It can be seen that during the nearly 400 years from the Northern Song Dynasty to the Yuan Dynasty, immigrants moved in for the first time, most concentrated in the Southern Song Dynasty. Zeng Xian-shan and Zeng Xian-shan listed 797 immigrant families in Zhuji Lane through the collection of genealogy, local chronicles and place names, which is the most detailed one seen so far.

So, did the ancestors of these families really move from Nanxiong Zhuji Lane? According to Chen Lesu's textual research, the name Zhuji Lane was not found in the historical records of Song and Yuan Dynasties. Among the Preface to Genealogy and Epitaph written by Chen Lian in Dongguan during the Yongle period recorded in Qin Dynasty, only Wu, Feng, Luo, Li, Cai, Deng, Ding, He, Liu, Li, Zhang and Yuan are called "the ancestors of Nanxiong". However, in Wannian, Liang Tingdong's poem "Zhu Ji Nostalgia" shows that "Zhu Ji's legacy is extremely sad and tired, saying that there was migration in the previous dynasty", and Huang Gongfu also has a poem "Zhu Ji in Changting Road, feeling lonely at present" and "getting old for no reason"

It shows that the legend of Zhuji Lane has been quite popular since the middle of Ming Dynasty. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, Qu Dajun clearly stated that he was a descendant of immigrants from Zhuji Lane in his Guangdong Xinyu, and said that "my hometown is a famous family, and most of them originally came from Nanxiong Zhuji Lane". According to him, because there was Zhuji Lane in Kaifeng in the Northern Song Dynasty, when the Song Dynasty moved south, the subjects who moved to Nanxiong called their settlement Zhuji Lane to express their nostalgia for the old capital. However, in the same book, it is said that Zhuji Lane's real name is Jing Zong Lane, and Tang Jingzong (in early 827) changed the name behind it because he avoided his temple name. It can be seen that there are already different legends in the local area, and no one can say for sure. But even according to the previous statement, the name of Zhujixiang has a history of more than 800 years.

However, Zhuji Lane is just a corner, and Fuchengneng is of course the real pastoral of the vast number of southern immigrants, and it is only their distribution center at most. Even from the genealogical evaluation, it can be seen that many family members' records that they originally came from a noble family in China or that their ancestors were high-ranking officials and dignitaries all came from collateral meetings, just like the "official document" quoted above, which is obviously fictitious for future generations, but it is completely understandable.

When an immigrant family struggled in Daiyue for several generations or even a dozen generations, it finally won the prosperity of the family. When they can build ancestral temples and genealogy with other families, how can they leave the connection between the origin of their ancestors and the migration history blank, or just be a refugee and a refugee? Since other rich families in Gaomen are all from Zhuji Lane and descendants of immigrants who moved south, what is the success of self-admission immigration in Zhuji Lane? Because of this, as early as hundreds of years ago in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, Zhuji Lane has become the spiritual pastoral of countless Lingnan people and the root of maintaining their feelings of mulberry and catalpa and clan friendship.

In fact, individual family members are not northern immigrants, nor are they children of local non-Han aborigines, nor are they immigrants from other places in Lingnan. Instead, they live in a social situation in which immigrants from Zhuji Lane dominate, and they also choose to identify with mainstream culture. Although their blood roots are not from the north, after a long period of integration, their culture and mentality are no different from those of the descendants of northern immigrants, and people should of course respect their own choices.

In the past, thousands of refugees and refugees who traveled long distances to Nanxiong through natural and man-made disasters left many bitter stories in the face of the "wild" Lingnan in the north. However, they embarked on the journey of moving south without hesitation, and eventually gave birth to millions of Lingnan children and cultivated great achievements through the ages.

Today, when we stand on this prosperous and rich site, how can we not think of Zhuji Lane, but of the ancestors of Zhuji Lane?

The roots of Zhuji Lane are connected with the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, and the branches and leaves of Zhuji Lane are all over Lingnan and all over the world.