Provinces with a strong sense of clan

In terms of birthplace, I am an authentic southerner. I was born and raised in Guangdong, and although I have lived in Fujian for the past 10 years or so, I still belong to the "South".

But the weird thing is, since I know, my family, my friends and relatives, my teachers, not forgetting to "teach" me: I'm a northerner, we are hundreds of thousands of people in this area are northerners. Where the north, the north of Henan! Why so, because we Liu's family, tens of thousands of people, is more than 600 years ago, from Henan forced migration.

Saying that this is a falsehood, it can be said: "home" where Henan, the specific location, can be clearly identified to a certain area, a village; south of the specific time, can be detailed to a certain year and a certain month; as for the specific migratory routes, clear, so and so the old road are clear.

I have since stayed in Hubei, Shaanxi, Henan generation of northern provinces is more frequently traveled, but indeed rarely found this extremely stubborn clannish persistence.

The most frightening thing is that all this is traceable to a reason, not quite like fiction, much less nonsense.

The evidence is in the neighborhood of a shrine, an old building, an old man's word of mouth, a genealogy and other documentary materials. In the past, the ancients said, "there is a history of the state, the family has a genealogy, the family has multiplied", in southern China, many regions, families and even families, is not uncommon.

Some of these concepts, in my understanding, is actually clan identity. In Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi and other southern provinces, there are hundreds of millions of southerners each cohesive as a closely related group, the same surname, the same clan gatherings, adhere to *** with the guardian of the culture, customs, beliefs.

Even, insist that they are "northerners", is the "Central Plains people" - when I was a child, the local burial, the most important a program, is the The most important procedure is to "cross the Yellow River", which means to return to the northern homeland after death. That send-off eulogy was so sad and somber to the point of misery that it is still unforgettable.

At least in the south of Guangdong, the kind of tens of thousands of people all with the same family name living together, the kind of ancestral temple as the center of the walled cottage or earthen floor household pattern, the kind of dependence on the internal intermarriage, blood relations formed by the acquaintances of the community, the kind of still have the township convention and family rules, you need to go back to the ancestral home to the ancestral graves of the custom of worship;

The kind of go out to the outside world to ask for the generation of the rules, such as the next village may be confused! The first thing you need to do is to check the dialect of the people you are talking to, and then you can see that you are not going to be able to get the best out of them. I have a good friend who is from Shunde and is the so-called eldest son of the eldest family, and when he got married last year, I heard him complaining that he had to kowtow to all the elders in the village until his legs got weak.

Many areas in the South, those extraordinarily strong clan forces, seems to be the North is less.