The first time, it was called "Yiguan Nandu". From the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty to the Wei and Jin Dynasties, the nomadic peoples in the north moved into the interior and mixed with the Han people, and by the end of the Western Jin Dynasty, the northern chaos was great, and the Han people in the north successively moved south and migrated to the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River. According to historians, there were more than 700,000 Central Plains people who moved to the south at that time
The second time, during the Anshi Rebellion in the 8th century AD, a large number of northerners fled south to escape the war;
The third time, in the 12th century AD, from the end of the Northern Song Dynasty to the Southern Song Dynasty, with the Establishment of the Jurchen Jin State occupying the central and northern parts of the Chinese mainland, a large number of people moved to the south of the Anjiang River with the defeated rulers.
The three southward migrations of northerners have made the Jiangnan region replace the Central Plains and become the most economically and culturally developed region in China.
Every Chinese has a "root"
At the same time, the northern peoples continued to enter North China, Central China, and even Jiangnan as naturalized or conquerors. The rulers of the Han national state, on the other hand, constantly mobilized soldiers and residents to land worth developing or frontiers that needed to be guarded. In Chinese historical texts, the words "move", "fa", "move", "migrate", "shi", and "tun" are endless, and each time they appear, it means an officially initiated migration of greater or smaller scale.
The fourth time, the great migration of Shanxi in the early Ming Dynasty.
According to the official historical records, before this migration, due to years of war and slaughter, the population of the north was reduced from 40% of the number of households in the country to less than 15%, and the fertile land was reduced to ruins. Northern China's economy is in decline, while Jiangnan is overcrowded. For example, Yangzhou, once the most prosperous city north of the Yangtze River, was occupied by Zhu Yuanzhang's army, and only 18 families were left.
As ruler, Zhu Yuanzhang had to launch a huge emigration, ordering his people and soldiers to reclaim and guard the sparsely populated land. The scale of this migration is unprecedented. According to the "Concise History of Chinese Immigration", in the early years of the Ming Dynasty, 7 million immigrants from the Yangtze River Basin, 4.9 million immigrants from North China, and 1.5 million from the northwest, northeast and southwest frontiers, a total of 13.4 million, accounting for almost 20% of the total population of the country at that time.
In the northern folk, the iconic memory of this great migration is a large locust tree. In Shandong, Henan and Hebei, there are still folk songs: "Ask me where my ancestors came from, the big locust tree in Hongdong, Shanxi." What is the name of the ancestral house, the old stork nest on the big locust tree. "This big locust tree, located in the north of Hongdong County, Linfen City, is said to be an ancient locust of the Han Dynasty.
Although Shanxi is in the north, it is blocked by terrain and less war, and the population is far denser than the devastated North China Plain, while Shanxi has less land than it can support too many people. In the early years of the Ming Dynasty, the Shanxi people were migrated in large numbers to Hebei, Henan, Shandong, and Shaanxi-Gansu, reaching the Huai River Valley as far south as the Huai River. Migrants departing from southern Shanxi often have to pass through Hongdong County, Shanxi, where they make a stopover.
According to records, during the Ming Dynasty, there was a Guangji Temple on the west side of Beijia Village in Hongdong City, with a large temple and many monks. There is an ancient Locust tree of the Han Dynasty next to the temple, "the tree is surrounded by several acres", and the chema avenue passes under the shade. Flocks of crows nest in the trees, dotted with dots. The Ming Dynasty government set up a bureau at Guangji Temple to handle immigrants centrally, and under the large locust tree became a place where immigrants gathered.
Such a majestic locust tree has become the deepest memory of the immigrant trek. When these immigrants arrived at their new settlement, they told their descendants where they came from, but over time, the names of the villages in Shanxi were lost in the legend, and their descendants could not go back to their earlier hometowns, so the ancestors once stayed under the big locust tree and became the end of the search for roots and ancestors.
In that great migration that spread across the country, there was not only one large locust tree. Yunnan folk legend, ancestors from Nanjing City Yangliu Lane, the soldiers guarding Yunnan are actually from Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Hunan and Henan, and the Nanjing they moved out of refers to the Nanjing area that includes today's Jiangsu, Anhui and Shanghai, not just Nanjing City; Anhui and Hubei immigrants, only remember Jiangxi Waduan Dam, and Northern Jiangsu people often claim that their ancestors came from Suzhou Zhangmen. Such small places, of course, are unlikely to feed a large number of people, and they, like the large locust trees, are only the memories of their ancestors of a gathering place on the way.
After the great migration in the early years of the Ming Dynasty, the economy of North China and Central China was restored. In later records, it is often seen that "at the beginning of the dynasty, people were sparsely populated", and by the Time of Yongle, the land was gradually reclaimed. Cities such as Beijing, Kaifeng, and Hejian have gradually regained their former prosperity. Later, during the Battle of Jingnan, the north experienced another migration to replenish the population of Beijing and Hebei. Ming Chengzu Zhu Di fixed the capital of Beijing, a national metropolis, the vast majority of the population is immigrants, the indigenous population is only one-tenth.
The fifth time, the lake filled Sichuan, "fill out the Kangqian prosperous world"
"The general trend of the world, for a long time will be united, a long time will be divided", just a word, it means "white bones exposed in the wild, thousands of miles without chicken chirping". In the second year of the Kangxi Dynasty (1663), Yin Zhangdedi of Shuntianfu was promoted to the governor of Sichuan, and at this time, there were only a few hundred in Sichuan and Chongqing, and the residents of prefectures and counties were often only a few dozen or even a dozen, and some even had only one or two households. One of the results of the sparse population was that tigers were rampant in Sichuan, and during the Shunzhi period, Nanchong County attracted more than 500 people to settle down, and 228 people were eaten by tigers. Faced with such a mess, Zhang Deshang wrote to Sichuan: "Since Zhang Xianzhong's rebellion in Sichuan, the land is sparsely populated, please recruit people to reclaim." In the seventh year of the Kangxi Dynasty (1668), the matter of immigration was mentioned again.
Immigration to Sichuan began with government encouragement, and the rewards were tempting: immigrants entered Sichuan without paying land taxes for five years. After the San Francisco Rebellion subsided, the Qing government announced that immigrants into Sichuan could be naturalized and could be admitted to the imperial examination. A couple, given thirty acres of paddy fields, or fifty acres of dry land, can be used as sons of Ding Zhuang's labor, and then allocate four acres. Each household was given twelve taels of silver as a cost of settling in the property.
So immigrants flocked to sichuan, and that huge migration was called "the lake fills Sichuan". The inhabitants of Hubei and Hunan descended along the river into eastern Sichuan; the Cantonese entered the western and southern parts of the Sichuan Basin in large numbers, bringing Hakka dialect to Sichuan. In addition, there are immigrants from Fujian, Jiangxi and Guangxi. Using their neighbors and relatives as a link, they formed a team of hundreds of people and trekked to the unknown.
At the same time, the Huguang people also continued northwards into southern Shaanxi, which borders Sichuan. By the late Qianlong period, the population of a county had increased to thousands or even tens of thousands of households in the areas that were once covered by barren grass, and there were residents in the mountains and rocks and deep valleys. The so-called "prosperous era of Kangqian" is, to some extent, also a prosperous world created by immigrants.
In modern times, China still has three waves of immigration, which people are accustomed to calling "breaking into the Guandong", "taking the west entrance" and "going down the South Sea". Unlike the "lake filling Sichuan", these three migrations are all spontaneous.
The sixth time, break into the Kanto, take the west exit, and go down to the South Sea
Break into Kanto
Guan, is Shanhaiguan; Kanto, which is today's three northeastern provinces. During the Kangxi Dynasty, the northeast was banned, and Han people were not allowed to enter the "Land of Longxing" for reclamation and mining, but it was still difficult for farmers who broke into the checkpoints and reclaimed land in the forbidden areas. By the end of Xianfeng, the 200-year-old ban was lifted, encouraging immigrants to reclaim the land, and immigrants from Guannei began to enter the northeast in large numbers.
After arriving in the Republic of China, the tide of immigrants invading the Guandong became higher and higher, and hundreds of thousands of people moved outside the Guandong every year, and at its peak, millions of residents of Hebei and Shandong moved to the northeast with their families every year. In the tide of the entire Kwantung, as many as 37 million residents of North China have migrated to the northeast, and the three northeastern provinces have become the most populous areas in China.
Take the West Exit
While the population of northern China crossed the Bohai Sea and crossed Shanhaiguan, the residents of northern Shanxi were trapped in frequent droughts and barren land, forced to cross the Great Wall and march to today's Inner Mongolia in search of a way to survive.
Go to The South Seas
Residents in Fujian and Guangdong have crossed the oceans one by one to make a living in Southeast Asia. It is recorded in the Yinghuan Zhiluo that "the people of Fujian and Guangdong, who build boats and wade across the sea, tend to be like birds." There are even those who buy land and marry women, and those who stay and do not return, such as Luzon and the Islands of Caropa (Java), there are no less than hundreds of thousands of people. "These areas were roughly in the northern part of today's Philippine Archipelago. This group of immigrants who opened up to the sea also became the first batch of Chinese with modern thinking. Since the late Qing Dynasty, outstanding figures among the Nanyang Chinese have continued to feed back to the mainland, open China's earliest private enterprises, generously donate to coastal defense, expand overseas trade, and many Nanyang children have returned to China to devote themselves to revolution and resistance. During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, as many as 3,000 overseas Chinese served on the Burma Highway alone, and one-third of them died there.