Teochew people

I once wrote that some Taiwanese people who identify themselves as Hokkien or Hakka might actually be descendants of Teochews.

Teochews are an interesting group of people among the overseas Chinese, whose ancestral land overlaps with that of Hakkas in the eastern part of Guangdong. Today, the main city is Swatow (Shantou) but it used to be Chaozhou in the past, from which the name of the group derive.

Although geographically from Guangdong, the Teochew language is closely related to Hokkien. Teochew spoken in places like Singapore is mutually intelligible with Hokkien, perhaps because it has been under the heavy influence from the latter, who form the majority there. But I heard that Teochew spoken in Swatow today is not readily intelligible to Hokkien speakers from Amoy.

The majority of ethnic Chinese in Thailand and Cambodia are Teochews, and even the royal family of the former has some Teochew ancestry.

The first Teochews who came into personal contact with me was a refugee family from Cambodia at the Chinese mass community back when it still met at Sophia University. That made me realize that the family running my favorite restaurant Cambodia in Takadanobaba actually was also Teochew.

The Singaporean exchange student I met also at the Chinese mass was also Teochew, and so was the family I stayed with when I was in Johor Baru, Malaysia, on my way to the UK back in 1992.

While I was in Hull, I once visited a Singaporean lady who married with a local English person. I remember she was also Teochew. The wife of one of my best friends from my Hull years is also Teochew, who come from an area close to Thai border on the east coast of Malaysia. Since Teochews from the majority of Thai Chinese, her family might have also moved from Thailand.

By the way, Mr. Li Ka-shing, one of the richest tycoons in Hong Kong, is also a Teochew and there's a YouTube video of him speaking in Teochew. Unfortunately, he is not a personal friend of mine.

Do you have any Teochew friends? Tell me about them.

Teochew people in Taiwan?

Teochew is not spoken, at least locally in Taiwan. Wikipedia says that Teochew people in Taiwan has been Hokkienized, and speak Hokkien. It also says that some of them speak Hakka.

I know for a fact that some Hokkien people claim that they trace their ancestry to Shantou-Chaozhou area. Take my mother-in-law for example. All her family members live in northern Taipei, and speak Hokkien with a marked Tong'an accent. Yet they claim that they are Teochew people. Or at least that's what their family tree chart "claims". In this post, I will talk about three kinds of people who are thought to be Teochew. And I will question if they can really be considered Teochew.

Teochew people are speakers of the language, whose center is Shantou-Chaozhou area. It is a branch of Southern Min family. Most Chinese people in Thailand and Cambodia are Teochew. Hong Kong also has lots of Teochew people, including Mr. Li Ka-Shing, the richest tycoon. They are quite powerful in Singapore and southern peninsular Malaysia as well.

Type A "Teochew" people in Taiwan are not really Teochew people at all. They are Pepo tribal people. Pepo tribes are Malayo-Polynesian people people who became Sinicized. They had to pretend to be Han-Chinese so they could own land. In order to prove that they were Han, they had to produce a family tree. But All their Hokkien neighbors knew that they are really different from them. They even spoke Hokkien with an accent. Therefore, they claimed in their family tree that their ancestors are Teochew. They thought the neighbors wouldn't know. But it's easy to tell they really have nothing to do with Teochews. Like my mother-in-law, they speak Hokkien with a Tong'an accent, which is Quanzhou-leaning. If they are really Teochew, they should sound more Zhangzhou.

Type B "Teochew" people maybe Hokkienized Hakka people that originated from western Zhangzhou areas in Fujian Province. There are many such people in Zhanghua and Yunlin Counties. The funny thing that most of those people don't recognize themselves as Hakka. They regard themselves as Zhangzhou Hokkiens. But Older generation people still remember some Hakka words. And some have admitted that they are Hakkas recently, and are engaged in reviving their Hakka culture.

Type C "Teochew" people are actually related to Chaozhou, but are not ethnically Teochew. They are mainstream Hakka people who migrated to Taiwan from Shantou-Chaozhou region. In this region of Guangdong, as in neighboring western Zhangzhou of Fujian, Hakkas and Southern Min people are coexisting alongside each other. Among the mainstream Hakka people who migrated to Taiwan en masse, some originated from this Teochew-speaking region. So their ancestry tree rightly indicate that their ancestral origin is Chaozhou. But that doesn't mean that they are ethnically Chaozhou.

By the way, in Tainan, there is a dish called Chaozhou noodles. I wrote a blog post about it in the past. I don't know if this delicacy is related to Type A or Type C psuedo-Teochews. Or maybe it's related to Chaozhou Township in Pindong.

A final word of caution: Be careful when you discuss this topic with the people concerned themselves. As I said, they may well perceive themselves as otherwise. And we must respect that. They don't particularly like being told who they are by a foreigner. The same principle applies to talking to people who might have Pepo ancestry.