Hi Vaché,

You are correct.

It's very difficult for me to talk about this funny issue by English.

Step 1:

The very first beginning

Yellow mongolian

Brown Malays(Southern Island races)

Step 2:

When yellow mongolian met malays, then maybe Yue emerged as a combination. That's why the abbreviation of Canton in Chinese pronounced as YUE.

But Han Chinese just simply called them BaiYue(hundreds of Yue). Actually there were many nationalities in Hunan, Sichuan, Chongqing, Guangxi, Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, etc, these southern provinces.

Baiyue, some of them might look like yellow race, some of them might look like a mixed blood, some of them might look like Malays( Cantonese).

Just now I searched some bbs, very funny, some non-cantonese posted to claim that Cantonese are related with Malays while some cantonese refused to accept it. Coz in Chinese opinion, Malays are …… you know it..

Step 3:

In the recent thousand years, Northern Chinese have migrated to southern China especial the end of southern China---Canton for many times, from Qin Dynasty, the end of Three Kingdoms(East Jin and West Jin), the end of Tang Dynasty, the end of North Song Dynasty and South Song Dynasty. And they met Baiyue.

That's where Chaozhou People and Hakkas came from. They were regarded as descendants of ancient Chinese, thus their dialects are  a little bit like ancient Chinese accent. But they did mix local BaiYUE people to different levels.

Besides, some of Baiyue nationalities have migrated from southern China to Indochina since thousands of years ago, even before written history. It's a continous process and never stop. Burman,Laos,Thai,Vietnamese have relationships with Yue.

So let's get back to Canton.

Cantonese(Hakka and Chaozhou People not included), we northern Chinese and Eastern Chinese(actually all non-canton provinces) think of them as more like Malaysian and Indonesian, these southern islands races, especiall typical cantonese.

But even in Canton, some local cantonese may look more like non-canton Chinese because maybe they have more Han Genes than southern islands races genes.

From Step 1-Step 2, the southern islands races might keep migrating to Canton and Southern China but couldn't step into other province any further.

From Step 3, most Chinese just migrated oversea as a strong culture spread force. That's why so many Chinese in Southern islands.

Anyway, above are all from my assumption and reasoning. May full of mistakes.

Because human beings kept migrating. It's kind of a continous and non-stop process, so we can't just define the race and nationality that easily.

Time+Place( historical period+regional distribution )=change, emergence, combination, migration of nationality.

Very hard to distinguish.

Get back to work, talk to you later, very funny, hah

发件人: Vaché Petrossian
发送时间: 2009年11月23日 15:16
收件人: 'Stephen Chu'
主题: RE: Greetings from Stephen

Hi Stephen,

It was good chatting with you as well the other evening and I also enjoyed our conversation. Let’s keep in touch and get together for lunch or dinner soon.

PS I checked info on Canton’s native people and found them to be related to the modern day ZHUANG minority in Guangxi. Collectively, they were called the YUE people and their language is actually related to Thai and Vietnamese (not Malay). Take a look and we can discuss more next time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yue_peoples

Thanks,