Sze Yup

Sze Yup, Sze Yap, Seiyap (Chinese: 四邑; pinyin: Sì Yì; Cantonese Yale: Sei3 yap1; literally "four counties") refers to the four former counties of Xinhui, Taishan, Kaiping and Enping in the Pearl River Delta of southern Guangdong province, China. Xinhui is a city district and the other three are county-level cities, all four belong to Jiangmen prefecture administered from the city of Jiangmen. Since Heshan became governed by Jiangmen in 1983, Ng Yap (Chinese: 五邑; pinyin: Wǔ Yì; literally "five counties"), which refers to all the five counties of Xinhui, Taishan, Kaiping, Enping and Heshan, has become an official title, and is widely accepted by the local residents today. However, among overseas Chinese, the name Sze Yup is still popular and frequently used.

It is said that over 100 famous people come from the Siyi or Wuyi region of Guangdong province, making the region famous for producing more stars than any other region in mainland China. As a result, the local government in Jiangmen which administers the Sze Yap or Ng Yap cities of Taishan, Kaiping, Enping, Xinhui, and Heshan, decided to build a Stars Park called Jiangmen Star Park (江门星光园).

The area gave rise to the Sze Yup dialects (四邑話) of Cantonese, the most prominent of which is Taishanese. Although Sze Yup and Cantonese are both dialects of Yue Chinese, Cantonese speakers cannot easily understand Sze Yup dialects[1] Therefore Sze Yup emigrants have kept their identity, even among other Cantonese emigrants.

In the 19th century, many people from Sze Yup emigrated to Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, Australasia, North America and South America. The Punti-Hakka Clan Wars also erupted in these counties during this time.[2]

References

  1. ^ Szeto, Cecilia (2000), "Testing intelligibility among Sinitic dialects", Proceedings of ALS2K, the 2000 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, archived from the original on 2007-09-27, http://web.archive.org/web/20070927223708/http://au.geocities.com/austlingsoc/proceedings/als2000/szeto.pdf, retrieved 2007-06-16 
  2. ^ Punti-Hakka Clan Wars and Taishan County

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