[Video] Was Cantonese really the language of Tang poets?

Into the rabbit hole, let’s slide through to the past…

1920. Zhu Cibo (朱次伯, 1892-1922) was first to sing an aria during a Chinese opera performance using Cantonese. It is uncertain if this happened in Hong Kong or Guangzhou. At that time, Cantonese opera was not sung in Cantonese, but in zhongzhouhua (中州話), a stylised Mandarin. Cantonese finally became the default language of Cantonese opera in the 1930s.

1850s. The first significant influx of mainland Cantonese immigrants arrived in Hong Kong, driven by the Taiping Rebellion. Population census between 1852-54:

1840s. Indian clerks, merchants, policemen and soldiers arrive in Hong Kong with the first British colonisers. Population census in 1841: 7450.

1637. The English mercantile trader Peter Mundy wrote in his travel diaries about the first contact between British traders and Cantonese speakers during an expedition under the command of Captain John Weddel in Macao and Canton.

2nd century. A brick tomb (actually a cenotaph, in Tonkin Street, Kowloon) was created for a Han dynasty dignitary.

Pre-Qin (before 221BCE). Chinese documents referred to mainland Southeast Asian regions, covering modern-day Guangdong and Guangxi, Fujian, Vietnam, etc as the Baiyue 百(越)粵 “hundred Yue”. 越 and 粵 are homophonous, with the latter typically referring to Cantonese. The former is associated with either the Wu regions (i.e., the Shanghai-Suzhou area, also known as Wuyue 吳越) or with Vietnam. Were the Baiyue people Cantonese speakers?

Although Yue hints at a common ancestry with the Wu Chinese, bai “hundred” suggests greater ethnic diversity. Possibly, Wuyue refers to the Yue tribes in the Wu regions. In fact, there are other prefixes such as Nan (南), Min (閩) and Luo (雒), and the various Yue-s have been referred to as Zhuyue (諸越, seen as late as the Song dynasty in Shen Kuo’s Mengxibitan《夢溪筆談·藥議·採草藥》). 

Massive southward migration

Ergo, the original inhabitants of the Cantonese areas were not of Han ethnicity. How then do we account for the fact that modern-day Cantonese are Han Chinese? The answer is — waves of southward migration. The earliest may have been circa 221-206 BCE when the first emperor sent 500,000 troops to conquer the Baiyue. However, we do not have much evidence of their cultural impact. Between the 3rd and 6th centuries, wars in the north triggered a southward exodus. Immigrants brought Confucianism and sophisticated agriculture. 

The most significant migrations occurred in the 10th and 12th centuries. There was a general southward shift of the Chinese economy as the Song dynasty moved its capital city from Bianliang (汴梁, modern Kaifeng) to Lin’An (臨安, modern Hangzhou) in the Wuyue region. Where the Chinese colonised, the original languages of the Baiyue peoples would be subverted. Robert Bauer’s research provided linguistic evidence that the original Baiyue languages were related to Austro-Tai — a proposed family connecting Tai languages such as Thai and Lao with Austronesian languages across Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

A non-Han pre-historic past

Among other examples, the informal word for excrement in modern Cantonese kher (phonetically /kʰɛ̋ː/) is clearly a cognate of Thai /kʰîː/, Biao Min (a Yao language) /kàí/, and Burmese /kʰje/, and unrelated to shi (屎). Bauer offered other modern Cantonese vocabulary items related to agriculture, etc, that are cognates of Austro-Tai and even Mon-Khmer. Many of these tended to be morphemes without reliable written forms.

Beyond linguistics, one finds such interesting evidence in food that straddles non-Han and Han languages, exemplified by the Vietnamese banh cuon, commonly called cheung fun (腸粉) in Guangdong and Guangxi. Modern Cantonese carries echoes of a non-Han prehistoric past.

Another early group of inhabitants in the Baiyue region were boat people who led a nomadic life on water. One wonders if they were of various Polynesian ethnicities and recognised differently by people from different shores: Tanka in China, but Orang Laut in Singapore, Sama Bajau in the Philippines. The traditional Tanka food is spicy, thus unlikely to be Cantonese. One of the authors (Lian-Hee) interviewed Tanka descendants in Hong Kong who recalled traditional spicy foods, and their grandparents’ stories of mooring in the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia and along the Chinese coasts. As maritime life dwindled, the sea nomads assimilated into the cultures of the different shores they chose to affiliate with, their own language and cultures forgotten.

Sub-dialects bloom

(From Zhan Bohui’s 《廣東粤方言概要》An Outline of Yue Dialects in Guangdong, 2nd edition. Guangzhou: Jinan University Press (2004: 304-310))

Different Cantonese subdialects are grouped into pian (片), largely by mutual intelligibility. A representative dialect is chosen here for each pian, with pronunciations transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet. The superscript numbers indicate tone value: “5” is highest, and “1” is lowest, so 55 is high flat, 13 is low rising, etc.

Before the 1850s migration, the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong by the meagre population was a sub-dialect called Weitou (圍頭) of the Guanbao group. Without young-generation speakers, Weitou in Hong Kong is slated for extinction. There were also Hakka speakers, a dialect family different from Yue Cantonese. When the British administration opened Hong Kong’s doors to immigrants in the 1850s, they engendered the cultural exports from Hong Kong that would make Cantonese culture so globally prominent in the latter half of the 20th century. Although Shanghai and other Chinese dialects also came to Hong Kong, their influence was limited. 

A dose of English

Curiously, English would enrich Hong Kong’s Cantonese giving it such iconic words as 撲街 (originally “poor guy”, now meaning bankrupted in Singapore and Malaysia, and vulgar in Hong Kong), 執笠 (possibly from “shut up”, to mean closing down a business), 拗撬 (from “argue”, the meaning is retained) among a long list of lexical items that included 蚊 from 蚊尼 “money”, now meaning “dollars”. These may have trickled through early Cantonese-English pidgins or through Cantonese-English bilingual dictionaries such as T’ong Ting-kü’s (唐廷樞) Chinese-English Instructor (《英語集全》, 1862). 

Claiming that Cantonese is the language of the Tang and Song poets is misguided. Cantonese is as much a descendant of ancient Chinese as all other Chinese dialects. It has inherited elements from diverse sources, just as other Chinese languages have been shaped and enriched by centuries of cultural contact — with Mongolians, Tanguts, Khitans and Manchus, for example.

Below, we offer three Tang poems for illustration: one rhymes well in Cantonese, one in Mandarin, and one does not rhyme in either. (Note: The characters in bold are supposed to rhyme within each poem below.)

(The poems are read in Mandarin by Zhao Kaixin and in Cantonese by Winnie HY Cheung. The characters are read approximating the various Cantonese sub-dialects by Lian-Hee Wee.)

勸君莫惜金縷 衣勸君惜取少年時 花開堪折直須折 莫待無花空折枝

清明時節雨紛 紛路上行人欲斷魂 借問酒家何處有 牧童遙指杏花村

離離原上 草一歲一枯榮 野火燒不盡 春風吹又生 又送王孫去 萋萋滿別情

To conclude, the rich heritage of Cantonese is not narrowly predicated on being a Chinese descendant. Conservation and celebration require rigour and broad sight. Be wary of over-reduction to a singular Chinese source, as there are many different threads deeply interwoven.

A wonderful piece of tapestry that illustrates the required magnitude of spirit is Cantonese opera. Here, one finds Western tunes (e.g. Auld Lang Syne and Oh! Susanna) adapted into its arias, along with Chinese ones from different dialect groups. As long as Cantonese continues to imbibe from many rivers, its colours will remain fresh and vibrant.

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