Hakka - Social and Cultural Influences

Social and Cultural Influences

Due to their agrarian lifestyle, Hakka have a unique architecture based on defense and communal living (see Hakka architecture), and a hearty savory cuisine based on an equal balance between texturised meat and vegetables, and fresh vegetables (see Hakka cuisine).

When Hakka expanded into areas with pre-existing populations, there was often little agricultural land left for them to farm. As a result, many Hakka men turned towards careers in the military or in public service. Consequently, the Hakka culturally emphasized education.

Hakka people built several types of Tulou and fortified villages in the southwestern Fujian and adjacent areas of Jiangxi and Guangdong. A representative sample of Fujian Tulou (consisting of 10 buildings or building groups) in Fujian were inscribed in 2008 as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Historically, Hakka women did not bind their feet when the practice was commonplace in China.

Read more about this topic:  Hakka

Famous quotes containing the words social and, social, cultural and/or influences:

    Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self- employment and artistic autonomy.
    Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)

    If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery, in impoverishment.
    Michael Harrington (1928–1989)

    A society that has made “nostalgia” a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.
    Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)

    The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)