Putian Erotic

What sets the Putian people apart is the way they speak. The old Xinghua prefecture sits on the central Fujian coast, between Fuzhou to the north and Quanzhou to the south. Over the centuries it developed its own speech, Puxian Min, which neither neighbor readily understands. Puxian Min has a hissing lateral sound, close to the Welsh ll, where Hokkien has a plain s, and the first consonant of a word can change depending on the word before it. Overseas, the same people call themselves Henghua or Hinghwa, the local way of saying Xinghua. That name still sets them apart from the Hokkien and Foochow communities they settled beside.

The homeland is compact: the city of Putian, Xianyou County inland, and offshore islands such as Meizhou. For generations, most people lived off rice paddies, lychee and longan orchards and fishing. In recent decades shoe factories and construction work have pulled much of the population into towns. Families once poured money into schooling, and the district became known for producing far more imperial examination graduates than its size would suggest.

Religion here is local and crowded. Meizhou Island is honored as the birthplace of Mazu, the sea goddess said to have been a fisherman's daughter named Lin Moniang in the tenth century. Her ancestral temple on the island draws pilgrims from Taiwan and across Southeast Asia. Putian also gave rise to the Three-in-One Teaching, which the sixteenth-century scholar Lin Zhao'en founded to blend Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist practice. Its halls still stand in villages at home and in Henghua neighborhoods abroad. Village temple festivals remain the main stage for Puxian opera, one of the oldest surviving forms of Chinese theater. A Protestant community that grew out of a nineteenth-century Methodist mission adds another layer.

History has left marks on the calendar. Raiders known as wokou sacked the prefectural city in 1562, and local tradition links the aftermath to an unusual New Year. Many families avoid visiting relatives on the second day of the lunar year and hold a second, bigger celebration on the fourth. On Meizhou, women still wear a sail-shaped bun and two-toned red and dark trousers for festivals, a style islanders connect with Mazu. Emigrants who left for Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia around the turn of the twentieth century found work pulling rickshaws, then moved into the bicycle trade and later motor parts. Xinghua rice noodles traveled with them.