About 300,000 Hakkas living in Hong Kong migrated from the poor and once inaccessible mountains around Heyuan in northern Guangdong. New roads, and especially the new Beijing-Kowloon railway, have now raised expectations that the exodus from places like Heyuan district will stop.
Heyuan is only 180 kilometres from Kowloon - and even remote border counties such as Longchuan are now only five hours away by train - but this remains a world apart. Centuries ago, the Hakka, or Kejia (as the Putonghua translates the term for 'guest people') came here seeking refuge and uninhabited lands. The Cantonese preferred to keep the rich Pearl River Delta for themselves and the Hakkas were allowed only to scratch a living in these inaccessible mountains.
Even now, as you travel along a newly-built highway, you can glimpse people still living in crude timber and mud huts, a sure sign of serious poverty.
Early hopes of an investment boom, with factories relocating from the delta to take advantage of cheap land and convenient transport links to Hong Kong, are fading.
Hong Kong and the delta together rank as probably the richest region in China, but this has not spurred much self-sustaining economic growth out here. In the recent past, officials estimated 63 per cent of the Cantonese lived in mountainous regions designated 'poverty areas'.
This is not to deny a trickle-down effect. Hong Kong's indirect influence has been immense and local officials expect it to grow after the handover. Take Longchuan, one of the five counties in Heyuan prefecture: out of its 800,000 population, 80,000 worked in Hong Kong-run factories in the delta plain. And their remittances, an average of 5,000 yuan (HK$4,665) a year, have brought a certain prosperity.
Local officials boast about the number of factories that relocated here, especially since 1992 when Beijing confirmed that the railway line would go through Heyuan. They say the economic boom sparked by the railway has sucked in thousands of workers from the rest of the country. One factory they showed visitors belongs to the Hong Kong Wah Gar group, which shifted first from Shenzhen, then to Dongguan and now to Heyuan, to make its American-style frozen yoghurt for export.