Wu Wenxing is as loquacious as taxi drivers the world over - but he is not happy.
'The wealthy Putonghua people are still in bed,' says Wu, piloting his yellow taxi through Guangzhou's unexpectedly quiet streets on a hot Saturday morning. 'Once they get up and turn on their vehicles, by 11 or so, the roads will be jammed. These buck-lo [literally 'northern guys'] bring with them the money from bribery and corruption and enjoy their life here.'
Wu isn't alone in his dislike of 'Putonghua people' and what are seen as their domineering ways. Thousands of protesters took to the streets in the heart of Guangzhou on July 25 and August 1 - when a parallel rally was held in Hong Kong - to demonstrate their support for Cantonese in the face of what is being seen as a cultural invasion. And battle lines are evident across the city.
'All yellow taxi drivers are Cantonese speaking,' Wu says. 'Red ones mostly Cantonese, blue and green ones mostly Putonghua.'
Like today's Hongkongers, the people of Guangzhou have long considered themselves as being apart from the rest of the country - 'The mountains are high and the emperor is far away' is a Cantonese saying that refers to the freedom the south has enjoyed by being distant from the politics of the north - with the Cantonese dialect being at the core of their sense of self.
This autonomous, defiant spirit has been fostered over centuries. Three-hundred years ago, the city was the only one in China open to Western traders. In 1900, when foreigners were being killed during the Boxer Rebellion, Guangdong declared neutrality. The 1911 revolution, which ended 2,000 years of dynastic cycles, was engineered by Sun Yat-sen, a Cantonese. The 1925 northern expedition that united the divided mainland started in Guangzhou. For 10 years during the Cultural Revolution, the biannual Canton Trade Fair was the only forum at which foreigners could do business in the mainland. And, when the mainland began opening up in the late 1970s, Shenzhen and Guangzhou were where the experiment began.
Hong Kong has played an important part, too, providing a safe harbour for Cantonese through the darkest days of communist rule and helping propagate, through its emigrants, the dialect and traditions around the world; according to the People's Daily, the Communist Party's mouthpiece, 67 million people speak Cantonese and it is the third-most spoken 'language' in the United States.
