Jing People of the Beibu Gulf, China’s Vietnamese Coast Dwellers

Along the warm sweep of the Beibu Gulf, at the very point where China meets Vietnam, lives one of the most unusual of China’s recognised peoples: the Jing, also called the Gin. They are, by descent and by language, Vietnamese, kin to the Kinh majority across the border, yet they are citizens of China, a small maritime nation caught on the northern side of a line that history drew around them.

This account follows the Jing from their origins as Vietnamese settlers of the coastal islands through their language, their homeland around the border city of Dongxing, their sea-going old ways, their society, beliefs, traditions, crafts, food, and their great Ha festival of song, to the bustling border life they lead today. It is the story of a people who belong, in different senses, to two nations at once.

Origins of the Jing People on the Beibu Gulf
What the Name Jing and Gin Really Mean
A Vietnamese Tongue Spoken on Chinese Soil
The Three Islands and the Border City of Dongxing
A Life Won From the Sea and the Tides
Village and Family Among the Jing
Temples, Sea Spirits and Belief Among the Jing
The One-String Zither and Other Jing Traditions
Nets, Weaving and the Crafts of a Coastal People
Seafood, Fish Sauce and the Jing Table
The Ha Festival and the Songs of the Jing
A Border People Between Two Great Nations
The Jing Today on China’s Southern Shore

Origins of the Jing People on the Beibu Gulf

A 1983 ethnolinguistic map of China showing its many peoples, among them the Jing of the far south coast — China’s ethnolinguistic patchwork, where the Jing sit on the Vietnam border

On the warm southern edge of China, where the country meets Vietnam along the shore of the Beibu Gulf, lives a small people who are, in origin, not Chinese at all. The Jing, known also as the Gin, are ethnic Vietnamese, kin to the Kinh majority of Vietnam, and they form one of the smallest of China’s officially recognised nationalities. Their presence marks the point where two nations and two cultures overlap along the sea.

The Jing trace their arrival to migrants who moved north across the shifting frontier several centuries ago, settling on a cluster of low islands and stretches of coast near the mouth of the gulf. When later boundaries were drawn between China and Vietnam, these Vietnamese-speaking communities found themselves on the Chinese side of the line, and over generations they became a distinct minority within China while keeping much of their ancestral Vietnamese culture.

Their origin story is therefore one of a border that moved around a settled people, rather than of a people who wandered far. Having come to fish these particular waters, the Jing stayed, and the frontier hardened around them. What had been simply Vietnamese villages became, in time, the Jing minority of China, holding a heritage rooted south of the border but a home firmly to its north.

This double inheritance runs through everything about the Jing. They are at once a Chinese people, citizens of the south coast, and an outpost of the Vietnamese world, and their culture makes best sense when both of those truths are held together.

What the Name Jing and Gin Really Mean

A young woman in the Vietnamese ao dai, the national dress of the Kinh people from whom the Jing descend — The ao dai of the Kinh, the wider people the Jing belong to

The people are known in China as the Jing, a name taken from the older word for the Kinh, the main ethnic group of Vietnam. In Vietnamese the same root gives Kinh, the term the Vietnamese majority use for themselves, so that Jing and Kinh are in effect two spellings of one name carried across a border.

In English the group is often written Gin, and both Jing and Gin point to the same coastal community of southern Guangxi. Whichever spelling is used, the name declares the essential fact about them: they are the Kinh, the Vietnamese people, living as a recognised minority inside China rather than as the majority of a nation.

That shared name is a reminder of how artificial the line between Jing and Vietnamese really is. Culturally, linguistically, and by descent, the Jing are Vietnamese; politically and administratively they are Chinese. The single name stretched across the frontier captures a people who belong, in different senses, to both sides.

Among their Chinese neighbours the Jing stand out precisely because of this name and what it signals. In a region of many peoples, they are the ones whose very label ties them to the country next door, a distinctiveness they carry with quiet pride.

A Vietnamese Tongue Spoken on Chinese Soil

A public sign illustrating a southern Guangxi dialect near the Jing homeland — Language on the Guangxi border, where Vietnamese meets Chinese

The Jing speak Vietnamese, the same language as the Kinh majority across the border, making them one of the few communities in China whose mother tongue is the national language of another country. For everyday life among themselves, in the home, at market, and at festivals, this Vietnamese speech has long been the natural medium.

Historically the Jing also preserved an older written tradition tied to the Vietnamese world, including the use of characters adapted to write their language before the modern romanised Vietnamese script spread. Much of their oral culture, their songs and their ritual texts, was carried in this Vietnamese speech and its inherited forms.

Living inside China, the Jing have naturally become bilingual, using Chinese for school, trade, and dealings with the state while keeping Vietnamese for community life. This everyday movement between two languages is one of the clearest marks of a border people, at ease in the tongue of their nation and the tongue of their heritage alike.

The survival of Vietnamese among the Jing depends, as ever, on its use at home and at their gatherings. As Chinese grows ever more dominant in public life, the Jing tongue lives on chiefly in the intimate settings of family, song, and festival, where the older speech still holds its place.

The Three Islands and the Border City of Dongxing

A street view of Dongxing, the border city on the Beibu Gulf that anchors the Jing homeland — Dongxing on the Beibu Gulf, heart of the Jing country

The Jing homeland lies at the very bottom of China’s map, in the coastal district around Dongxing city in Guangxi, hard against the Vietnamese border and the waters of the Beibu Gulf. Their historic core is a group of low sandy islands, long remembered as the three islands, where the founding Jing communities settled to fish the gulf.

These islands and the neighbouring shore gave the Jing a world shaped entirely by the sea. Flat, sandy, and open to the tides, the land offered little for large farming but everything for a fishing life, with rich coastal waters, mudflats, and estuaries teeming with fish and shellfish. Over time causeways and development joined some of the once-separate islands more closely to the mainland.

Dongxing itself, the border city that anchors the region, sits where China and Vietnam meet, a place of crossing, trade, and mingling. For the Jing this frontier setting has always meant close ties to relatives and markets on the Vietnamese side, so that the border ran through the middle of their social world rather than at its edge.

To be Jing is thus to belong to this particular strip of warm coast and gulf water. The sea, the islands, and the border town of Dongxing together make up a homeland small in size but rich in the resources and connections that a seafaring, frontier people needed.

This border setting also made the Jing homeland a place of constant exchange. Goods, kin, and news moved back and forth across the frontier, and the markets of Dongxing drew traders from both sides of the line. For the Jing, the boundary was never simply a wall; it was the living seam that joined their Chinese present to their Vietnamese roots, and much of the character of their country came from sitting astride it.

A Life Won From the Sea and the Tides

Round basket boats of the kind used by Vietnamese and Jing fishers along the gulf coast — Basket boats, an old tool of the fishing Jing

The old Jing economy was built on the sea. Fishing in the shallow, productive waters of the Beibu Gulf was the heart of their livelihood, pursued from boats and along the shore with nets, lines, traps, and the patient reading of tides and seasons. Where other peoples measured wealth in fields, the Jing measured it in catches and in knowledge of the water.

Alongside deep-water fishing, the Jing worked the rich margins where land and sea met. On the mudflats and in the estuaries they gathered shellfish, dug for clams, and set traps for crabs and shrimp, turning the daily rhythm of the tides into a reliable source of food. This shore-gathering complemented the boats and spread the community’s risk across many ways of taking from the sea.

Small-scale farming and salt-making filled out the picture, giving grain, vegetables, and the salt so vital for preserving the catch. Yet these were always secondary to the sea, and even families who tilled a little land thought of themselves first as people of the water. The tools of Jing life were the tools of fishing: nets, boats, floats, and baskets.

This maritime way of living tied the Jing tightly to the moods of the gulf. Storms, tides, and the movement of fish set the calendar, and success depended on skill, courage, and cooperation on the water. It was a life of both bounty and danger, and it left a deep mark on Jing belief, custom, and song.

Because the sea gave generously but without warning could turn deadly, the Jing learned to live by careful observation and shared caution. Weather signs, the behaviour of birds and fish, and the memory of past storms all guided decisions about when to sail and when to stay ashore, and this hard-won maritime wisdom was one of the community’s most precious possessions, handed from experienced hands to younger ones on the water itself.

Village and Family Among the Jing

Vietnamese sisters photographed in the mid twentieth century, an image of Kinh family life — Kinh family life, mirrored among the Jing across the border

Jing society was organised, like that of their Vietnamese kin, around the family and the village. Households traced descent through the male line, honoured their ancestors, and formed the basic units of a community bound by ties of blood, marriage, and shared work on the water. Villages on the islands and shore were close-knit worlds where nearly everyone was connected.

Cooperation was essential in a fishing life, where boats had to be crewed, nets hauled, and dangers faced together. Neighbours and kin worked in company on the water and shared in the risks and rewards of the sea, and the village provided the wider web of support that saw families through bad seasons and hard times.

Respect for elders and for ancestors shaped the moral order. The old were honoured for their knowledge of the waters and the customs, and the dead were remembered and served at household altars, so that the family stretched back through the generations as well as across the living community. Vietnamese ideas of family duty and ancestral reverence ran strong among the Jing.

Marriage, hospitality, and mutual aid followed customary forms familiar across the Vietnamese world. Guests were received warmly, obligations between kin were taken seriously, and the village acted together at the great moments of life, so that the individual household always sat within a larger, supportive whole.

Women held a strong practical place in this world, managing households, working the shore and the markets, and playing central roles in the rituals and festivals that held the community together, while men crewed the boats on the open water. The balance of these roles, tuned to the demands of a fishing life, gave Jing village society much of its resilience.

Temples, Sea Spirits and Belief Among the Jing

A temple at Dongxing, one of the places of worship in the Jing borderland — A temple at Dongxing, part of Jing religious life

Jing religious life reflected both their Vietnamese heritage and their bond with the sea. Ancestor worship stood at its centre, with household altars where the dead were honoured and asked for blessing, a practice shared with the Kinh of Vietnam and woven into the fabric of family life.

Because their living came from dangerous waters, the Jing also gave great importance to the spirits and deities of the sea. Protective gods of the ocean and the coast were honoured in temples and shrines and appealed to for safety and good catches, for no fishing people could ignore the powers that ruled the waves on which their lives depended.

Communal worship centred on village temples, where the guardian spirits of the community were served and where the great festivals gathered the people together. These temples were more than places of prayer; they were the heart of village identity, the setting for the rituals, feasts, and performances that bound the Jing as one.

Over time elements of the wider religious world of both Vietnam and China entered Jing practice, blending Buddhist, Daoist, and folk traditions with the older worship of ancestors and sea-gods. Yet the core remained a religion of family altars and village temples, tuned to the needs of a people who lived by the mercy of the sea.

The One-String Zither and Other Jing Traditions

The single-string đàn bầu zither, the instrument most associated with the Jing and their Kinh kin — The đàn bầu, the one-string zither beloved of the Jing

The most beloved of Jing traditions is their music, and above all the đàn bầu, the single-string zither that they share with their Kinh kin and hold as almost an emblem of themselves. From its one string a skilled player draws a remarkably expressive, singing tone, and the instrument accompanies the songs that carry Jing feeling and memory.

Song and storytelling run through Jing life. Ballads and folk songs, many of them in the Vietnamese tradition, recount love, labour, the sea, and the history of the people, and they are performed with special richness at festivals and gatherings. In a community that long kept its heritage more in voice than in books, these songs were a living archive.

Other customs mark the passages of life in ways familiar across the Vietnamese world. Births, weddings, and funerals each follow their proper forms, with offerings to ancestors, feasting, and the gathering of kin, so that the community shares in every threshold. Hospitality and reciprocity are held as matters of honour.

Through all of this the Jing keep alive a culture that is recognisably Vietnamese yet distinctly their own, shaped by the border and the sea. The plaintive voice of the one-string zither, more than anything, has come to stand for that heritage in the eyes of the wider world.

Nets, Weaving and the Crafts of a Coastal People

Traditional Jing (Gin) ethnic costume of southern Guangxi — The dress of the Jing people of Guangxi

Jing craft grew straight out of the fishing life. The making and mending of nets was a constant, skilled task, and the ability to fashion and repair the gear of the sea, nets, lines, traps, floats, and baskets, was among the most practical and valued of abilities in a coastal household.

Boat-building and the maintenance of vessels were equally central. A seaworthy craft was the tool on which a family’s living and safety depended, and the knowledge of how to build, caulk, and keep a boat was passed down as carefully as any other inheritance. The gear of fishing was itself a body of craft honed over generations.

Weaving and the making of clothing gave the Jing their traditional dress, which, like so much of their culture, echoes the styles of the Vietnamese world, including the flowing lines familiar from the ao dai. Costume worn at festivals expressed both the maker’s skill and the community’s identity, distinct amid the many peoples of the Guangxi coast.

On the shore, the making of salt and the preserving of the catch called for their own practical crafts, turning the raw bounty of the sea into food that would last. In all of these the Jing showed the resourcefulness of a people who drew nearly everything they needed from the meeting place of land and water.

Seafood, Fish Sauce and the Jing Table

A Vietnamese fish market, reflecting the seafood diet of the coastal Jing — Seafood, the staple of the sea-going Jing

Jing food is the food of the sea. Fish, shellfish, crabs, shrimp, and the many other creatures of the Beibu Gulf form the heart of the diet, eaten fresh from the day’s catch or preserved for the leaner times. For a people whose whole livelihood came from the water, the table naturally overflowed with its produce.

Central to the cuisine, as across the Vietnamese world, is fish sauce, the pungent seasoning made by fermenting fish with salt. This sauce flavours countless dishes and ties the Jing table firmly to the wider culinary tradition of the Kinh, a shared taste that crosses the border as easily as the language does.

Rice and other grains, along with vegetables from small plots and gardens, round out the meals, giving balance to the abundance of seafood. Coastal herbs and greens, and the fruits of the warm south, add variety, and the Jing kitchen weaves land and sea together into a distinctly southern, distinctly Vietnamese-flavoured fare.

Food, as everywhere, is bound up with community. Festivals and family gatherings call for special dishes and shared feasting, and the seafood banquet is at the heart of Jing celebration. To eat together from the bounty of the gulf is one of the plainest expressions of who the Jing are.

The Ha Festival and the Songs of the Jing

People gathered in Vietnamese traditional dress, echoing the festive gatherings of the Jing — Traditional dress worn at festival time, as the Jing do at Ha

The great festival of the Jing is the Ha, a communal celebration held at the village temple that gathers the whole community for worship, feasting, and above all singing. Its very name points to song, for the Ha is a festival in which music and the honouring of the gods are inseparable, the high point of the Jing year.

During the Ha the Jing offer worship to their guardian spirits and sea-gods, giving thanks and asking for protection and good fortune on the water in the year to come. Around this worship cluster the customs that define the event: the gathering of villagers, the shared meals, and the long hours of performance that fill the temple grounds.

Song stands at the centre of the celebration. Singers, accompanied by the đàn bầu and other instruments, perform the ballads and ritual songs of the people, and the festival becomes a stage on which the whole heritage of Jing music and story is displayed. Through these performances the young absorb the traditions of their elders.

The Ha does more than mark a date. In a small people surrounded by a larger nation, it is the moment when the Jing assemble as themselves, honour their gods, affirm their bonds, and celebrate the culture that sets them apart. It remains the clearest and most joyful expression of Jing identity.

A Border People Between Two Great Nations

A Qing-era boundary stone at Dongxing marking the old China frontier near the Jing lands — A Qing border stone at Dongxing, edge of the Jing world

The history of the Jing is a history of the border. Descended from Vietnamese who settled the coastal islands centuries ago, they lived through the long, shifting relationship between China and Vietnam, two neighbours whose frontier repeatedly moved and hardened along this southern shore.

When the modern boundary between the two countries was fixed, the Jing villages fell on the Chinese side, and their people became a minority within China rather than part of the Vietnamese nation. Recognised in the modern era as one of China’s official nationalities, they gained a formal place in the country while remaining tied by blood and culture to their kin across the line.

Their frontier position has meant both connection and vulnerability. In times of good relations the border was a place of trade and family visits; in times of tension it could become a hard edge that cut through the middle of a single people. The Jing have lived the full weight of what it means to be a small nation caught between two larger ones.

Through all these turns the Jing have held to their identity as a Vietnamese people of China. Their history is not one of conquest or great migration but of endurance on a contested shore, keeping their language, faith, and song intact whichever way the winds of politics blew.

The Jing Today on China’s Southern Shore

The Mountain-Sea Connection sculpture at Zhushan in modern Dongxing — Modern Dongxing today, home city of the Jing

Today the Jing remain a small but distinct people on China’s southern coast, centred on the Dongxing region of Guangxi. The growth of border trade and tourism has transformed their once-isolated islands and shore, and Dongxing has become a bustling frontier city where Chinese and Vietnamese goods, languages, and visitors mingle freely.

Many Jing have prospered from this openness, moving beyond fishing into trade, tourism, and other modern livelihoods that the border economy offers. The old life of nets and tides continues, but it now sits alongside shops, markets, and services, and younger Jing are as likely to work in the frontier trade as on the water.

With prosperity has come the familiar task of keeping the culture alive. The Jing language, the đàn bầu, the Ha festival, and the seafaring heritage all face the pressures of a fast-changing, Chinese-speaking world, and efforts to record and celebrate them have grown as the community modernises.

Yet the Jing wear their double heritage with confidence. As the Vietnamese people of China, at home on both sides of a busy border, they carry an identity that is at once local and cross-border, ancient and thoroughly modern, into the life of the twenty-first-century coast.