Twice, from the late Yuan to the Ming Hongwu years and from Shunzhi to Qianlong in the Qing, the state moved people into Sichuan to replace a population lost to war. In a hundred years about six million came, three million of them from Huguang, today's Hubei and Hunan. They came by water up the Yangtze through the Three Gorges, mostly from Hubei and Jiangxi, or by land on the old roads from Guizhou and Hubei. Sichuan's population went from 2.68 million in 1757 to 8.88 million in 1790. About 70 per cent of Sichuan people today descend from that movement.
From the journal
The guild house of the migrants
The Qing hall where merchants from Huguang and Guangdong kept their gods, their business and their hold on the city.
In the same city · Yuzhong District ↗The migration that filled Sichuan
Eight halls for eight provinces
The guild hall was the institution the migration produced: a place by native place where sojourners could sleep, meet, worship their home gods and do business. From the Qianlong reign to 1891 Chongqing had eight great halls, for Guangdong, Zhejiang, Fujian, Huguang, Liangjiang, Jiangsu, Shaanxi and Shanxi. The Yuwang Palace, built for the Huguang migrants in the Kangxi reign, was the one the others gathered around: the guild hall was built around it in 1759, under the Qianlong emperor, and rebuilt in 1846. The best preserved of the eight is this one.
The complex by Dongshuimen
The hall stands at 1 Bajiaoyuan Lane off Changbin Road, by the Dongshuimen bank of the Yangtze. The name covers the Yuwang Palace, the Qi'an guild built by people from Huangzhou in Hubei, and the Guangdong guild, also called Nanhua Palace, with a Jiangxi hall. It is the largest ancient guild-hall complex known in a Chinese city centre and has been a national key cultural relic since 2006; the migration museum is inside it. Its courtyards, gardens, meeting rooms and theatres were built for business, worship, entertainment and social life, and they still read as the record of how the city was peopled.