From 2016, the Hakka Affairs Council has run the Hakka Community and New Southbound Policy Collaboration Program, dispatching Hakka-related organizations or associations to visit Hakka communities in countries in Southeast Asia including Indonesia, Malaysia and Cambodia, through these cultural exchanges carrying out surveys of local cultural resources and through mutual visits deepening cooperation between Hakka communities in Taiwan and Southeast Asia. The cultural connection between people and interaction among Hakka communities promotes new partnerships and new cultural outlooks between Taiwan and Southeast Asian countries.

The Two Rivers Cultural Association, which has long looked after Hakka culture in the Zhudong area of Hsinchu County, in 2017 traveled to the Indonesian cities of Pontianak and Singkawang through the Hakka Affairs Council’s Hakka Community and New Southbound Policy Collaboration Program to hold exchanges with local Hakka groups and get to know each other’s Hakka culture.

Singkawang, located on the world’s third-largest island of Borneo, is a coastal city in the north of the province of West Kalimantan, and is the second-largest city in the province. Indonesian government statistics put Singkawang’s population at close to 256,000 people, of whom around 45% are of ethnic Chinese descent. Singkawang is well known in Indonesia as a Chinese city, and the Chinese there mainly speak the Hepo dialect of Hakka that comes from Jiexi County in China’s Guangdong Province.

Records at the Museum Tionghua in Jakarta show that in the 15th century, the Ming Dynasty explorer Zheng He established a stronghold on the coast north of Singkawang that provided his crew with food and cargo, and where exchanges with locals became increasingly frequent. This shows that over 600 years ago, maritime trade between Guangdong and Indonesia had already developed and there were continuous commercial exchanges.

In around 1740, gold mines were discovered in West Kalimantan, which attracted large numbers of Guangdong Hakka to come prospecting. In the mid-19th century, war and natural disasters prompted another wave of Guangdong Hakkas to migrate to Southeast Asia. At this time, the Chinese diaspora in Singkawang already numbered in the thousands.

In West Kalimantan, the most eminent Chinese figure was Luo Fangbo (羅芳伯). In 1772, this Hakka man from Meixian District in Guangdong went to western Borneo. He opened up land for the development of agriculture and gold mining, established a school to pass on Chinese culture, and brought local Chinese together. In 1777 he established the world’s first Chinese republic, the Lanfang Republic, which controlled the whole of Kalimantan for over 100 years until it was ended by the Dutch in 1885.