Meixian

• Meishien
• Mei-hsien (Wade–Giles)

Borrowed from Mandarin 梅縣 / 梅县 (Méi Xiàn) via Hanyu Pinyin.

• enPR: māʹshyěnʹ

Meixian

1. A former county of Guangdong, China, ancestral home of many Hakka emigrants

   Synonym: Mei County

   • [1976 February 19 [1976 February 13], “Spring Farming in Kwangtung”, in Daily Report: People's Republic of China, volume I, number 34, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, sourced from Canton Kwangtung Provincial Service, translation of original in Mandarin, →ISSN, →OCLC, People's Republic of China: Central-South Region, page H 7:

     To date Meihsien Prefecture has collected 160,000,000 piculs of manure, and spring farming is in full swing in the prefecture.]

   • [1977 May, Rewi Alley, “Meihsien—the Great Hakka Centre”, in Eastern Horizon‎^[1], volume XVI, number 5, Hong Kong: Eastern Horizon Press, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 16:

     The first county centre gone through, that of Tsengcheng, was full of new construction. After it, the language on the road right on into the Meihsien prefecture was Hakka.
     It took us five hours to get to Hoyuan, where we had lunch and a nap, starting out on the road again at three in the afternoon, and finally coming to rest in Wuhua, our first stop in the Meihsien prefecture, at nine in the evening.]

   • 1990 March 1, Sheryl WuDunn, “A Hero in Canton, a Harbinger of Prosperity”, in The New York Times‎^[2], →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 25 May 2019‎^[3]:

     Mr. Ye's more recent roots are in a county of Guangdong called Meixian, which is now a city in the northeast part of the province.

   • 2004 November, Cindy Yik-yi Chu, “Difficult Years, 1937–1951”, in The Maryknoll Sisters in Hong Kong, 1921-1969: In Love with the Chinese‎^[4], Palgrave Macmillan, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 48:

     She sadly bade farewell to the Sisters, who were returning to Jiaying (or Meixian), Guangdong Province, from Hong Kong. With foreseeable dangers ahead of them, the Sisters prepared for the worst in China.

2. A district of Meizhou, Guangdong, China.
   • 2020 July 28, Taiwan Affairs Office, “Basic facts about Taiwan”, in State Council of the People's Republic of China‎^[5], archived from the original on 31 July 2020‎^[6]:

     Among them, the Minnan and Hakka peoples are collectively called benshengren, as they mostly moved to Taiwan before 1945. Specifically, most Minnan people, nearly 70 percent of Taiwan’s total population, can trace their ancestry to today’s Quanzhou and Zhangzhou in East China’s Fujian province; today’s Longyan city in Fujian province and Meixian district in South China’s Guangdong province are the ancestral homes for the majority of the Hakka people — making up about 15 percent of the total.

• (from Hakka) Moiyan, Moiyen, Moyan, Moyen
• (from Cantonese, uncommon) Mui Yuen