Gin people

The Gin or Jing people (; người Kinh tại Trung Quốc) are a community of descendants of ethnic Vietnamese people living in China. They mainly live on an area called the Jing Islands (京族三岛) off the coast of Dongxing, Fangchenggang, in the Chinese autonomous region of Guangxi. These territories were administered by the Nguyễn dynasty, but were later ceded by the French to the Qing dynasty due to the convention 1887 of Sino-French war. The Việt were labelled Yue (; Vietnamese: người Việt tại Trung Quốc) before the introduction of the names "Kinh", "Gin" or "Jing" in 1958. The Gin population was 33,112 as of 2020. This number does not include the 36,205 Vietnamese nationals studying or working in Mainland China recorded by the 2010 national population census. In Vietnamese, Kinh and Việt are used interchangeably to refer Vietnamese people, with Kinh used more in more official contexts; the Chinese characters for the ethnic group, 京 and 越, are the same as in Sino-Vietnamese. Kinh (京), meaning "capital city", evolved to refer to people living in the lowlands, to distinguish them from people living in the highlands. Việt (越) is a reference to the Baiyue, a collection of non-Han peoples who lived in southern China since ancient times. The ancestors of the Gin people immigrated to the area from Hải Phòng, Vietnam, during the 16th century and established communities on the three originally uninhabited islands of Wutou, Wanwei and Shanxin. During the Mạc dynasty (1533-1592), the land south of Shidawanshan Mountains were ceded to the Ming dynasty. Jiangping was a melting pot of Vietnamese and Chinese, however, the region was neglected by the Vietnamese government. During the 18th and 19th, the area became a hotbed of piracy (see: Pirates of the South China Coast). After the end of the Sino-French War in 1885, Jiangping, Bailong Peninsula and the Jing Islands were ceded by the French to Qing China. The people of this very small ethnic minority have lived for about 500 years on the three islands of Wanwei (Vạn Vĩ), Wutou (Vu Đầu) and Shanxin (Sơn Tâm) off the coast of Guangxi, China, about 8 km east of the border with Vietnam.