There are about 400 thousands Hakka-people in Changhua County today, and half of them are Roaping Hakka. They immigrated to Yuanlin city, Yong Jing township, Bu Xin township, Tian Wei township, Zhu Tang township and so on for reclamation about 200 years ago.

Changhua’s Roaping-Hakka culture had been declined due to the fights between Taiwanese speakers and Hakka speakers in the time of Qing dynasty and besides, Taiwanese culture had been merged strongly into the local society and it led to Roaping Hakka’s decline.

After the Second World War, most of Roaping Hakka people in Changhua County spoke Taiwanese and a lot of them were not even aware of the fact that they were Hakka people, and it caused Roaping-Hakka language to disappear.

Due to the disappearance of the mother language- Raoping-Hakka and the wrong-oriented development of Hakka culture, Meidu Qiu, a brilliant local history educator from Yong Jing Loyal House, had studied on her own and became the first Roapimg-Hakka accent teacher in Changhua County in 2012. She established the History Studio of Yuanlin as the base for the recovery of Roaping-Hakka culture and language. She tried to recover the culture and the language by founding many clubs and classes such as, Roaping-Hakka language student club, parent and child learning lesson, Roaping society club, Roaping music class and so on to improve their mother language.

2015 was the year of germination of Roaping-Hakka. But the educator- Meidu Qiu knew that education is a long term project, she needs to spread the seed to support the recovery project of Roaping-Hakka.

According to the Taiwan official Roaping-Haaka accent teaching materials, most of them were made based on Hsinchu Roaping-Hakka accent, and yet the Changhua accent’s teaching materials were very rare and also unauthentic.

Since May, 2015, Mrs, Qiu has worked with Peifen Zhan, the educator in Zhuolan, to work on their self-made local teaching materials referring to Hakka Affair Council’s phonetic transcription and marked the Changhua Roaping, Zolan Roaping and Hsinchu Roaping accent. They discussed about the materials per week and sent it to Hakka Affair Council.

From July to Augest, educator Peifen Zhan and Qianqing Zhan taught in Jing Siou elementary school every Wednesday morning, and in the afternoon, they discussed about the accent and recorded it by pages. There are seven parts of the teaching materials, including words, sentences, short essay, poetry, ballads, music and general. It has about 200 lessons and 400 pages and it has become the best-selling book for promoting Changhua Roaping.

Due to the lack of Roaping-Hakka language teaching materials, Mrs. Qiu felt compelled to start making Roaping-Hakka vocabulary materials on her own. The first step was to separate the seven high-quality teaching materials into two parts – words and lexicon. Secondary, she marked the order by strokes of characters and differences among phonetic symbols, Zhuolan Roaping-Hakka accent and Hsinchu Roaping-Hakka accent. Finally, the experimental version of Changhua Zhuolan Roaping-Hakka Dictionary was published in the end of 2015. It has 30 pages in A4 size paper and each page is about 40 words which amounts to about 1200 words. As a result of the different accents between Changhua Zhualan Roaping-Hakka and Hsinchu Raoping-Hakka, Mrs. Qiu marked the 80 synonyms shared among Changhua, Zhuolan and Hsinchu accents. And there are only 0.8 percent of the words that are the same, so it is a very precious vocabulary material for the recovery of Changhua Roaping-Hakka.

It already is a great start, and Mrs. Qiu will continue editing Changhua Zhuolan Roaping-Hakka Dictionary which will come out amazing.

Mrs. Qiu has been studying the local culture and history of Changhua for decades, and she feels sorry for the policy of national assimilation-"To eliminate the country by eliminating the race, to eliminate the race by eliminating the language" by the Japanese colonial government during the Japanese ruling time. With time changes, if Changhua Roaping-Hakka is to be revived successfully, there must be a notion embedded in everyone’s mind that if you want a strong nation, you need strong citizen. If you want to have strong citizen, you need to enhance language. Therefore, compiling teaching materials and dictionaries came to be the priority for 2016.