Heyuan is a prefecture-level city of Guangdong province in the People's Republic of China. As of the 2020 census, its population was 2,837,686 whom 1,051,993 lived in the built-up area made of Yuancheng urban District and Dongyuan County largely being urbanized. Zijin County itself is quickly being conurbated in the agglomeration. The majority of the people are Hakka. The city includes many rainforests and the largest lake in Guangdong: Xinfengjiang Reservoir. The literal meaning of the city's name is "origin of the river". It has recently been officially titled as the "Hometown of the Dinosaur in China", due to the thousands of dinosaur egg fossils that have been unearthed in its vicinity.

The Hakka, sometimes also referred to as Hakka Han, or Hakka Chinese, or Hakkas, are a Han Chinese subgroup whose ancestral homes are chiefly in the Hakka Chinese-speaking areas of Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan, Zhejiang, Hainan, and Guizhou in China, as well as in Taoyuan City, Hsinchu County, Miaoli County, Pingtung County, and Kaohsiung City in Taiwan. Unlike other Han Chinese subgroups, the Hakkas are not named after a geographical region, e.g. a province, county or city, in China. That is because their origins were of northern Chinese refugees fleeing social unrest, upheaval and invasions throughout the northern parts of China throughout history who then sought sanctuary in the south where the Cantonese-speaking provinces such as Guangdong and Guangxi are. The Chinese characters for Hakka literally mean "guest families". The word is Cantonese in origin and as the name implies, they are the guest of the Cantonese people. Over the centuries though, they have since more or less assimilated with the Cantonese-speaking population. Modern day Hakka are generally identified by both full Hakka and by different degrees of Hakka ancestry and usually speak Hakka Chinese.