Meixian

• Meishien
• Mei-hsien (Wade–Giles)

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

• enPR: māʹshyěnʹ

Meixian

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

   Synonym: Mei County

   • [1977 May, Rewi Alley, “Meihsien—the Great Hakka Centre”, in Eastern Horizon‎, 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, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 25 May 2019‎:

     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.

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, archived from the original on 31 July 2020‎:

     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