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Overview
The Heke (河客) are a nomadic riparian people of the West, Far West, and Western Lake. Sometimes thought to be distant kin of the Jiangke, they are actually independent of them and are mostly of waterbending stock, probably remnants of the same migration in which the Foggy Bottom swamp and similar regions of the Earth Kingdom came to be settled by waterbending tribes. The grammar of their language is closest to that of the Southern Water Tribe, but contains many loanwords and loan-translations from Common and other Earth Kingdom languages and is not mutually intelligible. Many of them also speak Common, and some use its characters to write their own language.
The Heke support themselves in a wide variety of trades, sometimes functioning as peddlers and transient agricultural workers, other times traveling with their herds of river-pigs, grazing them on water plants and selling them at market towns along the rivers and lakes of the Northwestern Earth Kingdom. The tend to seasonally migrate south to the Western Lake for the winter, with tens of thousands of Heke gathering for festivals in the coastal settlements and islands of the Western Lake.
Although excluded for centuries, the Heke were first permitted to sit for the Royal Examinations during the Ri Dynasty. The famous scholar and poet Zhehe, a vigorous reformer of the Hao Ting renaissance, was a Heke.
History
Antiquity
Pre-War
Since the War
Physical Anthropology
Distribution and Population
Culture
Language
Literature and Folklore
Arts and Music
Cuisine
Religion and Holidays