Ying Shao (ca. 140-ca. 206) served as a local official during the early phase of the Eastern Han empire’s collapse, and was also a noted scholar. His Fengsu tongyi is a compendium of institutions, historical and cultural knowledge, and folklore. Only ten out of the original thirty chapters have survived, in addition to a number of fragments quoted in other texts.

The passages below are preserved as quotes in the early Song period encyclopedia Taiping yulan (Imperial Readings from the Taiping Era). They describe various “barbarian” peoples, propose tenuous etymologies for their ethnonyms based on ethnic stereotypes, and generally reflect an ethnocentric contempt for foreign cultures that had become the norm by the Eastern Han period. Interestingly, Ying Shao shared with other Eastern Han writers, such as Ban Gu (see source 2.8), a more positive attitude toward the “eastern Yi” people of the Korean peninsula due to the belief that they had been civilized by Chinese rule.

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[The barbarians of] the east are called Yi. People in the east are benevolent and cherish living things, so the myriad creatures emerge from the ground by butting it with their heads (dichu 觝觸). Yi means “to butt” (di 觝)¹….

[The barbarians of] the south are called Man. Among them, lords and subjects bathe in rivers together, which is extremely uncouth. Man means “uncouth” (man 慢)….

[The barbarians of] the west are called Rong. They slash and kill living things, unable to practice moderation. Rong means “violent” (xiong 兇).…

[The barbarians of] the north are called Di. Fathers and sons, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law live in the same cave without distinctions. Di means “erroneous” (pi 辟), because the ways of the Di are perverse and erroneous….

On the Hu, according to the Hanshu, they are a branch of the Mountain Rong.² Hu means “error” (hu 互). The Hu customs of wearing their hair loose and folding their robes to the left³, as well as their language and their gift goods, are all different from ours and therefore in error. In the time of the Yin (Shang) dynasty, they were called Xunyu, but now they have changed their name to Xiongnu.

On the Mo, the [Gongyang] commentary to the Annals speaks of “big Mo [states] and small Mo [states].”⁴ Mo means “lacking” (lue 略), which conveys the sense that the Mo have no rites and laws. They do not know how to hold social gatherings and have no ancestral temples and grain sacrifices, so their taxes are light and meager….

The Dī 氐 are so called because they are insolent (dimao 抵冒) and greedy, pursuing profit even at the risk of death. They take pleasure in living among mountains and streams. They originated as a branch of the southwestern barbarians (Xinan Yi) called the Baima.⁵ The Filial [Han] Emperor Wu dispatched the Guard Commander Guo Chang with an army to attack them, upon which they surrendered and their land was incorporated as Wudu commandery….

The Qiang originated from people of base status among the western Rong who were given responsibility for herding the sheep. That is why the character qiang 羌 is derived from the graphs for “sheep” (yang 羊) and “person” (ren 人); this is how they named themselves.⁶ They have no lords and ministers or distinctions between superior and inferior. The strong establish themselves as chiefs, and they are unable to unite under one ruler. They are divided into various tribes, with the stronger tribes oppressing the weaker and raiding one another. They regard it as good luck for men to die in battle, and bad luck for them to die from an illness…. The Qiang tribes are very populous and are a major threat to our frontiers.

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1. This is a rather bizarre passage that seems to suggest that animals in the east are born from seeds. Another version, quoted in a chapter on the “eastern Yi” peoples in the Hou Hanshu by Fan Ye (398-445), has the character di 柢 (“root”), thus meaning that “the myriad creatures emerge from roots in the ground.” ↩︎
2. On the Hanshu, see source 2.8. ↩︎
3. An allusion to Analects 14.17 (see source 1.3) ↩︎
4. The Gongyang commentary itself (see source 1.5) was alluding to Mencius 6B.10 (see source 1.4) in a discussion of rates of taxation. ↩︎
5. “Southwestern barbarians” was a generic Han label for indigenous highland peoples of northern and western Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan. ↩︎
6. Ying Shao’s interpretation of the philology for the character 羌 is taken from the the Shuowen jiezi dictionary of ca. 100 CE. However, he erroneously assumes that the Qiang themselves were literate in the Sinitic writing system and thus created the character for qiang. Note that while the Shuowen jiezi interprets the philology for 羌 in terms of animal husbandry, its glosses for the ethnonyms of several other foreign peoples are far more derogatory and dehumanizing. They explain the use of various “animal” radicals in the characters for the ethnonyms Di 狄, Mo 貉, Man 蠻, and Min 閩 by claiming that the Red Di 赤狄 were “originally a dog breed” (ben quanzhong 本犬種), the Mo were “a pig breed of the north” (beifang zhizhong 北方豸種), and the Man and Min were a “snake breed” (shezhong 蛇種). On this subject of bestializing orthography, see also Magnus Fiskesjö, “The Animal Other: China’s Barbarians and Their Renaming in the Twentieth Century,” Social Text 109 (vol. 29, no. 4, Winter 2012), 57-79. ↩︎