Before the modern period, military expansion from the north China Plain into the steppes, deserts, and mountains of Inner Asia tended to be both economically unprofitable and extremely costly in resources and human lives. As we saw in Chapter 2, therefore, most Han, Tang, and Ming discourse surrounding the northern and western frontiers emphasized a permanent, defense-oriented separation between civilization and “barbarism.” Eastward territorial expansion into Korea, too, was permanently abandoned after the seventh century, deemed a drain on resources better spent on fending off Inner Asian enemies. (The Mongol and Manchu empires invaded Korea to force it into tributary vassalage, but chose not to annex it to direct imperial rule.)
On the southern frontiers, on the other hand, conquest and colonization proved economically sustainable in the long run and could therefore be celebrated as a process of civilizing benighted indigenous “barbarians.” Subtropical and tropical diseases like malaria, which the Chinese blamed on miasmic air (zhang 瘴), did exact a heavy toll on armies and colonists that headed south. But the colonists, who initially consisted mostly of military garrisons, convicts, and political exiles, learned to manage the risks and gradually developed immunity to the local diseases, allowing for the growth of permanent self-supporting settlements. Chinese migration into southern frontier areas began with the lower and middle Yangzi regions, the Sichuan Basin, the Pearl River delta (i.e., Guangdong), and the Red River delta in north Vietnam, where advancements in rice cultivation and water management techniques allowed for steady economic expansion and population growth, especially from late Tang and Song times on. Population pressure eventually drove south Chinese migration into more economically peripheral regions like Fujian, Guangxi, Guizhou, and Hainan.
The sources translated in this chapter show that the history of the “civilizing” or “Sinicizing” process in the south was a source of pride for many Chinese writers through the centuries, especially southern literati who saw it as a basis for claiming equal cultural prestige to peers from the north. But the process was by no means quick or simple, as indigenous peoples often resisted pressures to change their way of life and become full subjects of the Chinese imperial state. In fact, they could even be joined by Chinese fugitives and rebels who also sought to escape the reach of the imperial state, a phenomenon explored by James C. Scott’s book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).
In most southern frontier regions, indigenous peoples were divided into many chiefdoms and labeled by the Chinese using a wide variety of ethnonyms, including the classical (and generic) Man 蠻, Yi 夷, and Yue 越, but also more regionally specific terms like Lao 獠/僚, Li 狸/俚/里, Yao 猺/傜/徭, Zhuang 獞/僮, Luoluo 猓玀/玀羅/倮倮, Miao 猫/苗, Li 黎, and Fan 番.1 Some indigenous groups were partially integrated into the Chinese imperial structure through modes of autonomous vassalage, such as the jimi and tusi systems (see the introduction to Chapter 2). Groups that refused to be co-opted and resisted Chinese encroachment might be forcefully subjugated and enslaved, or displaced from river valleys into the hills and mountains. The boat-dwelling peoples known as Dan 蜑 (or, in local dialect, Tanka 蜑家, “Dan households”) were able to remain effectively independent and separate from the settlers by living on the rivers and the coasts, but at the cost of being treated as outcasts and pirates.
Over time, most co-opted indigenous groups faced gradual erosion of their autonomy and separate identity, as native chieftaincies were abolished and replaced with bureaucrats directly appointed by the imperial state to fixed terms of office (a policy known in the Ming and Qing periods as gaitu guiliu 改土歸流, “changing native [officials] into rotating [officials]”). These imperial officials were typically expected not only to govern and tax the “barbarians” but also to “transform” (i.e., “civilize”) them via education in Chinese Confucian norms, while facilitating the movement of ever more Chinese settlers into their lands, until the indigenous who did not assimilate to Chinese culture were left a marginalized and despised minority.
But Chinese colonization was not always inexorable or irreversible. Some southern colonies were too remote from the imperial center to remain permanently under central control. During periods of imperial collapse, they evolved into independent hybrid states that used the Chinese script and Classical Chinese alongside a non-Sinitic language spoken by the indigenous majority. For example, the Han empire established two commanderies in Yunnan (Yizhou and Yongchang), but these became effectively independent under the Cuan 爨 family dynasty during the turbulent fourth century. The Cuan state in turn was conquered in the mid-eighth century by a new indigenous Yunnanese kingdom, Nanzhao. Similarly, the Chinese commanderies/prefectures in the Red River delta and areas further south became the kingdom of Đại Việt in the wake of the Tang empire’s collapse. Đại Việt eventually developed a separate ethnocultural identity, albeit one that also subscribed to Confucian notions of statecraft and civilization, and pursued its own southward expansion into the lands of the Cham people and the Mekong delta, establishing the boundaries of the modern Vietnamese state at the expense of Cham culture.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Yuan and Ming empires conquered the entire Yunnan plateau, resulting in new waves of Chinese migration to the southwest. A Ming attempt at reincorporating north Vietnam in the early fifteenth century proved ephemeral, however. Finally, in the seventeenth century, Chinese settlers cooperated with the Dutch East India Company to establish a colony in the lowland areas of western Taiwan. This “Sino-Dutch colony” was conquered by the Ming loyalist commander Zheng Chenggong in 1662 and then absorbed into the Qing empire in 1683, marking the last instance of significant southward expansion by an imperial state based in the Chinese heartland.
Sources
Part 1: The Han and early medieval periods
5.1 Ban Gu 班固, Hanshu 漢書 (History of the Han), ca. 82 CE
5.2 Fan Ye 范曄, Hou Hanshu 後漢書 (History of the Later [Eastern] Han), ca. 432
5.3 Gan Bao 干寳, Soushen ji 搜神記 (An Account of Inquiries into the Supernatural), ca. 330
5.4 Shen Yue 沈約, Songshu 宋書 (History of the Liu Song), 488
5.5 Linghu Defen 令狐德棻 and Cen Wenben 岑文本, Zhoushu 周書 (History of the Northern Zhou), ca. 636
Part 2: The Sui and Tang periods
5.6 Wei Zheng 魏徵 et al., Suishu 隋書 (History of the Sui dynasty), 636
5.7 Zhang Jianzhi 張柬之, Memorial proposing the abolition of Yaozhou, 698
5.8 Fang Qianli 房千里, Touhuang zalu 投荒襍錄 (Miscellaneous Records of an Exile to the Frontier), ca. 840
Part 3: The Song period
5.10 Su Guo 蘇過, “Lun Hainan Li shi shu” 論海南黎事書 (A Letter on the Li of Hainan), ca. 1098-1100
5.11 Zhou Qufei 周去非, Lingwai daida 嶺外代答 (Answers to Questions about the Lingnan Region), 1178
5.12 Edicts and memorials from the Song huiyao 宋會要 (Song State Compendium)
5.13 Liu Kezhuang 劉克莊, “Zhangzhou yu She” 漳州諭畲 (Persuading the She of Zhangzhou to Submit), ca. 1264
Part 4: The Yuan and Ming periods
5.14 Li Jing 李京, Yunnan zhilue 雲南志略 (Abridged Gazetteer of Yunnan), 1303/1331
5.15 Two sources by Qiu Jun 丘濬 (1421-1495)
5.17 Qian Yue 錢鉞, memorial to the Hongzhi emperor, July 31, 1499
5.18 Wang Shangyong 王尚用, Xundian fuzhi 尋甸府志 (Gazetteer of Xundian Prefecture), 1550
5.19 Tian Rucheng 田汝成, Yanjiao jiwen 炎徼紀聞 (A Record of Things Heard on the Torrid Borderlands), 1558
Part 5: The Qing period
5.20 Qu Dajun 屈大均, Guangdong xinyu 廣東新語 (A New Account of Guangdong), 1687
5.21 Tian Wen 田雯, Qianshu 黔書 (Book of Qian [Guizhou]), 1690
5.22 Wang Fuzhi 王夫之, Song lun 宋論 (Discourses on Song History), ca. 1691
5.23 Yu Yonghe 郁永河, Pihai jiyou 裨海紀遊 (Small Sea Travelogue), 1698
5.24 Fumin 傅敏/福敏, memorial to the Yongzheng emperor, 1727
5.25 Zhang Qingchang 張慶長, Liqi jiwen 黎岐紀聞 (A Record of Things Heard In the Li Highlands), 1756
5.26 Zhao Yi 趙翼, Yanpu zaji 簷曝雜記 (Miscellaneous Notes from the Sunny Awning Studio), 1810
5.27 Liang Zhangju 梁章鉅, Guitian suoji 歸田瑣記 (Random Notes from a Retired Recluse), 1844
5.28 Lý Văn Phức 李文馥, “Yi bian” 夷辨 (Defining Barbarism), 1831
5.29 Nguyễn Tư Giản 阮思僩, “Bian Yi shuo” 辨夷說 (Explicating the Meaning of Barbarism), 1868
5.30 Ding Shaoyi 丁紹儀, Dongying shilue 東瀛識略 (A Concise Account of the Eastern Ocean), 1871
Further reading
Anderson, James A. and John K. Whitmore (eds.), China’s Encounters on the South and Southwest: Reforging the Fiery Frontier over Two Millennia (Leiden: Brill, 2015)
Anderson, James A. and John K. Whitmore, “The Dong World: : A Proposal for Analyzing the Highlands Between the Yangzi Valley and the Southeast Asian Lowlands,” Asian Highlands Perspectives 44 (2017), 8-71.
Backus, Charles, The Nan-chao Kingdom and T’ang China’s Southwestern Frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
Baldanza, Kathlene, Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)
Churchman, Catherine, The People Between the Rivers: The Rise and Fall of a Bronze Drum Culture, 200–750 CE (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016)
Clark, Hugh R., The Sinitic Encounter in Southeast China Through the First Millennium CE (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016)
Crossley, Pamela Kyle, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton (eds.), Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)
Giersch, C. Patterson, Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006)
Hargett, James M. (trans.), Treatises of the Supervisor and Guardian of the Cinnamon Sea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010) [A complete translation of Fan Chengda’s (1126-1193) Guihai yuheng zhi, a gazetteer of the southern frontier that includes a chapter on various “Man” peoples]
Herman, John E., Amid the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200–1700 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007)
Hostetler, Laura, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)
Jenco, Leigh K., “Chen Di’s Record of Formosa and an Alternative Chinese Imaginary of Otherness,” The Historical Journal 64.1 (2021), 17–42.
Lycas, Alexis, Les Man du fleuve bleu – La fabrique d’un peuple dans la Chine impériale (The Man of the Yangzi River – The Invention of a People in Imperial China) (Toulouse: Anacharsis, 2023)
Marsh, Sean, “Simple Natives and Cunning Merchants: Song Representations of Frontier Trade in Guangxi,” Asia Major 27.2 (2014), 5–28.
Schafer, Edward H., The Vermilion Bird: T’ang Images of the South (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967)
Schafer, Edward H., Shore of Pearls: Hainan Island in Early Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970)
Shepherd, John Robert, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993)
Shin, Leo K., The Making of the Chinese State: Ethnicity and Expansion on the Ming Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Teng, Emma Jinhua, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004)
Von Glahn, Richard, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987)
Wade, Geoff, “The “Native Office” (土司) System: A Chinese Mechanism for Southern Territorial Expansion Over Two Millennia,” in Geoff Wade (ed.), Asian Expansions, The Historical Experiences of Polity Expansion in Asia (London: Routledge), 69-91.
Weinstein, Jodi L., Empire and Identity in Guizhou: Local Resistance to Qing Expansion (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015)
Wright, Eloise, “History and Autoethnography: Accounting for the Indigenous population of Yunnan, 1550–1650,” Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History 22.1 (2021)
Yang Bin, Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), available online here
- The use of the dog radical to write the ethnonyms of numerous southern indigenous peoples in the Chinese script is related to myths of their descent from a dog named Panhu (see source 5.3), though the human radical could also be used. However, it probably also reflects (and certainly further encouraged) general dehumanizing attitudes toward these peoples. In the twentieth century, the use of dog-radical forms was finally banned as offensive to the peoples thus named. Certain ethnonyms were also given new written forms to dissociate them from pejorative connotations: Yi 彜 replaced Yi 夷 (“barbarian”) and Zhuang 壯 replaced Zhuang 僮 (which also had the meaning “slave boy” when read as tong). See 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. ↩︎
Ethnic Identity in Imperial China 