The passages below are from Tian Rucheng’s (1503-1563) Yanjiao jiwen, a gazetteer of the Ming empire’s southwestern frontier in Guizhou, Guangxi, and Yunnan. Tian served as an official in Guizhou and Guangxi in 1536–1540 and participated in the suppression of an indigenous Yao rebellion against the Ming state. He retired from government service due to poor health in 1541 and spent the rest of his life in his hometown, Hangzhou. He published his notes on the southwestern frontier as the Yanjiao jiwen in 1558.

The first excerpt translated below is from an ethnographic section titled “Barbarians” (Man-Yi) in the text’s last chapter, and describes Guizhou indigenous peoples known to the Ming Chinese as Miao 苗. The second excerpt is the chapter’s afterword, which presents a theory that the progress of civilization beyond the Chinese lands has followed a clockwise pattern, corresponding to the movement of qi from the northwest (where the Zhou dynasty originated) to the southwest, and that the peoples of the southwest, though still barbaric and ignorant from Tian’s point of view, are destined to become just like the Chinese. Tian even makes an optimistic prediction of the empire’s eventual expansion into northern Thailand and Myanmar.

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Barbarians (Man-Yi)

The Miao people are the descendants of the Three Miao of antiquity.¹ To the south of Changsha and the Yuan and Chen rivers and throughout the former territory of Yelang², one frequently finds them living mingled with the Dī 氐 and Yi 夷, and all are generically called southern Man. There are many kinds (zhong 種) living scattered among the hills, and some gather in villages called zhai 寨. These people have names but no surnames. They have clan lineages but no rulers. Those who live close to the provincial border are Cooked Miao; they pay taxes and perform corvée, rather similar to good (free commoner) households. Every ten years, the local authorities carry out a census of their population and report it to the imperial court. Those not registered in the census are Raw Miao. The Raw Miao are many and the Cooked Miao are few.   

Their customs vary from group to group and are passed down through the generations. In general, they are violently obstinate and distrustful, devoid of ritual propriety and courtesy and ignorant of ethical norms. They care only about personal gain and have no sense of integrity or shame. When happy they behave like humans; when angered, they turn into beasts. They will kill a man over just a small grievance or dispute, and the entire clan of the man who was killed then has a feud with the killer and will not rest until they have avenged him. If any do not [pursue vengeance], then even kinsmen will come to hate one another; any who do help [in avenging him] will gladly face beheading without regrets. The saying goes, “A Miao feud lasts for nine generations,” meaning that such feuds are irresolvable.

These people wear mallet-shaped topknots and straw sandals. They climb among steep cliffs and caverns and walk across thorny shrubs as quickly as deer. They wear striped clothing and fold their robes to the left. Some of their robes have no collars; the head goes where the garment ends, and they attach two sleeves that can be detached in an emergency. They stick pheasant tail feathers on the crowns of their heads and go around carrying a quiver and a crossbow. When an opportunity presents itself, they immediately engage in plunder and then charge back into the bamboo thickets like wild boar, making it impossible to apprehend them.

Their unmarried men decorate their ears with silver earrings and are called Malang 馬郎 (literally “horse lads”). Upon getting married, they remove their earrings. The women wear necklaces made of an assortment of cowrie shells, bronze bells, and beads. Their virgins walk and sing in the countryside to entice the Malang, engaging in sexual promiscuity without any restrictions. In the second lunar month, they carve a horse out of wood and make offerings of cattle and wine to it. The old men sit beside the horse with their legs splayed out, while the unmarried men and women play mouth organs and sing songs with lewd and suggestive lyrics. They call this “dancing under the moon” (tiaoyue 跳月). If a man is attracted to a woman, he carries her off on his back. He negotiates the amount of bride price based on how beautiful or plain-looking the woman is. Any man who defaults on the bride price due to poverty is hounded for payment by his in-laws year after year. Even when he is already old and balding and has sons and grandsons, they do not let him off.

Their diet is coarse and disgusting. They mix buckwheat ashes into glutinous porridge to ferment it into a foul-smelling broth. Then they throw fish, meat, and other assorted ingredients into it and call it yin 䤃. Swarms of flies gather to feed on it, but they regard it as a prized delicacy. Those who brag about their wealth say, “I have a vat of yin that has been stored for generations!”

On New Year’s Day, they gather their relatives to beat bronze drums and hold bullfights in the countryside. They slaughter the bull that loses, use its meat as a sacrificial offering, and then eat it in chunks as large as a human palm. They pass the bull’s horns down to their sons and grandsons, saying, “Your grandfather or your father ate this many bulls.”

They make contracts without writing and instead carve inch-long pieces of wood into tallies. For lawsuits, they do not go to the prefect’s office, and even if they did, we could not apply our legal code to them. Instead, each side chooses a representative who is upright and eloquent, calling him the xingtou 行頭 (team leader), and tasks him with arguing its case. The xingtou uses a bamboo token to represent each grievance, and there can be as many as a hundred tokens for just one case. He holds up a token and accuses the other side, saying, “In such and such a matter, you broke your word to me.” If the other side acknowledges this, then [the xingtou] puts the token away. He next holds up another token and accuses the other side, saying, “In such and such a matter, you infringed upon me.” If the other side does not acknowledge this, then he puts the token down. At the end, each xingtou counts how many tokens he has put down and reports to his client, “On this matter and that matter, he did not acknowledge guilt.” If his client accepts this, then the dispute is settled; if he does not, then another round of arguments begins, and the matter only ends when both parties accept the outcome. If a xingtou has put many tokens away and knows that the other side will not be able to pay full compensation, then he advises his client to throw one token to the heavens, one token to the earth, and one to the mediator. They then estimate the compensation for the remaining tokens and demand that the losing party pay it in cattle and horses.  In cases of murder where the avenging party has exacted excessive vengeance, compensation is also calculated in this way.   

Their language is extremely incomprehensible and can only be understood through indirect translation. Those of their generation with whom they are friendly, they call tongnian 同年 (“same year”) and treat with greater affection than their own kin. When they are friends with a Han (Chinese) person, they also call him tongnian. They call their chiefs mang 茫 and call other people dai 歹. They also refer to themselves as dai, similar to the [vernacular] use of zan 咱 in the Jin (Shanxi) region and nong 儂 in the Wu (Jiangsu) region. They do not know our official lunar calendar, and use animals like the rat and the horse to name the hours of the day, as well as the days of the month. They count the three winter months as the beginning of the year and hold religious rites on the first day of each winter month, calling this “opening the year.” They use chicken bones for divination, reading cracks on the bone as auspicious or inauspicious. Some also break stalks of grass to divine the future. When sick, they do not take medicine and merely pray to the spirits. If a sick person does not recover, then they say that the spirits hate him, and they therefore abandon him and cease to care for him. They call their shamans guishi 鬼師 (spirit master). They do not mourn their dead; sometimes they bury their dead and sometimes they do not. In general, the various Miao groups have roughly similar marriage customs, but their funeral rites are different.

They are good at making gu 蠱 poison. The gu have no form but their poison is real, and all are deadly enough to kill a human being. Some say that the gu come from gods that glow like the moon and enter people’s homes at dusk to afflict them. If one starts making a gu on that day [when the god arrives], it is finished in twelve days. The gu will not rest until it has attacked a living person. If there is no living victim available, then the owner has to eat the gu himself and either defecate or vomit it out. If not, then the god will inflict calamity on his household.…

[Translator’s note: Tian Rucheng next describes the customs of different Miao groups in Guizhou: These include the Kemeng and Guyang, the Miao of Nine Names and Nine Surnames, the Purple Ginger Miao, the Father-selling Miao, the Short Skirts Miao, the Eight Fan (Bafanzi 八番子), and the Black Miao (also known as Heaven Miao). I have omitted this section.]

I have given here a general description of Miao customs. The Miao all live in remote mountains and valleys and have never seen what the outside world is like since the day they were born. That is why their customs have not changed. They do not have to pay taxes to the state, and that is why their people are lazy. They have an abundance of land rich in fruits and insects, so they never lack food. That is why they are aimlessly lackadaisical and never store up resources for the future. They are illiterate and cut off from the former [sage-]kings’ teaching of ritual propriety and moral duty. That is why they are disobedient and dissolute, just like birds and beasts. How pitiful they are!

[Translator’s note: The text goes on to describe various other southwestern peoples, including the Luoluo 羅羅, the Gelao 犵狫/犵獠, the Mulao 狇狫, the Yanghuang 𦍕獚/楊黃, the Zhongjia 狆家, the Songjia 宋家, the Caijia 蔡家, the Longjia 龍家, the Ranjia 冉家, the Dong 峒, the Yao 猺, the Zhuang 獞, the Lao 獠, the Li 黎, the Dan 蛋, and the Ma 馬 (also known as Luting 盧亭).]

Afterword

Alas! The customs of the Man are too repulsive to be recorded in writing, but I have recorded them here for a profound reason. When heaven and earth split apart, the lands of the Xia swarmed with people who were no different from animals. The sage-kings, worthies, and sages used rewards and encouragement to teach them humaneness and moral duty, refined them with rites and music, and rectified them with laws and punishments. Only then did the people understand the beauty of robes and caps, the goodness of proper food and drink, and the importance of ethical norms. The barbarians of the four quarters, however, roam around with mountain sprites and live with jackals and wolves. Their eyes have never seen the teachings of humaneness, moral duty, rites and music, and government by laws and punishments. They are still like the [people of the] Xia lands in primordial times, so why should one find it strange that their customs are repulsive?

The movement of wind and qi is closely connected to human civility. It has cycled through the four corners of the world since remote antiquity, beginning in the northwest, followed by the northeast, then the southeast, and finally the southwest. At the beginning of the Zhou, Jizi was enfeoffed in Chaoxian (Joseon), which then became a well-governed land, while the region of the Huai River and Xuzhou was rejected as a land of barbarians.³ Taibo dressed in ritual clothing to govern Wu but was still unable to change its people’s habits of cutting their hair and tattooing their bodies.⁴ The Qin and Han dynasties conquered the Hundred Yue, but [Han] Emperor Wu responded to the Min (Fujian) barbarians’ rebellions by resettling its people between the Yangzi and Huai rivers, leaving the land of Min empty of people.⁵ It was a wasteland full of foxes and rabbits at the time, but today its reputation for refinement and ritual institutions is equal to that of the Central Plains.

Emperor Wu sent Tang Meng to open a route through Yelang, but he could not get past the Kunming.⁶ The Yuan dynasty expanded into [the southwest] for the first time but merely bridled (jimi 羁縻) it. When our dynasty arose, it established commanderies (prefectures) and counties here for the first time, and the maritime countries of the Western Ocean all presented tribute [to the imperial court] as well. This must be clear evidence that changes in qi resulted in the gradual extension of human civility, like the wind’s cycle beginning in the northwest and ending in the southwest. Who knows, in a hundred generations, the lands of Yun and Bo may have a reputation for refinement and ritual institutions like that of the region between Min (Fujian) and Guang[dong]!⁷ And who knows, the barbarians (Yi) of Babai (Lan Na), Cheli (Chiang Hung or Sipsong Panna), and Miandian (Myanmar) may one day have commanderies (prefectures) and counties staffed by imperial officials!

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1. The Three Miao were a group of ancient peoples associated with the region of Hubei and Hunan and best known as antagonists of the legendary sage-kings Yao and Shun. According to classical sources, Shun exiled the Three Miao to Sanwei 三危 in the far west, traditionally identified with a three-peaked mountain near Dunhuang, Gansu. However, the Southern Song Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi (see source 3.9) wrote an essay, “On the Three Miao” 記三苗, in which he speculated that an indigenous people on the Hunan frontier, known to the Chinese as the Miao 猫, were descended from the Three Miao. In Ming times, Zhu Xi’s theory became the standard Chinese interpretation of the origins of the Miao despite the lack of evidence to support it. ↩︎
2. Yelang was an ancient kingdom in western Guizhou that was annexed by the Han empire. ↩︎
3. On Jizi, the legendary founder of Chaoxian, see source 2.8. ↩︎
4. On the Zhou aristocrat Taibo, the legendary founder of Wu, see source 1.8. ↩︎
5. According to the Shiji (see source 1.8), the Han empire conquered the Fujian (Min) region in 111 BCE but found it so challenging to govern, due to the mountainous terrain, that it forcibly depopulated the region by resettling its people in the area between the Yangzi and Huai rivers (i.e., Jiangsu and Anhui). ↩︎
6. In 135 BCE, Emperor Wu sent an expedition under Tang Meng to establish diplomatic contact with the kingdom of Yelang. The Han then established a commandery (called Qianwei 犍為) in Yelang and dispatched laborers from Sichuan to build a road connecting Sichuan to the Zangke (Beipan) River via Yelang. This project, aimed at facilitating an invasion of Southern Yue via the Zangke River, was abandoned after several years, due to the difficult terrain and the hostility of indigenous peoples. In 122 BCE, after finding out that there was a trade route connecting Sichuan to India via the Dian kingdom in Yunnan, Emperor Wu sent envoys to find the route and make contact with the Indians. However, the envoys were attacked and killed by the Kunming people in western Yunnan. Tian Rucheng seems to have conflated Tang Meng’s expedition with the later mission to India. ↩︎
7. Yun 溳 refers to the Yun River, a tributary of the Han River in Hubei. Bo 僰 refers to the ancient Bo people, whom Yuan and Ming ethnographers identified as ancestors of the Bai people of Yunnan (see. e.g., source 5.14). ↩︎