Self-governing peoples · South China · as at first light, 1 January 1200

Self-governing peoples of South China

These are the peoples of the south who no prince governs and the Song taxes only at the edge: the Li of the Hainan highlands, the Yao (and, later called so, the Miao and Dong) of the hills where Guangxi, Guangdong, Hunan and Guizhou meet, the Dan who live on boats in every estuary from Fuzhou to the Gulf of Tonkin, the hill dong people of the Tingzhou, Meizhou and Ganzhou uplands (whom later Chinese call the She) and the Austronesian peoples of Taiwan.

Each lives by its own law. A Li or Yao district settles quarrels, marriages and blood-feud by meeting of headmen; a Dan fleet has its boat-elders; Taiwan's villages have chiefs and age-sets but no state. The Song reaches them through salt, cloth, iron and tea at the markets, through headmen who take a title, and through the occasional punitive march; they reach the Song as labourers, pearl and fish suppliers, bandits and soldiers.

Their evidence is thin and mostly written by outsiders.

Who rules

Name
not applicable. Hill dong headmen, Li headmen (dongzhu), Dan boat headmen and the village elders of the Taiwan peoples
Title
No ruler: each people is led by its elders, headmen and kin groups
Since
not pinned
Born
not known
Confidence
low

Chinese gazetteers and notes of travellers (Fan Chengda 1175, Zhou Qufei 1178, Zhao Rugua about 1225) describe customs; no named leader is recorded for these peoples in the winter of 1199-1200 except the Wang headwomen of the Li (separate record).

Overlord

None in law. The Song counts some of them as registered subjects (the "cooked" Li, the Dan who pay fishing dues, hill dong that have submitted) and treats the rest as unregistered.

What the realm holds

  • The Hainan interior (the Wuzhi mountains and the Li dong)
  • The Nanling hill belt where Guangxi, Guangdong and southern Hunan meet (the Yao)
  • The eastern Guizhou, western Hunan and northern Guangxi borderland hills
  • The estuaries and coasts worked by the Dan, from the Min to the Gulf of Tonkin
  • The upland dong of the Fujian-Guangdong-Jiangxi border
  • Taiwan

How it was acquired

By settlement and descent; none by grant.

Allies and rivals

Each people is split into districts that fight, marry and trade among themselves. The Li are divided, in the usual Song terms (our recollection; the Wikipedia pages we read do not set the distinction out), between "cooked" (shu) districts near the Song counties that pay tax and "raw" (sheng) districts in the highlands that do not; the Wang headwoman is the Song's channel to the first and a rival of the headmen of the second.

The realm that morning

No rising of any of these peoples is recorded for the winter of 1199-1200 in the sources available to me. The nearest dated troubles are the 1197 suppression of the Dayushan (Lantau) islanders, whom the sources call salt smugglers, and the Pisheye raids on the Quanzhou coast in the 1170s and 1180s. The big Yao risings come later (1208 in Jinghu).

Wealth

Rice and millet on burnt hill fields, cotton and ramie cloth (Li cloth of Hainan is famous), aloeswood and rattan, honey and wax, pearls and oysters, fish and salt (made without licence), hardwood and bamboo.

Military

Foot fighters with bows, crossbows, spears and shields; ambush in forest and karst; stockaded villages. No figures: the Chinese numbers for hill risings are exaggerations.

Threats

  • The Song salt monopoly and its patrols (Lantau 1197)
  • Han settlers pushing up the valleys
  • Pisheye or other sea raiders on the Fujian coast and the Penghu fishermen

What the year holds

What happened next, if nothing in play changes it. Each event carries what it depends on and what would stop it.

  1. Qingyuan 6 (1200, from about 18 January by our reckoning)The Cuifeng water-army garrison posted on Dayushan (Lantau) after the 1197 rising, given as 300 men on rotation, is reduced and moved to Guanfu on the Kowloon shore, which is nearer Chaozhou for control and relief.Depends on: The Hong Kong history text that follows the Song sources; the figures are its and we have not checked them. Stopped by: A new rising on the islands, or a court order to the contrary.

Where the sources disagree

  • The brief and the campaign board treat the She as a named people; the name "She" is not attested before the 1230s (Liu Kezhuang) and is used here only for the later name of the hill dong people.

Evidence: Described by outsiders; no Song source gives chiefs' names for these peoples in 1200 except the Wang line of the Li.

"The campaign board" is OMNIA's working map. These notes record where its earlier claims were checked against the sources.

On the map: Zones only. The Li, Yao and hill dong are drawn on their later known homelands; Taiwan is drawn whole although the plains of the west and south were not in Han hands.

Sources and studies

  1. Wikipedia, "Hlai people"
  2. Wikipedia, "Boat Dwellers"
  3. Wikipedia, "She people"
  4. Hong Kong history text on the Song salt fields, Dayushan (Lantau) and Tuen Mun (Joint Publishing HK, ISBN 9789620448010, section on the Song Guanfu salt field)
  5. Wikipedia, "Early Chinese contact with Taiwan"
  6. Zhou Qufei, Lingwai daida (1178), described in Wikipedia, "Lingwai Daida"

Last revised 4 November 2026. Published 4 November 2026. Suggest a correction on the OMNIA Discord.