J PUBL
50
K. M. A. BARNETT
The Yao are reported to practise a type of agriculture based on cutting a clearing in the forest, burning the trees, hoeing in the ash and planting a crop of hill paddy, sweet potatoes or peanuts, none of which require irrigation. At the time we speak of, it is questionable whether they were yet cultivating peanuts, which had been introduced into Southeastern China by the Arabs not long before. Chinese books of reference speak of Foochow50 as the place of introduction of the peanut, but in view of the importance of this bean in the ecology of South China, it would be an advantage if Chinese botanists could collaborate with historians to fix the date and point of introduction and to trace the spread of its cultivation over the rest of South China, where it is now the principal oil plant. The sweet potato, also nowadays a vital crop in South China, is likewise an importation, but it comes from the other direction, i.e. from Central America across the Pacific.
It is quite certain that the Yao were one of the two pre-Chinese people living on the hills of this territory: and it is almost a certainty that many of our present inhabitants are their descendants. In previous studies I have already listed non-Chinese words preserved in local place names. I attempted a number of such identifications in my introduction to T. R. Tregear's Gazetteer of Hong Kong Place Names. Some of my conjectures have been since confirmed and I think many of them were sound; but there is a remarkable reluctance on the part of local Chinese scholars to admit that many of the people now living here can be of indigenous origin, or that their languages and place names can retain words from pre-Chinese languages.1 110 This attitude of mind is the reason why we are now missing so many of the pieces in our puzzle; Chinese scholars have shown remarkably little interest in the identification of the various non-Han peoples of China and their languages, betraying a tendency to group them in large heterogeneous assemblages, and to treat their languages merely as a collection of words, with no attempt to study the way those words were arranged and the way in which the languages expressed ideas which are not found in Chinese thought. This last, however, is a very common fault in the study of languages, and appears to have communicated itself even to those who have been busy inventing electrical translation machines.