HONG KONG BEFORE THE BRITISH
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also wear headdresses and tails to resemble dogs and they have a legend about their descent from a dog. This legend, as reproduced in the later Han history, is as follows. An emperor who wished to subjugate a certain chieftain offered his youngest daughter in marriage to anyone who would bring him his head. After this proclamation one of his pet dogs brought a man's head and laid it in front of the throne. It proved to be the head of the enemy. The princess then insisted that she should be married to the dog and the Emperor was forced to comply. The princess was taken by the dog to a stone fortress in a mountain in Hunan. There she changed her mode of living, discarded her Chinese clothes and wore a strange head-dress. She bore six children. They made bark clothes which they dyed with various grass juices. They cut them with a tail behind. They lived in the mountains. Their descendants multiplied and are known as the Man I
Man and I are Chinese terms for barbarians. Man, as we have seen, is applied locally to the Hoklo, but it can represent a barbarian of South China in general. It generally represents Tibetan or western barbarians. When Chao T'o, one of the chiefs of the Canton estuary, made himself independent in the Han dynasty, he called himself "King of the Man and I". Since the Yao have the same dog myth as the Man I, there is a likelihood that this people were partly composed of Yao and partly of Indonesian stock.
It is only possible to take such broad distinctions as the Chinese historians allow. There were in ancient South China two types. One the "dragon myth" peoples, primarily in Fukien, using boats with eyes painted on the bows, and designated by many names Min Man Tan and so on with the radical for serpent or dragon. The other a mountain people with a "dog myth" stretched from the confines of Tibet to South China and included the Yao. The former may be of Indonesian and the latter of Tibetan stock.
One problem must still be mentioned. The presence of a very early Negrito population in South China is suspected. Negrito dwarfs are still found in Cochin China, the Malay States, the Philippine Islands, and Formosa and in the history of the Liang dynasty occurs the following text: