ARE THE TANKA PEOPLE DESCENDANTS OF MONGOL SOLDIERS?
KEITH STEVENS
161
I have not done any research into the origins of the Tanka people of the Pearl River Estuary and have always assumed from something I read many years ago that ethnically they were one of the many original minority groups of southern China.
However, I have just come across a paragraph in 'Pulling Strings in China', a book written in the late twenties by W.F. Tyler, suggesting that the Tanka boat people were a mixture of Mongol soldiers and Chinese with whom they had intermarried. Tyler was an interesting character, an Englishman who had been not only a young officer serving with the Chinese Imperial Navy during the Yalu battle in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 but had gone on to be a Commissioner with the Chinese Maritime Customs.
The relative passage from the paragraph concerned claims that:
*
In about 1370 the conquering Ming dynasty ordered that the soldiers of the previous Mongol garrisons - descendants of the famous hordes of Ghengis Khan - and their families should be slaughtered. At Canton there had been intermarriage and absorption in a century of Mongol rule, and enmity was dead, so there was reluctance to fulfil this drastic order: consequently it was reported to the capital that they had been driven into the river, and by inference, drowned. They were not drowned; they were allowed to live in boats and in piled shacks below high-water line. And so they lived and bred and grown for five hundred years or more, and it was no one's business to institute a change. These were the Tankas; fine-looking men and pretty girls”.
Has any reader confirmation of Tyler's story?
NOTE
Tyler, William Ferdinand Pulling Strings in China Constable London 1929
ARE THE TANKA PEOPLE DESCENDANTS OF MONGOL SOLDIERS?
KEITH STEVENS
161
I have not done any research into the origins of the Tanka people of the Pearl River Estuary and have always assumed from something I read many years ago that ethnically they were one of the many original minority groups of southern China.
However, I have just come across a paragraph in Pulling Strings in China', a book written in the late twenties by W.F.Tyler, suggesting that the Tanka boat people were a mixture of Mongol soldiers and Chinese with whom they had intermarried. Tyler was an interesting character, an Englishman who had been not only a young officer serving with the Chinese Imperial Navy during the Yalu battle in the Sino- Japanese War of 1894 but had gone on to be a Commissioner with the Chinese Maritime Customs.
The relative passage from the paragraph concerned claims that:
*
In about 1370 the conquering Ming dynasty ordered that the soldiers of the previous Mongol garrisons - descendants of the famous hordes of Ghengis Khan - and their families should be slaughtered. At Canton there had been intermarriage and absorption in a century of Mongol rule, and enmity was dead, so there was reluctance to fulfil this drastic order: consequently it was reported to the capital that they had been driven into the river, and by inference, drowned. They were not drowned; they were allowed to live in boats and in piled shacks below high-water line. And so they lived and bred and grown for five hundred years or more, and it was no one's business to institute a change. These were the Tankas; fine-looking men and pretty girls”.
Has any reader confirmation of Tyler's story?
NOTE
Tyler, William Ferdinand Pulling Strings in China Constable London 1929
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