RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1997
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579
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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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2000
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n
22

Han Suyin's patrimonial heritage is very specific, as her father originated from the Hakkas, or "Guest People," a sub-group of ethnical Han Chinese, which initially meant displaced, dispossessed, and hungry peasants, the refugees from misery, migrating in millions from the regions struck by floods, droughts, foreign invasions, civil wars, and rural upheavals, and simply "seeking a roof." The Hakkas themselves claim that they moved five times within recorded history, their first migration dating at about A.D. 311, and the fifth one at the end of the Taiping rising (i.e., in the sixties of the nineteenth century). Their culture was to a very large extent affected by the turbulence of political and social events, by their own relative insecurity in the territories of new settlement, and by the resulting enormous eagerness and ability to survive. For these particular reasons, a somewhat remote analogy can perhaps be drawn between the mobile, industrious, and hard-working Hakkas, dispersed among the settled Han population, and the Jewish enclaves dispersed in medieval Europe and in the contemporary world as well.

In the thirteenth century - the time of Gengis Khan's invasion and of the resulting third migration - Han Suyin's distant ancestors, named Chou, settled in Meihsien in the province of Kuangtung, a purely Hakka district. The wave of the Manchu-dynasty-inspired fourth migration (1680-1720) took some of them further to Szechuan, the region of Four Streams, a remote Chinese hinterland guarded from the outer world by the cliffs of Tibet, the Snow Mountains, and the Cold Mountains, and the dangerous Yangtse gorges. The recorded family history starts from the first ancestor, who arrived in Szechuan as an itinerant pedlar, most probably carrying across his shoulder a pole, with the baskets swinging at both ends to transport miserable personal property and sale goods.

By the nineteenth century, Han Suyin's family had managed to climb up the economic and social ladder, to attain the top echelon, i.e., the scholar-official-administrator class. They had become local landed gentry, the cornerstone of the Chinese feudal social setup, and this anachronistic setup might have continued ad infinitum, had it not, under pressure from the colonial superpowers, ultimately collapsed.

Han Suyin's father, Chou Yentung, was born in 1886 in China already invaded by the French and the British, the two colonial
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2003
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390
220

Buddha. After all, the Greeks had settled here even earlier, in the third century BCE. Other examples, before being blown up in 2001, were the huge images of Buddha carved out of the cliff in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, with their moulded mud and stucco draperies. Alexander's forays and settlements to lands well to the east of his Macedonian homeland remind us that several of the cities that Tucker describes were far more ancient than the Silk Road. Babylon, which fell to Alexander in 331 BCE, had already by then been the Middle East's most magnificent city for over fifteen hundred years. The earliest city to occupy the site of Chang'an was in existence before 1000 BCE.

Tucker manages to convey a huge sweep of history and geography. You will need time to read this book as, if you merely dip into it, you will lose the interconnecting threads, which are the crux of his thesis, i.e. that, throughout fifteen hundred years, numerous cultures met along the Silk Road and nourished each other's creative spirits. You will need to read it at a table because it is too heavy to read on your knees. And you will need an atlas alongside it that has maps showing some realms not often shown on a single spread. Your maps will need to show the geographical proximity of the towering mountain ranges of the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush with the drainage basins of the Aral Sea to their west and north and with the upper tributaries of the Indus to their east and south. The passes connecting these regions beckoned both Alexander and, nearly two thousand years later, Tamerlane, both intent on conquering and settling the north of the Indian subcontinent. You will need a single map to show the vast latitudinal spread of the great grasslands, deserts and semi-deserts from Turkey to northern China over which the nomads galloped. It was along these northernmost routes of the Silk Road that the Mongols charged on their terrifying way to Vienna, besieging it in 1241 and only withdrawing because they had to travel back, unexpectedly but unavoidably, all the way to Karakorum to appoint a new Grand Khan. The Silk Road saw many such events that were turning points in history, such as when in 1218 the governor of a city in what is now Kazakhstan killed an envoy of Ghengis Khan, suspecting that he was a spy, an action that precipitated the wrath of the Khan, and "was to propel the world into an abyss, setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to the deaths of millions of people from the Danube to the Sea of Japan' (p.221) - because Ghengis Khan's horsemen set out to avenge this insult, inflicting terrible retribution on all in their path.
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