Abstract
Starting from what the Hou Hanshu says about the Southern Man in Later Han times, this article aims to measure the prescriptive importance of Fan Ye’s text, through a comparison with other types of documents, mostly unearthed documents from the Middle Yangzi area. Beyond the stereotypical image of benevolent officials educating savage barbarians, it suggests that the “Man problem” was not an ethnic issue, but rather a political and fiscal one. Indeed, most Man rebellions occurred not only because of the gradual imperial colonization of the southern part of the realm, but also because the officials holding office in the Middle Yangzi regularly questioned the Man’s fiscal status.
Highlights
During the first millennium of the Chinese empire, the Southern Man (Nan Man 南蠻) people remained a constant threat to the political stability of Southern China, as their territory was not really controlled by the imperial armies
In order to assess who the Man were, where they lived, and how they were represented and integrated, I suggest in this article that the issue of the Man people should be mainly addressed as a political and fiscal problem rather than an ethnic one
Enough, the situation depicted in the Hou Hanshu echoes to a certain extent the author’s own times, i.e., the fifth century
Summary
During the first millennium of the Chinese empire, the Southern Man (Nan Man 南蠻) people remained a constant threat to the political stability of Southern China, as their territory was not really controlled by the imperial armies. Taxing the Southern Man in Order to Control Them Closely related to the Man’s origin myth, the following lines show the basis of the Man’s “myth” of fiscal privilege: In light of the previous achievements of their ancestor [Panhu] and given the fact that their ancestress was the daughter of a monarch, [the Man] live off their farming production which they can [freely] trade, and are not required to present a pass when crossing passes and bridges, nor to pay any land tax.. Note that bugeng 不更 is a Qin rank (translated as “Service Rotation Exempt” in Barbieri-Low – Yates 2015, p. xxii), but I use it here in the local context and in relation to the previous quotation
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