Abstract
A VALUABLE Report which has just been laid before Parliament contains an account of a journey made by Mr. Bourne, British Consular Agent at Chung-King in Szechuen province, through South-Western and Southern China, to study certain commercial questions in these regions. The journey lasted 193 days, and carried the traveller through the great provinces of Yunnan, Kwangsi, Kweichow, and Szechuen. Mr. Bourne was constantly brought into contact with various non-Chinese tribes inhabiting these provinces, and his Report contains a large amount of information respecting their language and habits. He also devotes a special appendix to them. He says that there is probably no family of the human race, certainly none with such claims to consideration, of which so little is accurately known as the non-Chinese races of Southern China, and he attributes this to the “perfect maze of senseless names” in which the subject has been involved by the Chinese. The “Topography of the Yunnan Province,” published in 1836. gives a cata-logue of 141 classes of aborigines, each with a separate name and illustration, without any attempt to arrive at a broader classification. To Mr. Bourne it appeared that before the tribes could be scientifically assigned by ethnologists, they must be reduced to order amongst themselves, and that something might be done in this direction by taking a short vocabulary and obtaining its equivalent in the dialect of every tribe met with, when a comparison would reveal affinities and differences. Accordingly he gives twenty-two vocabularies, containing the numerals up to 12, 20, 30, 100,1000, father, mother, brother, sister, heaven, gold, hand, foot, sun, dog. horse, iron, &c.—in all, thirty-six words. In each case the date, place, the name by which each tribe calls itself, the name by which the Chinese know it, and the name by which it knows the Chinese, is given. A comparison of these vocabularies and a study of Chinese books lead him to the conviction that, exclusive of the Tibetans, there are but three great non-Chinese races in Southern China—the Lolo, the Shan, and the Miao-tsze. The vocabularies do not convey the whole evidence that these scattered people respectively speak the same language, for the Lolo, Shan, and Miao-tsze are all languages of the Chinese type that make up for poverty of sound by “tones”; the resemblance is much more striking to the ear accustomed to these distinctions of sound than when the words are written in English, when the similarity of tone is lost. Among the 141 tribes described in the Chinese topography of Yunnan, with short vocabularies of the principal dialects, there are very few, and those unimportant, that cannot be identified from the illustrations or letterpress as belonging to one or other of the three families or to Tibetan. As to the names of these families, Lolo is a Chinese corruption of Lulu, the name of a former chieftain of the people, who call themselves Nersu, and has come to stand for the people themselves. Shan is the Burmese term adopted by Europeans for the people who call themselves “Tai,” “Pu-nong,” &c. Miao-tsze, a Chinese word, meaning “roots,” is confined by the more accurate to the aborigines of Kweichow and Western Hunan.
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The Non-Chinese Races of China . Nature 38, 345–346 (1888). https://doi.org/10.1038/038345a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/038345a0