Miao-Yao

Taiwan was not part of ancient or even medieval China, Taiwan aboriginals were never referred to as Yue, and the languages certain to have been spoken by the Yue are early forms of Tai, Vietnamese and Miao-Yao. It is odd that the author pursued such tangents in space; in time, back to the Neolithic; and in fancy, locating "pre-Austronesian" on the mainland, but then stopped the Yue story abruptly at ad 50.

I volunteered in 1960 to work in Laos because of its Chinese cross-border minority nationalities and especially the Miao-Yao group I had selected as a possible proto-Chinese stock in the context of my encyclopedic synthesis of the anthropology of China2 In my eyes, the (H)mong were also a rare example, in the anthropology of China, of a completely illiterate society with an exclusively oral tradition.

The construction of the Miao nationality in the 1950s has tried to focus on groups more or less linguistically related in a vast set of populations speaking a large span of languages known as the Miao-Yao group.

According to the online Brittanica.com, Miao-Yao (myou'you') is a small group of languages whose speakers are found in mountainous areas of southern China and Southeast Asia (13).