Hlai

The Hlai, who call themselves Hlai and are known in Chinese as the Li, are a Kra–Dai people and Hainan Island's largest indigenous minority, split into five branches. Linguists place their original home on the Leizhou Peninsula opposite, from which their ancestors crossed the Hainan Strait to reach the island about four thousand years ago; related groups once lived on the neighbouring mainland coast, and Li appears in Chinese records from the Han onward.

A third-century work describes wall-less Li villages in the commanderies south of Guangzhou, and in the sixth century the tribes briefly united under the hereditary chieftain Lady Xian, while the Liang campaigned against them between 523 and 545. By the eleventh century the mainland Li had vanished from the records; the Hainan Hlai paid Song taxes while keeping their mountain villages.

Han settlers gradually took the best farmland, and by the late Ming the Hlai lived mainly by supplying mountain products; after the Qing restored island administration around 1700, competition from migrant merchants drove them to revolt in 1766.