Hmong

The Hmong are a branch of the Miao, hill peoples speaking Hmongic languages in southern China's mountains since ancient times. Chinese records long used Miao loosely for the unassimilated Nanman; only from the Tang dynasty of 618 to 907 did it clearly refer to the ancestors of the later Miao.

They held the rugged uplands of present-day Guizhou, Hunan and neighbouring provinces, farming steep slopes by slash-and-burn under clan headmen, while officials labelled them 'raw' or 'cooked' Miao by assimilation. In 1337 their heartland was the Wuling Mountains on the Hunan–Hubei–Guizhou border and Bozhou in Guizhou, ruled by native chieftains with little imperial interference.

Ming direct-rule campaigns set off repeated Miao rebellions, each crushed brutally. Under the Qing, pacification campaigns in the 1720s, the great Guizhou revolt of 1735 to 1738 and another rising in 1795 to 1806 preceded migration: war and Han settlement in the valleys drove growing numbers of Hmong-speakers across the southern borders into Vietnam, Laos and Southeast Asia.