Zhuang

The Zhuang are the Tai-speaking indigenous people of Guangxi, settled along the Zuo, You and Liu river valleys of southern China and kindred to the Bouyei of Guizhou and the Tày and Nùng of northern Vietnam. Chinese histories trace them to the Xi'ou of the ancient Baiyue, and they appear under successive names such as the Liao and the Wuhu before the term Zhuang, their own word for a cave, came into use under the Song. They farmed irrigated rice in the lowland valleys, wrote their language in the Chinese-derived Sawndip characters, and ordered village life around song courts, matrilineal customs and the animist Mo faith served by bumo shamans. For centuries they were ruled through loose-rein prefectures under hereditary chieftains of the Nong, Huang and Cen clans.

The greatest of these leaders, Nong Zhigao, seized Yongzhou in 1052 and proclaimed his own dynasty before the Song general Di Qing defeated him at the Kunlun Pass in 1053; the followers he left beyond the frontier became the Nùng of Vietnam. The Song then enrolled more than fifty thousand Zhuang as frontier militia between 1064 and 1067, and under the Ming their mercenary bands were famed as wolf warriors, fighting the court's campaigns including the Big Rattan Gorge war of 1465, in which some twenty thousand people died. The Ming and Qing kept the Cen and other chiefly houses as tusi native officials while opening Chinese schools in the Zhuang country, where local rebellions continued into the Qing period.