How Southern China Became Chinese

We know a fair amount about the process by which Southern China adopted Han Chinese culture, both in terms of timing and process, because its historical records are quite old. The process in this case was atypical of more familiar historical cases of conquest.

This vignette also illustrates a recurring theme that I try to note: The world in the past was more different from the present than we realize. The Han Chinese cultural core of all of China today, was not always so monolithic, even in the historic era. 

In Confucius’s day, some 2,500 years ago, very few Chinese lived south of the Yangtze River. Most lived in the North, where Chinese culture and civilization had begun. Back then, the southern part of what is now China belonged to other nationalities, which the Chinese referred to collectively as the Mán, or ‘Southern Barbarians.’ These non-Han people appeared strange and wild to the Chinese, and for Confucius and his contemporaries. . . .

Nevertheless, Han Chinese naturally began to migrate into those southern territories . . .  a technologically superior people pioneered and colonized an enormous territory, overwhelming scattered and disparate native cultures in the process. . . . the Chinese movement south, by even the most conservative reckoning, took well over a millennium. . . .  

In China . . . non-Han peoples and cultures were not so much erased as slowly absorbed. Groups in South China in contact with Han immigrants gave up their original ways of life and became Chinese. They took up Chinese dress, customs, language. They gave up native names in favor of Chinese ones. . . . . Han Chinese immigrants tended to settle in native villages and mingle with people already living there. Men married local women and brought up their children as Han Chinese. Even Han military colonies were not always segregated! South China thus became Chinese gradually through the process of absorption, and the language and culture of the dominant people—the Han Chinese from the North—became the language and culture of all.

From Language Log (the comments note a few instances of linguistic and culinary borrowings from the Southern Chinese people by the Han culture).