Ancient China: We Are Barbarians: The Four Categories of Barbarians.
I have been watching Chinese historical dramas on YouTube, and in the English subtitles I often see the word "Ape Man", and soon found out that Ape Man meant Barbarians. The ancient Chinese on the Central Plains where the major dynasties arose, viewed the non-Han peoples of the border regions as Barbarians. In the map of ancient China as it was during the Spring and Autumn period that you see above, China was a multitude of Kingdoms, Fiefdoms and tribal regions [there are 54 entities here]. The Barbarians inhabited the vast steppes of the North, the mountainous and forested regions of the South-East covering today's Fujian, Guangdong, Zhejiang provinces, the region where today's Sichuan, Yunnan meet Qinghai and the Tibetan plateau, and the cold snow-covered region of today's Heilongjiang and Jilin Provinces that border Korea and Russia. The table below shows how the ancient Chinese classified the Barbarians into 4 geographical areas. So we Hokkiens, ...