The Immigration Legends and Genealogy books of Ethnic Minorities in Southwest China
西南少数民族的移民传说及族谱
余志清
The immigration legends, which are also described as “the legends about the ancestors from the same place”, tell us from where our ancestors emigrated. There are many popular immigration legends among the Han people, and the most representative ones are the Immigration Legend of Shanxi Hongdong Large Chinese Scholartree and the Immigration Legends of Nanxiong Zhuji Lane, which spread respectively in the most area of Huabei Plain and Zhujiang Delta. These immigration legends spreading widely among the Han people also spread among the Ethnic Minority people in South and Southwest China, and the more important point is that those legends are very similar in both the contents and structures. For example, there are Immigration Legend of Nanjing among the Bai people in Yunnan Province, Immigration Legend of Jiangxi among the Buyi and Miao people in Guizhou Province, Immigration Legend of Jiangxi and Nanjing among the Yao people in Guizhou, and Immigration Legend of Shandong Qingzhou among the Zhuang people in Guangxi Province and so on.
This thesis not only analyzes the content and structure of those immigration legends among the ethnic minority people which are gathered in the field work in detail, but inspects the historical background when the ethnic minority people absorbed those legends with the written material such as the Genealogical Records to discuss those legends’ function and significance in the ethnic minority society.
