Comments by "Angry Kittens" (@AngryKittens) on "Dragon Boat Races Celebrate China's Ancient Past | National Geographic" video.

Yet another technology (like rice domestication) they stole from "Baiyue" when they assimilated the Austronesian and Austroasiatic tribes of southern China, but now claim as their own and use as justification for their claim to the South China Sea. The real dragon boats are the war canoes of the Austronesians, and they are thousands of years older than the Qin dynasty. Even the dragon boats of the Ryukyuans are not borrowed from China as they claim, but acquired from contact and intermarriage with their Austronesian neighbors in Taiwan. The Han Chinese were neither a river nor a sea people. They were steppe nomads.
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The Chinese character for Miao is irrelevant. It's Chinese. The Pearl River region, the most probable origin of rice cultivation 13,000 years ago was part of the core territory of the Austric "super"-ethnic group - which later split to numerous groups - the seafaring Austronesians, and the river/mountain Tai-Kadai, Mon-Khmer, and Hmong-Mien and possibly (more distantly) the Ainu and Ryukyuans (and thus, the Japanese). The Miao were one of those branches, and they didn't exist 13,000 years ago. Their Urheimat (homelands) are basically the same place, and their historical territories still overlap even to this day. Moreover, the cultural parallels between all of them is extraordinary. From tattooing, to headhunting, to the blackening of teeth, the domestication of the water buffalo (a draught animal), the banana, the chicken, the pig, jade carving, traditional dress, cordware, social structures (the nobility, warrior, and the commoner class; as well as the relative egalitarianism between sexes), pre-contact religions (dual/multiple souls, soul loss, female shamans, and a version of spirit-centered shamanism very different from Han Chinese shamanism), and yes, rice cultivation, which remained a central part of the cultures of ALL of them. None of these things are Han. Han are Sino-Tibetan. They domesticated the yak, the millet, the barley, the horse, and the soybean. All of which are highland/steppe technologies. A very far cry from the marsh/lowland/coastal technologies like rice farming and dragon boats. What I find objectionable is the way China labels everything as Han Chinese, despite the fact that the entirety of southern China, coastal China, and Taiwan, were not Han territories.
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@obsidianstatue It is theft. The Yue were not Han. In the same way that Taiwanese aborigines are not Han. They did not have Han customs or culture. Tell me which culture colonized the islands of two oceans from Rapa Nui to Madagascar, and then tell me again who invented the more sophisticated boats. Log boats are easy. But a dragon boat isn't a simple log boat, is it? Designing boats, especially ocean-worthy boats, was something only achieved by a few cultures. China wasn't one of them until much much later when they assimilated the non-Han sea people in southern China, erased their cultures, then claimed their advancements as their own. It's insulting because it makes it look like only China made technological discoveries. Especially since the Chinese call everyone non-Han as "barbarians". To call Han chinese "pan-Asian" only makes it clear how utterly ignorant you are of non-Han Asian peoples.
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@Amidat LOL. Han Chinese is not synonymous with "Chinese citizen" (Zhongguo Ren) like your Dear Leader Mao defines it as. Han Chinese were an actual people (you call them the Huaxia) who once lived between the Wei and the Huang He Rivers. They are the ancestors of the unified Chinese empire who then conquered southwards during the Han Dynasty in 200 BC (hence the name - Han). And they have one important cultural characteristic: they did not have ships that could sail in the seas. They acquired ship technology only much much later, during the Song Dynasty (900 AD), and they copied that technology from the Srivijaya Empire's djongs. The Mongols later used those ships to try to invade Japan and Java when they conquered China. But they failed, because your ships sucked. Jurchens are Tungusic. Mongols are Mongolic. Neither of them are Han Chinese (Sino-Tibetan) either. You got tired of stealing territory and inventions, you are now stealing Asian ancestries too? And you're right. I hate thieves.
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@brucelu4782 The Yangtze peoples are Austronesian/Tai. Genetic studies have confirmed that. LOL. Even your own records confirm that. You called them the "hundred yue". Stop it.
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@brucelu4782 You didn't assimilate them. You annihilated them. Nothing of their culture remains, except the technologies you now claim is yours. The same thing almost happened to Taiwan. Though happily, the real natives, the Taiwanese Aborigines managed to survive until modern times. They're not Han.
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@brucelu4782 And yes, you had raft technologies which developed into FLAT-BOTTOMED river boats which in turn developed into the Chinese junks. You never invented the keel. Dragon boats have keels.
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