Cuanman Erotic

The Cuanman were the peoples of eastern and central Yunnan, in southwestern China, who lived under the rule of the Cuan clan from roughly the 4th century until the mid-8th century, when the kingdom of Nanzhao broke them apart. Their descendants are generally traced into the Yi and Bai peoples of today. The name is a Chinese one, and not a flattering one. Cuan was the family that held power, and man was the catchall word Chinese writers used for the non-Han south, closer to "barbarian" than to anything neutral. What made them a group was less a shared language or ancestry than a shared political fact: for about four centuries, one family governed the country around modern Qujing and the Dian Lake basin. It was nominally loyal to whichever Chinese court held the throne, and mostly left alone.

The Cuan family came out of the great local clans that rose to power in the region, then called Nanzhong, after Zhuge Liang's southern campaign in 225. They claimed descent from Chinese nobility, and their surviving monuments back up at least the cultural side of that claim. The two great Cuan steles, raised in 405 and 458 near Qujing, are carved in a stiff script caught between the clerical and regular styles, and Chinese calligraphers still study them. Whether the Cuan were Han settlers who went local or local chiefs who took on a Chinese pedigree is an open question. For a borderland family, it may be the wrong question, since they likely did both.

Beneath the ruling clan, Chinese sources split the population in two. The Western Cuan, called the Baiman or "White Man", held the lake basins and plains, the more Chinese-influenced country. The Eastern Cuan, the Wuman or "Black Man", were scattered through the wooded hills and valleys farther east. Both labels were applied by outsiders, and historians still argue over what the colors meant.

The end came fast. In the 740s the Tang pushed a fortified route through Cuan territory toward Annam. The Cuan chiefs revolted, then turned on one another, and the Tang leaned on Nanzhao, the rising power around Erhai Lake, to restore order. Nanzhao did, and kept the country for itself. It deported some 200,000 Western Cuan households west to Yongchang, near modern Baoshan. The Eastern Cuan, too scattered to round up, gradually moved into the emptied lowlands. The Cuan name faded after that, but the split between Black and White it recorded carries on into the later history of the Yi and the Bai, and the steles still stand.