Southern Barbarians), were ancient indigenous peoples who lived in inland South and Southwest China, mainly around the Yangtze River valley.

It was an umbrella term that included any groups south of the expanding Huaxia civilization, and there was never a single polity that united these people, although the state of Chu ruled over much of the Yangtze region during the Zhou dynasty and was partly influenced by the Man culture.

The early Chinese exonym Man (蠻) was a graphic pejorative written with Radical 142 虫, which means "worm", "insect" or "vermin".

Baxter & Sagart (2014) provide a similar Old Chinese reconstruction for Min 閩 *mrə[n] 'southern tribes', which is also a name for Fujian province.

Today, similar-sounding self-designated ethnonyms among modern-day peoples include Mraṅmā, Hmong, Mien, Bru, Mro, Mru, and Maang.

When the state of Qin conquered Chu, they found that the commandery of Qianzhong, corresponding to modern Hubei, Hunan and Guizhou, was still inhabited by Man people.

The Bandun Man (literally "board shield" barbarians) lived further west of the Linjun and were known for their music and heroic conduct in war.

They supported Liu Bang after the fall of the Qin dynasty and contributed troops to Han campaigns against the Qiang people.

[6] Related to the Bandun were the neighboring Cong (賨) people, who became interested in the mysticism of the Celestial Master Zhang Lu and moved north to the border of his territory.

[9] The campaign was retold in the famous 14th-century historical novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which provides a heavily romanticised narrative of the events that happened.

A notable example was Zhang Chang, a Jin dynasty (266–420) rebel from one of the Man tribes in Hubei who was allowed to serve as a county official prior to his rebellion.