The Boat Dwellers, also known as Shuishangren (Chinese: 水上人; pinyin: shuǐshàng rén; Cantonese Yale: Séuiseuhngyàn; "people living on the water") or Boat People, or the derogatory Tankas,[2][3] are a sinicised ethnic group in Southern China[4] who traditionally lived on junks in coastal parts of Guangdong, Guangxi, Fujian, Hainan, Shanghai, Zhejiang and along the Yangtze river, as well as Hong Kong, and Macau.

The origins of the Boat Dwellers can be traced back to the native ethnic minorities of southern China known historically as the Baiyue, who may have taken refuge on the sea and gradually assimilated into Han Chinese culture.

[29][better source needed] The Amoy University anthropologist Ling Hui-hsiang wrote his theory of the Fujian Boat Dwellers as descendants of the Baiyue.

He claimed that Guangdong and Fujian Boat Dwellers are definitely descended from the old Baiyue peoples, and that they may have been ancestors of the Malay race.

[30] The Tanka inherited their lifestyle and culture from the original Yue peoples who inhabited Hong Kong during the Neolithic era.

[37][38] During the British colonial era in Hong Kong, the Tanka were considered a separate ethnic group from the Punti ("locals"), Hakka, and Hoklo.

[39] The Boat Dwellers have been compared to the She people by some historians, as both are ethnic minorities descended from natives of Southern China who now practice Han Chinese culture.

"[41] In modern times, the Boat Dwellers claim to be ordinary Chinese who happen to fish for a living, and speak the local dialect.

[11] The Boat Dwellers were regarded as Yueh and not Chinese, they were divided into three classifications, "the fish-Tan, the oyster-Tan, and the wood-Tan" in the 12th century, based on what they did for a living.

[45][46] The three groups of Punti, Hakka, and Hoklo, all of whom spoke different Chinese dialects, despised and fought each other during the late Qing dynasty.

[49] The scholar Jacques Gernet also wrote that the Boat Dwellers were aboriginals known as pirates (haidao), which hindered Qing dynasty attempts to assert control in Guangdong.

[50] The most widely held theory is that the Boat Dwellers are the descendants of the native Yue inhabitants of Guangdong before the Han Cantonese moved in.

[52] Regarding the Fujian Minyue Boat Dwellers it is suggested that in the southeast coastal regions of China, there were many sea nomads during the Neolithic era and they may have spoken ancestral Austronesian languages, and were skilled seafarers.

[citation needed] Eugene Newton Anderson in 1970 claimed that there was no evidence for any of the conjectures put forward by scholars on the Boat Dwellers' origins, citing Chen,[who?]

It is hypothesized that the Fujian Boat Dwellers mainly originate from the ancient indigenous Daic people and have only limited gene flows from Han Chinese populations.

[58] Another study on the Boat Dwellers concluded that the Tanka people not only had a close genetic relationship with both northern Han and ancient Yellow River basin millet farmers but also possessed more southern East Asian ancestry related to Austronesian, Kra-Dai and Hmong-Mien people compared to southern Han.

[64] The Tanka boat population were not registered into the national census as they were of outcast status, with an official imperial edict declaring them untouchable.

Tanka people would also supply fish for the Portuguese, as they did for the Cantonese, an activity which is mentioned in a poem by Chinese poet Wu Li.

[74] Literature in Macau was written about love affairs and marriage between the Tanka women and Portuguese men, like "A-Chan, A Tancareira", by Henrique de Senna Fernandes.

Those Tankas who only own small boats and cannot fish far out to sea are forced to stay inshore in bays, gathering together like floating villages.

[84] In 1937, Walter Schofield, then a Cadet Officer in the Hong Kong Civil Service, wrote that at that time the Tankas were "boat-people [who sometimes lived] in boats hauled ashore, or in more or less boat-shaped huts, as at Shau Kei Wan and Tai O".

[87][88] Due to their marginal position in Chinese society, and the fact that they lacked access to many of the privileges that societal integration could afford them, Tanka people were not as tightly bound by social pressure and Confucian ethics as other ethnic groups when interacting with foreigners.

Though this claim is somewhat historically supported, it has also been criticized as a "myth" spread by other Chinese peoples to express xenophobia towards Hong Kong's Eurasian community.

[108] Qing records indicate that "Weng, Ou, Chi, Pu, Jiang, and Hai" (翁, 歐, 池, 浦, 江, 海) were surnames of the Fuzhou Tanka.