The Li People: Indigenous Relations in Illumine Lingao
Hainan Island in 1628 is not empty land waiting to be claimed. Its mountainous interior is home to the Li people, an indigenous population that has inhabited the island for at least three thousand years and has resisted Chinese colonization with a tenacity that has frustrated every dynasty from the Han to the Ming. For the transmigrators, the Li are not a footnote in their plans. They are a people whose territory, knowledge, and potential allegiance could determine the success or failure of the entire project.
Who Are the Li People?
The Li are the indigenous inhabitants of Hainan Island, ethnically and linguistically distinct from the Han Chinese who have settled the island's coastal lowlands over the past two millennia. Their language belongs to the Kra-Dai language family, related to Thai and Lao rather than to any variety of Chinese. Their material culture, social organization, and spiritual practices developed independently of Chinese civilization, adapted over thousands of years to the specific environment of Hainan's mountainous interior -- a landscape of steep ridges, dense tropical forest, fast-flowing rivers, and narrow valleys that is among the most difficult terrain in southern China.
By 1628, the Li population on Hainan numbers in the hundreds of thousands, concentrated primarily in the island's central and southern mountains. They are not a single unified polity but a collection of communities and clans, each controlling a particular valley or mountain territory, each governed by its own chiefs and customs. Some Li communities have extensive contact with the Han Chinese settlements on the coast, trading forest products -- rattan, medicinal herbs, honey, animal skins -- for salt, iron tools, and cloth. Others live in deeper isolation, maintaining traditions and practices that have changed little over centuries.
Li agriculture is adapted to the mountain environment. They practice swidden farming -- clearing forest for cultivation, farming the cleared land for several seasons until soil fertility declines, then moving on to clear a new plot while the old one regenerates. This system, often mischaracterized as primitive by outside observers, is in fact an ecologically sophisticated response to the realities of tropical mountain agriculture. It maintains soil fertility over the long term, preserves forest cover across the landscape, and produces sufficient food for a population living at densities appropriate to the environment. The Li also raise livestock, hunt in the forests, and fish in the mountain rivers, maintaining a diversified subsistence economy that is remarkably resilient to the disruptions that plague more specialized agricultural systems.
Their military tradition is equally adapted to the terrain. Li warriors are formidable fighters in their home mountains, using their intimate knowledge of the landscape to ambush, harass, and evade forces that attempt to pursue them into the interior. They fight with bows, crossbows, spears, and occasionally captured Chinese weapons. Their tactics emphasize mobility, concealment, and the exploitation of terrain -- the same principles that guerrilla fighters have used throughout history to negate the advantages of larger, better-equipped conventional forces. Chinese armies that have ventured into the Li mountains have historically suffered badly, defeating in detail by opponents who know every trail, every stream crossing, and every ambush position.
A History of Resistance
The relationship between the Li and the Chinese state spans two millennia and follows a pattern of cyclical conflict that is depressingly familiar from colonial histories worldwide. Chinese settlement on Hainan began during the Han Dynasty, initially confined to small coastal trading posts. Over the centuries, as Chinese settlers expanded along the coast and into the more accessible lowland areas, they progressively displaced Li communities from the fertile plains and pushed them toward the mountainous interior. Each expansion provoked resistance, and the resulting conflicts -- recorded in Chinese sources as "Li rebellions" -- were in fact defensive wars fought by indigenous people against the encroachment of settlers onto their traditional lands.
The Ming Dynasty, which governs Hainan in 1628, maintains a network of military garrisons on the island whose primary purpose is to keep the Li contained in the mountains and to protect Chinese settlements from Li raids. This military cordon is expensive to maintain, imperfectly effective, and deeply resented by the Li communities that it constrains. The Ming approach to the Li is a mixture of military intimidation, administrative co-optation (appointing compliant Li leaders as minor officials in the imperial system), and cultural assimilation (establishing schools and encouraging adoption of Chinese customs). The results are mixed at best. Some coastal Li communities have been substantially assimilated, adopting Chinese language, dress, and farming practices. The mountain Li remain largely autonomous, paying nominal tribute to Ming officials while governing their own affairs according to their own customs.
The periodic Li uprisings that punctuate this history are not random outbursts of violence but calculated responses to specific provocations -- excessive taxation, land seizures, abuses by Ming officials or Chinese settlers, or the violation of territorial agreements. The most serious rebellions mobilize thousands of warriors across multiple clans, overwhelming isolated garrisons and threatening Chinese settlements across wide swathes of the island. The Ming response typically involves dispatching additional troops from the mainland, conducting punitive expeditions into the mountains that inflict casualties without achieving lasting control, and eventually negotiating a settlement that restores the status quo until the next provocation triggers the next uprising.
The transmigrators know this history in detail, which gives them both an advantage and a burden. The advantage is understanding what works and what does not in dealing with the Li. The burden is the moral weight of that knowledge -- the awareness that they are the latest in a long line of outsiders seeking to establish power on an island that belongs, by any reasonable measure of prior occupation, to someone else.
The Transmigrators' Dilemma
The transmigrators' relationship with the Li people presents one of the novel's most complex moral and strategic challenges. From a purely strategic perspective, the transmigrators need the Li as allies -- or at minimum, they need the Li not to be enemies. Their settlement on Hainan's northwest coast is a thin strip of controlled territory backed by mountains that they do not control and cannot effectively patrol. A hostile Li population in those mountains would represent a permanent security threat, tying down military forces needed elsewhere and creating the possibility of devastating raids on infrastructure and personnel at moments of vulnerability.
But the strategic calculus runs deeper than mere security. The Li mountains contain resources the transmigrators want -- timber, minerals, medicinal plants, and potentially agricultural land for expansion. The Li themselves represent a potential labor force and source of local knowledge about Hainan's environment that no amount of modern education can fully substitute. And in any future conflict with Ming forces or other external threats, Li warriors fighting alongside the transmigrators would provide light infantry capabilities that the transmigrators' own military forces lack -- scouts, skirmishers, and mountain fighters who know the terrain intimately.
The question is how to build this relationship. The transmigrators are modern people, many of them educated in an intellectual tradition that is deeply critical of colonialism, that recognizes indigenous rights to land and self-determination, and that understands the moral catastrophe that European colonialism inflicted on indigenous peoples worldwide. They know, in painful detail, what happened to the native populations of the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific Islands when technologically advanced settlers arrived with diseases, weapons, and an insatiable appetite for land. They do not want to repeat this history. But they also recognize that their entire project -- industrializing 1628 China, redirecting the course of history -- inevitably involves extending their influence over territory and people, including the Li, in ways that are difficult to distinguish from colonialism no matter how carefully they manage the process.
A Different Approach
The transmigrators attempt to differentiate their approach from both Ming colonial policy and European colonial practice, though the degree to which they succeed is one of the novel's open questions. Their stated principles include respect for Li territorial sovereignty in the mountain interior, fair trade based on mutual benefit rather than coercion, medical assistance that reduces the devastating impact of diseases (some introduced by Chinese settlement over the centuries), and a commitment to non-interference in Li internal governance and cultural practices.
In practice, this means establishing trading posts on the boundary between transmigrator-controlled lowlands and Li mountain territory, where goods can be exchanged without either party needing to enter the other's domain. The transmigrators offer metal tools, cloth, salt, and medical treatment -- goods that the Li genuinely need and that the transmigrators can produce at costs far below what the Li would pay through existing trade channels with Chinese merchants. In return, they seek forest products, local knowledge, and a mutual non-aggression agreement that secures their northern and eastern flanks.
Medical assistance is perhaps the most important and morally uncomplicated element of this engagement. The transmigrators' knowledge of medicine, hygiene, and disease prevention allows them to treat conditions that are death sentences in the Li mountains -- infected wounds, malaria, parasitic infections, difficult childbirth. Providing this treatment builds goodwill more effectively than any quantity of trade goods, because it addresses needs that are immediate, visceral, and otherwise unmet. A transmigrator doctor who saves a chief's child from a fever that would otherwise be fatal creates a bond of obligation that no amount of diplomatic rhetoric can match.
The transmigrators also make deliberate choices about what technologies to share with the Li and what to withhold. Agricultural improvements -- better crop varieties, more effective farming techniques, improved tools -- are shared freely, because increased food security for Li communities reduces the economic pressures that historically drove Li raids on Chinese settlements. The logic is straightforward: well-fed people have less reason to fight. Medical knowledge is similarly shared. Military technology, however, is not -- the transmigrators are pragmatic enough to recognize that arming the Li with modern weapons would create a potential threat that could turn against them if the relationship soured.
The Ethics of Engagement
The novel does not shy away from the moral ambiguity of the transmigrators' relationship with the Li. Even their most benevolent policies serve the transmigrators' strategic interests. Medical treatment builds dependence as well as goodwill. Trade creates economic ties that bind the Li to the transmigrator economy. Agricultural improvements, by increasing Li prosperity, make the transmigrators' neighbors more stable and predictable -- which benefits the transmigrators as much as it benefits the Li. The distinction between generosity and calculated self-interest is not always clear, and the novel allows both interpretations to coexist without forcing a resolution.
Some transmigrators are uncomfortable with this ambiguity. They argue that any relationship built on a massive power imbalance -- and the technological gap between the transmigrators and the Li is perhaps the greatest power imbalance between neighboring communities in human history -- is inherently exploitative, regardless of the surface courtesy with which it is conducted. The Li cannot meaningfully consent to a relationship whose full implications they cannot understand, because they cannot comprehend the transmigrators' technological capabilities, their long-term intentions, or the historical patterns of colonial dispossession that the transmigrators carry in their collective memory. From this perspective, the transmigrators are simply a more polite version of every colonial power that has ever extended a friendly hand while reaching for indigenous land with the other.
Other transmigrators reject this framework as paralyzing perfectionism. They argue that the Li's situation under the Ming is already one of colonial subjection -- their land has been progressively taken, their autonomy constrained, their culture denigrated by Ming officials and Chinese settlers. The transmigrators are not introducing colonialism to Hainan; they are arriving in a situation where colonialism is already underway. If they can improve the Li's material conditions, protect them from the worst abuses of Ming administration, and establish a relationship based on genuine mutual benefit rather than exploitation, they are doing better than the alternative -- which is the continuation of Ming colonial policy without any of the ameliorating factors the transmigrators can provide.
This debate is never fully resolved within the novel, and its irresolution is one of the story's strengths. Real ethical dilemmas do not have clean answers, and the transmigrators' relationship with the Li is a genuine ethical dilemma -- a situation where every available choice involves moral costs, where good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes, and where the judgment of history is uncertain.
Cultural Exchange and Its Limits
Beyond the strategic and ethical dimensions, the transmigrators' contact with the Li creates opportunities for cultural exchange that enrich both communities. The Li possess ecological knowledge of Hainan's interior that is invaluable to the transmigrators -- knowledge of which plants are edible, which are medicinal, which are poisonous, where water can be found in the dry season, how to navigate the mountain trails, what the weather patterns mean. This is knowledge accumulated over three thousand years of inhabiting a specific landscape, and it cannot be found in any book the transmigrators brought with them. Li guides, herbalists, and hunters know things about Hainan that the transmigrators' modern education cannot provide.
The exchange runs in both directions. Li communities that establish regular contact with the transmigrators gain access not only to material goods but to ideas and practices that some individuals find fascinating. The transmigrators' metalworking, their construction techniques, their medical practices, their methods of agriculture -- all of these are visible at the trading posts and in the coastal settlement, and curious Li visitors absorb what they see. Some young Li men and women seek employment or education within the transmigrator community, creating a small but significant population of bicultural individuals who move between two worlds.
The limits of this exchange are set by the Li themselves, who are not passive recipients of transmigrator beneficence but active agents with their own agendas, their own values, and their own red lines. Li leaders who trade with the transmigrators are perfectly capable of rejecting proposals that threaten their autonomy or their territorial integrity. Li communities that prefer isolation maintain it, and the transmigrators -- to their credit -- generally respect this preference rather than forcing contact. The relationship is unequal in terms of power, but it is not unilateral. The Li have agency, and they exercise it.
The Long Shadow of History
What makes the transmigrators' relationship with the Li so compelling as a narrative element is the shadow of historical knowledge that hangs over every interaction. The transmigrators know what happened to indigenous peoples elsewhere in the world when they encountered technologically superior newcomers. They know about the destruction of Native American civilizations, the devastation of Aboriginal Australians, the exploitation of Pacific Islanders. They know that contact between technologically unequal societies almost always results in the subordination, displacement, or destruction of the less powerful group, regardless of the initial intentions on either side.
This knowledge creates a moral imperative that complicates every practical decision. When a transmigrator proposes expanding agricultural land into territory that the Li consider theirs, the echo of every land grab in colonial history sounds in the ears of those who know that history. When a transmigrator suggests recruiting Li workers for industrial labor, the shadow of forced labor systems from plantation slavery to colonial conscription falls across the proposal. The transmigrators cannot escape their knowledge of how these stories usually end, and that knowledge forces them to examine their own actions with a critical awareness that historical colonial actors never possessed.
Whether this critical awareness is sufficient to produce a genuinely different outcome is the question that Illumine Lingao poses but does not definitively answer. The transmigrators are trying to do something that has never been done -- to establish a relationship with an indigenous people that is simultaneously unequal in power and equitable in practice, that serves the transmigrators' strategic needs without sacrificing the Li's fundamental rights and interests. History provides no precedent for this succeeding, and the novel is honest enough to acknowledge that precedent while allowing its characters to try anyway. The result is one of the most morally complex and historically informed treatments of indigenous relations in any work of speculative fiction, a storyline that refuses easy answers and rewards careful thought.