The Li Mother Spirit and the Sturggle for Hainan's Land and Legend

Chinese local histories depicted the landscape of Hainan Island as historically, spiritually, ethnically, and politically meaningful. The land was not inert nor was it an insignificant backdrop for human action. In the Chinese imagination, the land and the spirits inhabiting it had great symbolic meaning, and the meanings were at bottom contradictory: Hainan was both Heaven and Hell, beautiful and repellant, inviting and inaccessible. ² Spirits and the lingering ghosts of historical figures inhabited rocks, mountains, trees, and rivers, and were involved in the centuries-long conflict over land between settlers from the mainland and the state which supported them, and the Li people who are the original inhabitants of Hainan. This conflict over land lies at the heart of Hainan's long history. In this essay, I review Hainan's history, and then look at some of the ways the land and its spirits "participated" in that history. I introduce the land and several of its more colorful spirits, and then focus on a nineteenth-century legend about a Han general and his legendary interaction with the most powerful of the spirits of the island, the Li Mother.

Hainan lies in the South China Sea on the Sunda shelf five degrees south of the Tropic of Cancer, twenty-five kilometers from the Chinese mainland and 240 kilometers from the eastern coast of Vietnam. ³ The island measures about 280 kilometers southwest to northeast, and averages 175 kilometers northwest to southeast. Its area is 34,300 square kilometers, with 1,500 kilometers of uneven coastline. ⁴ The coastal strip, level plains, and river valleys make up approximately ten percent of Hainan Island's area. Slightly less than half of the island is a "terrace" (taidi) of under 100 meters in altitude, located mostly in the north. A hilly region between 100 and 500 meters above sea level takes up thirteen percent of the island's surface and lies between the coastal strip and the central mountains. The mountains make up a quarter of the island's total surface. The Five-Finger peak is the highest at 1,867 meters. ⁵ Except for land along the Nandu and Changhua River valleys, arable land is almost exclusively limited to the lowlands and coastal strip. ⁶ Rivers originate in the mountains and often produce dangerous flash floods. The rivers are short and broad, and vary greatly in depth according to season. ⁷

Wood products of Hainan were in great demand from before the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) and up to the present. Especially famous was "sinking aromatics" of the aloeswood tree (aquilaria agollachum), its wood so dense it sank in water, and with an aroma so strong a small piece could perfume a whole room. ⁸ Beginning in the Han Dynasty with the earliest written descriptions of Hainan, mainlanders were fascinated with its wildlife. Many species were of interest as sources of ornaments or medicines, such as bright bird feathers, pearl oysters, tortoise shell, and deer horn. Betelnuts, coconuts, and tropical fruits attracted merchants to Hainan as well. The island's forests also served as a place of exile, for their remoteness and the often deadly malarial "miasma" (zhangli or zhangqi). An aphorism attached to a similarly miasmic place in Guangxi called "the ghostly gate" (guimenguan) explains why the central states often sent especially troublesome political enemies into exile to the far south: "ten people enter the ghostly gate, nine do not return." ⁹

Neolithic archaeological sites suggest that the ancestors of the people who became known as the Li settled in Hainan about 3000 years ago. ¹⁰ Historians generally agree that the ancestors of the Li now inhabiting Hainan were not one but many groups which arrived on Hainan at various times and from various places. ¹¹ The inhabitants of Hainan described by mainlander settlers in the Han Dynasty were joined later by hill peoples from...