Liuqiu流求

The state of Liuqiu (流求國) dwells on an island in the sea, over against Jian'an commandery. Five days by water and one arrives. The land has many mountains and caves. The king is of the Huansi clan, and his name is Keladou, but where he came from and how many generations the state has lasted is not known. The people of that land call him kelaoyang, and his wife duobacha. The place where he lives is called the settlement of Boluotan. It has a moat and palisade three deep, ringed about with running water, with thorn trees planted for a hedge. The house where the king lives is sixteen bays in size, carved with birds and beasts. There are many doulou trees (鬥鏤樹), which are like the orange, with thick leaves and branches as fine as hanging hair. The country has four or five chiefs who govern the several settlements (洞), and each settlement has a lesser king. Here and there are villages, and each village has a niaoliao chief (鳥了帥). They take men who fight well for this, and set them up among themselves to manage the affairs of one village. Men and women alike wind their hair with cord of white ramie, coiling it from the back of the neck around to the forehead. The men make caps of bird feathers, hung with beads and shells and trimmed with red fur, and no two are of the same shape. The women make hats of white cloth with a woven pattern, square and straight in form. They weave the bark of the doulou with fur of all kinds to make clothes, and the cutting is not of one pattern. They join fur and hang shells for ornament, mingling colors together, and small shells hang below that sound like girdle jade. They fasten on ear pendants, put on bracelets, and hang beads at the neck. They plait rattan into hats and trim them with fur and feathers. They have swords and spears, bows and arrows, blades and lances. There is little iron in that place, so their knives are all thin and small, and they piece them out with bone and horn. They plait ramie for armor, and some use the hides of bears and leopards. The king rides a wooden beast and has his attendants carry it, and those who lead and follow are no more than a dozen or so. The lesser kings ride a frame carved in the shape of a beast. The people of the country are fond of attacking one another. All of them are swift and strong and run well, hard to kill and enduring of wounds. Each settlement forms its own troop, and they do not come to one another's aid. When two forces stand against each other, three or five of the bold ones come out in front, leaping and shouting, trading words and cursing one another, and then they strike and shoot. If a side does not win, the whole force runs, and when they send a man to make apology they are reconciled at once. They gather up those who died in the fighting and eat them together, and the skulls they carry to the king, who bestows a cap on the man, and he becomes a company chief (隊帥).

They levy no taxes, and when there is business they pay their share alike. In using punishments too there is no fixed standard, and all is judged as the case arises. A crime is judged by the niaoliao chief, and one who will not submit is sent up to the king, who has his officers deliberate together and settle it. In their prisons there are no cangues or chains, only cord for binding. A death sentence is carried out with an iron awl as thick as a chopstick and more than a foot long, driven through the crown of the head. For light offenses they use the rod. Their custom has no writing. They watch the waning and waxing of the moon to mark the seasons, and take the flourishing and withering of grass and trees for the year. The people have deep eyes and long noses, like the Hu, and they have some small cleverness. They have no order of ruler and subject, of high and low, and no rite of bowing and prostration. Father and son sleep on the same bed. The men pluck out their beards and whiskers, and remove the hair wherever it grows on the body. The women tattoo their hands in black with patterns of insects and snakes. In marrying they take liquor, beads, and shells for the betrothal gift, and if a man and a woman please each other they simply become a pair. When a woman gives birth she must eat the afterbirth, and after the birth she scorches herself with fire to bring out the sweat, and in five days she is well again. They dry sea water in a wooden trough for salt, make vinegar of tree sap, and brew liquor of rice and flour, and its taste is very thin. They eat wholly with their hands. When they come by a rare dish they offer it first to their elders. At any feast the one holding the cup must wait until his name is called before he drinks, and the one who offers liquor to the king also calls the king's name before he takes the cup in his mouth and they drink together, much as among the Tujue. They sing and shout and stamp their feet, one man leading and the crowd all answering, and the sound is much of it sorrowful and full of grievance. They lift a woman up on their arms and dance with waving hands. When a man is dying and his breath is about to go, they carry him out before the courtyard, and kin and guests weep and mourn him. They wash the body, bind it about with cloth and silk, wrap it in a reed mat, and bury it straight in the earth, raising no mound above.

A son eats no meat for some months for his father. In the southern reaches the customs differ a little: when a man dies, the village eats him together. There are bears, jackals, and wolves, and pigs and fowl are more plentiful still, but there are no sheep, oxen, donkeys, or horses. Their fields are rich and fat. They first burn them over and then draw water in to flood them, and they take a single spade with a stone for a blade, more than a foot long and a few inches wide, and break the ground with it. The land suits rice, millet, grain, panic millet, hemp, beans, red beans, black beans, and the like. Among trees there are the maple, the fir, the camphor, the pine, the pian, the nan, the elm, and the catalpa. Bamboo, rattan, fruit, and medicines are the same as south of the Yangtze, and the soil and climate are much like those of Lingnan. Their custom is to serve the spirits of the mountains and the sea, sacrificing to them with meat and liquor, and when they kill a man in battle they take the man they killed and sacrifice him to those spirits. Some build a small hut beside a thick tree, some hang skulls in the trees and shoot at them with arrows, and some pile up stones and tie on a banner to serve as the spirit tablet. Where the king lives they like to heap skulls at the foot of the wall, and hold that fine. Over the doorways of the common houses they always set the head bones and horns of beasts.

In the first year of Daye under the Sui, the sea captain He Man and others said that in the two seasons of spring and autumn, when the sky was clear and the wind still, one could look east and faintly make out what seemed to be smoke and mist, and how many thousand li away it was they did not know. In the third year Emperor Yang ordered Zhu Kuan, commandant of the plumed cavalry, to go out into the sea and seek out strange customs, and since He Man had spoken of it, he went along with Man. They came together to the state of Liuqiu, but their speech did not carry, so they seized one man and came back. The next year Kuan was ordered again to soothe and win them over, and they would not follow. Kuan took away one of their cloth cuirasses and returned. Just then an envoy of Wa came to court, saw it, and said, "This is what the people of the state of Yaku (夷邪久國) use." The emperor sent Chen Leng, general of the tiger guard, and Zhang Zhenzhou, grand master for court audience, to lead troops and put out to sea from Yi'an. They reached the island of Gaohua, went east two days more to the island of Goubi, and one day more brought them to Liuqiu. Liuqiu would not submit, and Leng struck them and drove them off. He pressed on to their capital, burned their palace buildings, took several thousand men and women captive, and returned laden with the spoils of war. From then on it was broken off.