The word 'miao' is not technically a word in the English language, but it is commonly used as an onomatopoeic representation of the sound a cat makes.
It is often used by children or in playful contexts. For example: - The little girl giggled as she heard the kitten go "miao" while playing with a yarn ball. - The cartoon character imitated a cat by saying "miao" as he pretended to scratch at the sofa. - The professor paused his lecture as a stray cat outside the classroom window let out a loud "miao".
Since the late 18th century, the Hmong alone among the Miao groups have slowly migrated out of the southern provinces of China, where about 2.7 million still remain.
Members of the Buyi (Zhongjia) group are concentrated in southern Guizhou, where they share an autonomous prefecture with the Miao (Hmong) group.
Other minority groups include the Miao (also called Hmong), Hui (Chinese Muslims), and Manchu.
During this period persistent waves of migrant Han (Chinese) from the North occupied the land, and the indigenous Miao (Hmong), Tujia, Dong, and Yao (Mien) were pushed west and southwest into the hills, which they still occupy.
Asian immigration to California surged in the 1970s and '80s, with Filipinos, Vietnamese, Miao (Hmong), Cambodians, Laotians, and South Koreans among the newcomers.
The patches of soil between the mountains are fertile enough, but the province's land has to support some 37m people, a mixture of the Han Chinese majority and the various peoples that lived here long before Chinese encroachment began in the 16th century: the Miao, Yi, Dong, Bouyei, Bai, Shui and the rest.
The Miao-Yao (Hmong-Mien) peoples, with their major concentration in Guizhou, are distributed throughout the central south and southwestern provinces and are found also in some small areas in eastern China.
Hmong, ethnic group living chiefly in China and Southeast Asia and speaking Hmong, one of the Hmong-Mien languages (also known as Miao-Yao languages).
The minority languages were unwritten until missionaries devised scripts for some of them, such as the Samuel Pollard script for the Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao) languages.
The importance of these two peoples was recognized by the creation of a Hainan Li-Miao autonomous prefecture, but this entity was dissolved when Hainan was made a province in 1988.
As Li Miao of Hong Kong's Phoenix TV reported to camera, a group of worshippers surrounded her, angry at her Chinese take on the significance of Yasukuni.
