ABSTRACT
The highlanders who lived in cities and towns, fortresses and villages were likely to possess the virtues and vices of the rural people the anthropologists have analyzed. The old immigrants were mostly garrison soldiers, tradesmen, refugees, and fugitives, sprinkled with a few physicians, fortune-tellers, and frustrated scholars. The social composition of the new immigrants was likely to be similar. The way the western Hunanese interpreted the widely known Meng Jiang Nu story is indicative of their defiance. The story of Meng Jiang looking for her husband who failed to return home from his corvee duties of building the Great Wall plucked a sympathetic cord in the hearts of many Chinese in many provinces. The couple had their own home of which the wife was the mistress, a person of considerable decision-making power as she was older than the man and did productive work.
