Archive Note
Li tattooing was carried almost exclusively by women, across all five Li branches (Ha, Qi, Run, Meifu, and Sai). Girls were tattooed at about thirteen or fourteen by an older woman who was a recognized specialist and not necessarily a relative, beginning on the nape and face and continuing over years onto the arms and legs, with the hands marked only after marriage; the Meifu branch carried the work from the chin down the torso to encircle the navel. The technique was hand-poke: a design stencilled in Chinese writing pigment, pricked in with a thorn, and rubbed with soot, in the lead account of the tattoo anthropologist Lars Krutak. The marks signalled marriageable adulthood and encoded a woman's branch, lineage, and family, so that a knowledgeable viewer could read her community from her pattern; a further reported function, that they let the spirit be recognized by ancestors after death, traces to Li women interviewed in the 1930s and is single-source. The earliest datable documentary anchor is the Han annexation of Hainan in 111 to 110 BCE, when the commandery name Dan'er was traditionally read as a reference to the indigenous face-marking and pendant-ear custom; this is the documentary floor, not an origin, and round-number claims of two thousand or three thousand years should be treated loosely. The German ethnologist Hans Stübel documented the tradition on two expeditions in 1931 to 1932, by which point facial work was already receding, and published the foundational monograph in 1937. New tattooing ended within a generation of the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 under anti-superstition policy, with no documented revival; survivor figures are dated and declining, with about two thousand tattooed women aged seventy-two to ninety reported in 2018. The popular story that the marks were meant to make women unattractive to raiders is a recurrent cross-cultural folk-etiology, absent from the scholarly framing, and should be treated as suspect.