In its humble beginnings, before Rome dominated the Italian Peninsula, it was populated by many peoples like the Umbri and the Etruscans. Before the Han dominated China, what peoples lived in China alongside/standing against the Han, and what happened to them?

by Xxxn00bpwnR69xxX

I've found stuff about the steady territorial expansion of the early dynasties, but nothing about what kind of societies they were expanding into.

Glenssuos

I'm not a historian, but I have a little knowledge on the topic based on my knowledge of linguistics.

The non-Han peoples that lived in China were mainly Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien and Austronesian speaking peoples. These people lived in Southern China, where some of their descendants still live today. Evidence for this can be found through the various words that can be traced back to their proto-languages, the locations of their descendants, and early loanwords into Chinese.

An example of this would be the Chinese word jiang. The word was originally used in reference to the Yangtze, and reconstructions of its pronunciation in Old Chinese point to its similarities with the Austroasiatic *krong, meaning river. It is believed that the Chinese first encountered Austroasiatic speakers around the old state of Chu, which roughly corresponds to modern Hubei and the northern Hunan provinces. There is some evidence that these people were called the bai yue in early Chinese texts.

The Chinese were also in contact with the Tocharians, an Indo-European-speaking people in Northwest China. Evidence for this can be found in loanwords such as *mjit, which means honey, as well as archaeological evidence of a people in northwest China with Indo-European traits.

Most of these people were assimilated into Chinese society, a process still ongoing today in Manchuria, Xinjiang and Taiwan. The majority of people who moved to these regions were Han Chinese males, which is evident in the haplogroups of these regions which show little female introgression but high amounts of male introgression.

Sources:

Li, Hui; Huang, Ying; Mustavich, Laura F.; Zhang, Fan; Tan, Jing-Ze; Wang, Ling-E; Qian, Ji; Gao, Meng-He; Jin, Li (2007). "Y chromosomes of prehistoric people along the Yangtze River".

Alicia Sanchez-Mazas, Roger Blench, Malcolm D. Ross, Ilia Peiros, Marie Lin (2008). "Past Human Migrations in East Asia: Matching Archaeology, Linguistics and Genetics"

Michael Loewe, Edward L. Shaughnessy (1999). "The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC"