The Dong people, a Chinese ethnic minority who number about 2,514,000 individuals according to the 1990 Chinese state census, are found mainly in the provinces of Guizhou and Hunan , as well as in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Modern-day Dong people are considered a sub-group among the Yue folk who, it is believed, were the original ancestors of the Han Chinese people, though there are competing theories regarding the origin of the Han Chinese. If the reader will suffer the following short aside--which is part fact, part speculation--we will return to the main theme presently...

Scholars believe that early man's migration out of Africa, part of which migration pushed eastward beyond the Indian subcontinent, saw a trail of migrants who expanded northward into China (another trail of migrants had, possibly earlier, expanded southward), the Yue folk. A subgroup of the northward-expanding Yue group, the Dong-yi ("Eastern" yi, "Yi" being a variant of "Yue"), entered into present-day China either via Yunnan or Sichuan Province, eventually settling in the present-day Sichuan-Gansu-Shaanxi-Shanxi area and becoming the forebears of the Han Chinese.

The group of Yue folk who had headed southward into Southeast Asia, forebears of the Dai (alternatively, Tai) folk who in turn are the ancestors of the the present-day Tai people of Thailand, eventually reached the bottom of the Southeast Asian cul-de-sac, as it were, and ended up heading north again along the coast, eventually reaching present-day China, where they settled in the Guizhou-Hunan-Guangxi area of China, thus becoming the forebears of the present-day Dong people of China (there are also large numbers of Dong people in present-day Vietnam).

Returning again to the main theme, during the Qin (BCE 221-207) and the Han (BCE 206-CE 220) Dynasties, the forebears of the present-day Chinese Dong people lived in the Lingnan area and were known as the "Bai Yue" ("Hundred Yue") folk, a branch of the Luo Yue folk. A branch of the Bai Yue folk emerged during the Southern and Northern (CE 420-588) Dynasties period calling itself the "Liao" folk. The Liao subdivided further during the Tang (CE 618-907) and Song (CE 960-1279) Dynasties, and thus the small, present-day Chinese ethnic minority officially referred to as the Dong people (present-day members of this ethnic group usually call themselves "Kam" (pronounced slightly like "Gam") is believed to stem from Liao ancestors, and--going even farther back--from the Yue folk who are believed to be the earliest ancestors of the Han Chinese.

Present-day Chinese Dong communities are to be found in 20 contiguous counties in southern China, spanning the three provinces mentioned immediately above (note that Guangxi is not a Chinese province per se, but an autonomous region, namely the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region).