The Dan boat people once lived their whole lives on the water in southern China.
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疍 is not used independently in modern Chinese; it is a variant of 蜑 and appears only in 疍民 / 疍家, the boat-dwelling Tanka people of the Pearl River delta and southern coast.
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Ethnonym only — seen in writing about the Tanka people, not in general vocabulary.
The bottom 虫 (creature) radical reflects an old, derogatory naming convention for southern peoples, the same radical seen in the variant 蜑. It does not mean the people were insects — it was a writing habit of the time.
The top 疋 serves as the sound element here, with a wide drift to dàn typical of old phonetic series. It carries no 'foot / bolt' meaning in this ethnonym.
No stroke data for 疍; the glyph shown is your device font, so component strokes can't be highlighted.
