The most entertaining parts of Gulliver’s Travels are Gulliver’s journeys to the land of the little people and the land of the giants. In Lilliput, people, animals, plants and every other object are one twelfth of our size. In Brobdingnag it is exactly the reverse, and everything is twelve times as large. Seen from today, none of this is quite the tall tale it appears, and here are a few examples of little people who really did appear on Earth.
The Qing dynasty collection Records Under the Autumn Lamp in the Night Rain, in a piece on little people inside a hollow tree, records the following. On the island of Macao in Guangdong there was a merchant surnamed Qiu, named Duan, who often travelled to various countries to trade. One day he met a typhoon and was fortunate enough to shelter in the bay of an island. After the wind died down, the boatman stayed to watch the vessel out of exhaustion, and Qiu Duan went ashore to walk. He saw a great many dead trees on the island, some ten spans around, full of holes, with little people living inside them, only seven or eight inches tall, old and young, men and women, their skin the color of chestnut peel. Each carried at the waist a small knife, a bow and arrows and other equipment, all in proportion to their size. Seeing Qiu come to look at them, they cried out together, “Qu san yi li!” Qiu at that moment needed to relieve himself, so he loosened his trousers and squatted on the ground, and afterward smoked a pipe and went on watching.
Suddenly he heard a clamor of voices. At the highest point of a dead tree there was a small walled city no higher than his knee, all built of black stone. The city gate opened wide and something over a thousand little people came out arm in arm, waving flags and raising a shout, and from every hole in every tree little people came out to meet them and stood listening for orders. Among them was a young one with regular features, his hair bound up in a purple-gold crown, acting as commander in chief, murmuring words that could not be made out. Then the crowd answered, “Xi li,” and pressed forward with their weapons. Qiu was startled and understood that they meant to drive him off, but he thought so little of their size that he was not afraid and stayed squatting where he was. The young one murmured again for some time, and when Qiu did not respond he brandished his halberd and joined battle. Small arrows, small spears, small knives and small halberds pricked and stabbed at Qiu’s thighs and hurt a good deal. Annoyed, he struck at the young one in play with the pipe in his hand. At one blow the young one toppled onto the back of a chicken and died. The crowd carried the body back and shut the city gates fast, and the rest scurried into the tree holes. Qiu too returned to the boat.
In the quiet of the night he heard the little people arrive on the shore in great numbers, flinging mud and sand and shouting loudly, “Li er shi si yi li!”. Only at cockcrow did they fall silent. Qiu thought to himself that if he could catch one or two and bring them home, he could make a show of them. The next morning, on the pretext of gathering firewood, he took a cloth bag and an axe to the same place and split open a tree. There were a good many little people inside, some not yet awake, probably one household, and not one escaped the bag. Back on the boat he gave them rice, which they ate, and they were especially fond of pine nuts. Qiu was about to set off home when the shore filled with countless little people like ants, murmuring what sounded like abuse, and small arrows came like rain. The boatmen were alarmed, and they cast off and left. About a month later Qiu returned to Guangdong and asked those who might know, and was told they were people of the country of Jiaoyao. He asked Westerners, who said the creature ought to be eaten as meat and was sweet in flavor, and that it never dared travel alone for fear of being carried off by sea birds. Qiu was delighted, put the little people in a box set with rock crystal and took it to the market for people to view, and made a great deal of money from it.
Afterward the little people were passed on to someone else, who built them a small house of red sandalwood. The little people understood propriety and knew shame, and in intelligence and in their habits of life were no different from people of the present day, only smaller.
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The Han dynasty writer Guo Xian records in Records of Penetrating the Obscure in Other Realms that the people of Lebi are three inches tall, have wings, and are good at speech and at jesting, for which reason it is called the country of good speech. They often fly in flocks to sun themselves beneath the sun, and return when their bodies grow hot, and they drink cinnabar dew for their beverage, cinnabar dew being the dew that lies like pearls when the sun first rises. Guo Xian’s account of the people of Lebi is brief, but something can still be glimpsed in it. Their sunning themselves beneath the sun and returning when their bodies grow hot, taking in the energy of the sun, seems akin in spirit to modern qigong practitioners who cultivate facing the sun and the moon, which can only mean that both belong to the same way.
The collection What Confucius Did Not Discuss, in the entry in which the historian Xia relates three matters, records the following. Xia Ligu of Gaoyou was serving as education supervisor in Hunan, and his boat was crossing Lake Dongting. He met heavy wind and waves, and several thousand boats had moored and not moved. Xia was impatient by nature and wanted to reach his post by the appointed day, so he ordered the helmsman to go on against the wind, and the other boats raised sail and followed. At the middle of the lake the wind grew stronger, heaven and earth turned black, and white waves rose like mountains. Two short people were seen on the water, about a foot tall, their faces slightly dark, brushing past the boat and pointing at the oar, like men on patrol. Everyone in the boats saw them. When the wind settled and the sun came out, they gradually disappeared.
A skeleton of a little person from 5,000 years ago
Dr. Franz of the University of Berlin, while investigating caves near central Mexico, excavated some strange things. He first noticed an odd pattern on the ground and tried digging down. What came up was extraordinary: a number of tiny household objects and some tiny ornaments that looked like toys. At the very end the owner of these things appeared, a little person. The skeleton was about 12 centimeters tall, and what matters is that this was certainly not the body of a child, because the bone structure was already that of an adult. Scientists who studied it confirmed the date as about 5,000 years ago.
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