Shanyu and Mayin

Shanyu and Mayin were two residents of the small southern Ariddian island of Ewesaha. They were quite possibly the first non-Indigenous inhabitants of the Ariddian Isles. Almost everything about them remains a mystery.

The O'ia community on Ewesaha has preserved an oral history, handed down over centuries, of two fairly young strangers with yellowish skin, a man and a woman, arriving on their land by sea, half-starved, one morning. The strangers wore clothing (something the O'ia had never seen before), and spoke an incomprehensible language. Although the O'ia had never known people existed beyond the Pacific islands they were aware of, these two were clearly human beings. The man's name is recorded in oral history as Shanyu, and the woman's as Mayin. The two lived the rest of their lives among the O'ia, adopting their customs and learning to speak Wymgani. They had four children after their arrival, who inter-married with the indigenous inhabitants. Many Ewesaha islanders today trace their ancestry back to one or another of Shanyu and Mayin's children. Oral accounts (genealogies) suggest they may have lived in the island towards the end of the eleventh century, but such estimates may be very imprecise.

When Europeans arrived in the seventeenth century, fairly few settled on Ewasaha. It was not before the early 1800s that the story of Shanyu and Mayin reached the White settlers' ears. Several years later, colonial interest was increased by linguist Carl Melun's report that local Wymgani dialects contained words and concepts not found in other Ariddian islands; he tentatively identified some words as having Chinese roots, and suggested they had been introduced to the island by the two mysterious strangers. The O'ia themselves remained mostly oblivious to all this outside curiosity, and it is only in 1834 that they took two anthropologists to the carefully preserved graves of their foreign ancestors. In 1838, permission was obtained from the initially reluctant O'ia for the remains to be unearthed. Phrenologists sought to determine the ethnic origin of the "strangers". In 1966, genetics tests sought to determine whether there were traces of Asian heritage in the contemporary O'ia genetic mix; results were inconclusive.

The remains were, for a long while, exposed in a tiny local museum, before being buried again in 1981. Today the O'ia remain the custodians of their graves.

In 1920, an O'ia man, Awel Iou, published a short book which contained in writing much of the oral histories of his people (A History of the O'ia), including the story of Shanyu and Mayin.

The currently accepted theory, based on linguistic evidence and oral historical accounts, as well as Iou's book, is that they originated from China, although how they ended up in Ariddia remains entirely unknown. They were presumably castaways. Their story remains one of the intriguing mysteries of early Ariddian history.

See also

• Emily Ius, possibly the third non-Indigenous settler in Ariddia after Shanyu and Mayin