There are about 400,000 Shui people in China. Most of them reside in Guizhou province, and the rest live in Guangxi.

The Shui are the descendants of the ancient Luoyue tribe that lived along the southeastern coast of China before 206 BC.

The Shui language belongs to the Tai-Kadai language family. It has a simple script, but it’s almost exclusively used by the shamans and not by ordinary people. The majority of the characters are borrowed from Chinese, but written backwards. Today only about half of the Shui continue to speak the Shui language.

Most of the Shui continue to practice their traditional animistic religion, though many are Buddhist.

Most of the Shui people are farmers. They mainly grow rice and corns.

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