Cenxun Cave: Guangxi in the Sui–Tang Era

Cenxun Cave sits in Taiping Town, Pingguo County, Baise City, a karst landscape that has sheltered human activity for millennia. The skeletal material dated to 440–658 CE places these individuals at the cusp of late Sui and early Tang dynastic expansion across southern China. Archaeological data indicates human presence in Guangxi long before the Sui–Tang period; however, Cenxun represents a localized window into life along inland trade and agricultural corridors in the mid-first millennium CE.

Geographically, Guangxi is a crossroads between interior China and Southeast Asia; this corridor saw movement of peoples, crops (notably wet-rice agriculture), and ideas during the first millennium CE. Limited evidence from Cenxun Cave suggests inhabitants here were part of that broader regional mosaic rather than isolated enclaves. Given the small sample size (three individuals), assertions about large-scale migrations or population replacement would be premature. Instead, Cenxun should be read as a fragmentary but evocative record: a snapshot of maternal lineages and human presence in a contested and dynamic landscape as imperial structures shifted from Sui to Tang authority.

Three individuals from Cenxun Cave produced mitochondrial DNA results dominated by haplogroup M lineages: two assigned to broad M and one to subclade M10. Haplogroup M and its sublineages are widespread across East and Southeast Asia and are commonly observed in ancient and modern populations of the region, reflecting deep maternal continuity that dates to the initial peopling of East Asia. The presence of M10 in this small sample aligns with known distributions of M subclades in southern China and adjacent regions.

No Y-chromosome haplogroups were reported for these individuals, so paternal-lineage inferences are not currently possible. Given the very small sample count (n=3), conclusions must be highly provisional: the Cenxun maternal signatures suggest local or regional continuity with broader East–Southeast Asian maternal pools, but they cannot resolve migration timing, admixture proportions, or links to specific linguistic groups. Future sampling and genome-wide data would be needed to test hypotheses about genetic continuity between Sui–Tang era Guangxi and modern southern Chinese populations, the extent of northern vs. southern ancestry components, and potential gene flow across the Sino–Southeast Asian boundary.