When the Adantri came over the Blue Hills to the Trier Sea Coast, they found another people already living there, a people they called Sangarans. After several centuries of mixing with the Adantri, the Sangarans are still physically distinguishable; they tend to be shorter and stockier, somewhat darker of skin (especially when compared with the Northern Adantri), with black hair and eyes and, usually, noses that go beyond the aquiline to be unmistakably beaky. Although there has been a fair amount of intermarriage between the Adantri and the Sangarans in the city of Dal Shang, in the outlying areas of that province they have remained two distinct populations. The Sangarans were and still are fishermen and sailors, and in the small coastal villages they are the most numerous people--many of these villages are purely Sangaran. (In the inland farming valleys, the population is almost all Adantri.) The Sangarans share the Adantri love of color and dress in the common style of the Empire, modified for the needs of working on ships.

The Sangarans have adopted much of the Adantri culture. However, since they are all of the same primary caste--fishermen (a subcaste of the farmer main caste)--the Adantri caste system has little meaning for them. Neither do they belong to any of the warrior clans, by their own choice, for they are not a warrior people. They have a clan/lineage descent system of their own and a hierarchical system based on a person's role in fishing which provide them with all the social structuring they seem to need. A Sangaran is born into his or her mother's lineage clan and never changes that. Marriage is always to someone of another clan, and usually to someone of another village. A Sangaran male, when old enough (teens, usually), starts working on one of his village's fishing boats--after his first voyage, he is held to have come of age and there is a party in the village; he can then start courting the young woman of his choice. The members of a ship's crew have a strict hierarchy--the captain, the steersman (if he is different from the captain), rowers, netters, and so forth down to the cabin boy or gofer (a youngster starts at the bottom and works his way up), and this ranking is carried over into the rest of their lives. The village council, for instance, is composed of the village's captains.

The Sangarans pay lip service to Mantor; it is not that they don't believe in or honor Mantor so much as that Mantor, who is still primarily the god of honor in battle, has little relevance to their lives. They have a sea goddess, Taraloa, whom they pray to, swear by, and, sometimes, curse (sea goddesses being notoriously fickle).