Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

Page 414

FURTHER-INDIAN BRANCH
413
Siam
THE SHANS
The Shans are a numerous and widely spread race. They inhabit a strip of territory extending from China in the north to Burma in the south, from Assam and Khamti in the west to Siam in the east. Shan is a Burmese term, the indigenous rame being Thai. The names Siarn and Assam seem to be merely corruptions of Shan. The Shan dialects belong to the Thai group of the SinoSiamese sub-family of the Tibeto-Chinese family of languages.
The early history of the Shans is largely shrouded in mystery. They seem to have first appeared in the last centuries B.C., when they were settled in central and southern China. They form even nowadays a great percentage of the total population of four of the southern provinces of China, Yün-nan, Kwei-chow, Kwang-si and Kwang-tung, and there are traces as far as Canton, and perhaps even across the sea to the island of Hainan. The ancient indigenous name seems to have been Ai-Lao or Lao, that is "man," "person." The name Lao is still applied to the Shans of Upper Siam and to "Laos." Formerly split up under a number of independent kinglets, the Lao were united about A.D. 650 under a ruler named Hsi Nu Lo in a kingdom called by the Chinese Nan Chao or "the country of the southern Iord." About 764, the capital was shifted to Tali-fu. During the ninth century, the Tali-fu kingdom came very near to overthrowing the Chinese dynasty, but in 1234 it was destroyed by the Mongols.
In the meantime, for many centuries, under the pressure of the Chinese, and later of the Mongol wars of conquest in China, the Thai gradually moved south-eastwards down the valley of Mekong, and south and south-westwards into the "Shan States and down the Salween valley. In the early eleventh century, they were the most powerful race in central Indo-China. In the west the Ahoms, a Shan tribe-Ahom seems to be a variant pronunciation of Assam, this term being apparently, as already mentioned, a corruption of "Shan"-invaded Assam in 1228, and became its master in 1540. Another Shan tribe occupied the country to which they gave the name Khamti. The Shans also overran northern Burma and furnished kings for Burma for about a couple of centuries. The thirteenth century witnessed a general advance of the Thai or Shan race, facilitated by the fall of Pagan dynasty which followed the Chinese invasion. After the conquest of northern Burma, the Shans passed onwards into the basin of the Menam where they very soon came into conflict with the Khmers. The most important events occurred about 1275 when the Shans founded the kingdom of Sukhotai, the ancestor of modern Siam, and about 1350, when they established themselves in the great delta of the Menam; at this time they founded Ayudhya, the capital of Siam proper, and formed thus a wedge of Thai-speaking people between the Mon-Khmers of Terasserim and Cambodia. The Khmer kings, pushed to the east, had to abandon their capital Angkor, probably in the course of the fifteenth century. This event marks the disappearance of pure Hinduism. The whole country now professes the 'Theravada (a composite Buddhist religion), which the Thai influence introduced at the end of the thirteenth century and to which the triumph of Siam assured an uncontested hegemony,
Many external, geographical, ethnical and linguistic influences from varying sources were brought to bear upon the different Shan tribes, and sharp divisions began to be formed particularly between the more civilized southern Shans or Siamese, and the more primitive, northern Shans, so that to-day the various Thai tribes present widely divergent characteristics. The different communities are also