The Journal of the Siam Society Vol. LXIV, Part 1-2, 1976 - Khamkoo

REVIEW ARTICLE 367
Starting with the more obvious we have found probable origins for
the important motifs of the early part of TS, except for the very first,
that of a " ... ho king named devakala ... who ruled nagara daiydda or
mo'an rajagrh the capital ... ". It has already been determined that this
king is associated with a fictitious, but traditional, era, the anjana,
named after a grandfather of the Buddha, and I have adduced evidence
that the compiler of TS believed the original homeland of Buddhism to
be in Southeast Asia-not, as Manit holds, that he wrote about a second
Rajagrba in Yunnan. The geographical situation of the Rajagrha ofTS,
which I say was intended as the original, cannot be in doubt since
Devakala is called a hb king, and the ho, for the northern Thai, have
always been a people residing to the north. At present ho seems to be
applied only to Yunnanese Chinese, but it is not their own term, and its
origin" as applied to the Yunnanese in Thailand remains an unsolved
mystery".91
Thus we do not have to assume that hb, for the Thai, always meant
Chinese. Prince Damrong, for example, wrote that at the time of the
so-called hb wars in the late 19th century, people in Bangkok believed
ho to be a separate ethnic group and were surprised to find the northern
people giving the name to Chinese.n
The term daiydesa for the area in which Devakala ruled is no
problem. We may assume that much of the region for a long distance
north of Chiang Saen, in the Burmese and Chinese Shan states, was
probably inhabited by various Thai peoples at whatever reasonable date
we wish to place the first composition of TS, and without doing violence
to the latest theories of Thai migration.
With Mithila and Rajagrba transposed to the "golden triangle" it
was obvious to the chronicler that this was Thai country, and ho rulers
in Yunnan, whatever ethnic group may have been designated by that
term, were a political fact of life for the northern Thai states. [n fact,
the equation by the writer of TS of Thai and ho in the person of Devakala
91) F.W. Mote, "The Rural 'Haw' (Yunnanese Chinese) of Northern Thailand",
in Peter Kunstadter, ed. Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations vol. II,
chap 13, pp. 487-524, see pp. 490-491, n.3.
!}~) PP part 24, vol. 14, gune sabhti ~dition, p. 176,