The Journal of the Siam Society Vol. LXXI, Part 1-2, 1983 - Khamkoo

1S2
Anthony'R. Walker
literacy predating the invention of scripts by Christian missionaries;& and they have no
political institutions beyond the village community or, at most, the cluster or neighbouring
village communities (cf. Kandre 1967:616; Walker 1975b:l17).
The Lahu are one sueh minority group. Originally located w~olly in China's
Yunnan province (still their population centre), some Lahu during the 19.th century
began m()ving southwards into territories which are now part of Burma and Laos and,
subsequently, into whatis now the northern region of the Kingdom of Thailand. There
were two principal motives for this expansion over the borders of the Middle Kingdom :
a desire to escape from Imperial "pacification" measures directed at them as "barbarians"
of the frontier regions, and the need to find new farming lands as the soils of
southern Yunnan became overworked (cf. Walker 1975a:332-33, 1975b:l13-114).
Today in China there are 300,000 Lahu living in the far southwest of Yunnan
province (BR 1980; CP 1981). Here, in 195~, China's new communist administrati~n
set up for them the "Lan-ts'ang Lahu People's Autonomo~s Area", redesignated an
"Autonomous County,, or hsien the following year (SCMP 1953; Ch'en 1964 : 46-8).
South of the Chinese border, in Burma's Federated Shan State, estimates of the Lahu
population vary from 40,000 to 230,000. 9 Only a few thousand Lahu live in Laos, in
the far western comer, and their numbers have probably decreased in the ·past two or
three years as several · Lahu communities have ct:ossed over into Thailand to escape
political unrest following the communist victory in Laos.l o . In. Thailand, where information
on the Lahu population is both accurate and up-to-date, there are now ~5,500
·of these people distributed through 290 villages (Lewis 1980a:1). Finally, there may
be a remna~t Lahu community, numbering less than 2,000, in northern Vietnam.ll
8. A minor exception among the hill people living in Thailand are the Yao. or lu Mien people,
whose spirit-specialists read from ritual texts written In standard Chinese characters (cf.
Shiratori 1975, 1978:232)'. Further north, in China, the Yi or Lolo people have their own
ideographic script (cf, Vial 1898), as do the Na-khi or Moso (cf. Rock, 1968:42-45).
9. Lewis (1980a:1) gives .a low estimate of 205,000 and a high of 230,000 Lahu in Burma, but
he cites no authority. Ten· years ago, Lewis (1970:80) was of the view that there were
80,000 Lahu in Burma, while a Burmese publication (BSPP 1970:47) claimed only 40,000
Lahu. In the light of these widely conflicting estimates, we can. o~ly hope for a detailed
census to be taken io resolve the problem ..
10. A decade ago, Lewis (196?) suggested that the Lahu population of Laos was 5,000. His
recent estimate (1980a:l) is that it is now between 8,000 and 10,000. Again he cites no
evidence for his estimate. ·
11. In 1948 the Chinese anthropologist, Ruey Yih-fu (1948:1), stated that there were Lahu
living in the_ mountains "north of Tonkin". More recently, a Vietnamese scholar, Vuong·
Hoang Tuyen (1974:170-79) (also in a French edition 1973:176-85) has reported a group