Chiang Mai Faces Potential Tourism Crisis

[Foggy Bottom]

The people in the Samoeng valley, and I am talking down in the valley, all speak Kham Muang, are lowland folks planting padi rice, eat sticky rice and raw meat dishes, and so I assume they are included in the definition of Khon Muang, which to the best of my knowledge does not include city dwelling.  Methinks the folks you spoke to at the Hill Tribes Research Centre at CMU are in a bit of an error.

Now as I said, me and the kids dropped down into the valley on a back road from atop the hills and half the kids I was with, their mother's tongue (including my son)  was not Kham Muang but Karen, and the other half, their grandparent's langauge was K'mu. 

If you take the Samoeng valley heading north to meet up with the road to Pai, the folks in the lowland valley are most definitely Khon Muang, but if you take any of the side roads up into the hills you will meet not only Khon Muang, most of whom are families recently assimlated to Khon Muanghood, but also hilltribe groups such as Karen and Mong.

Going back to our motorbike trip, the funniest thing was bringing six young boys to the Pong Kwaow hot springs where they wanted 150 baat to bathe and you could not usually pay any of these kids 150 baat to bathe.

You've been reading too much "authorised" propaganda issued by the Chulalongkorn Tour Guide Training Manual writers - do your own in-depth research especially for the 11th - 14th centuries AD and you will see that even the Lonely Planet and Rough Guide accept the trash spouted as politically expedient to fulfill Pridi & ChaiSongkhram's nationalism building policies of the 1950's. In particular, cross-reference your sources with the imperial chronicles of neighbouring nations, and with the folk histories of the peoples themselves .... the Karen for example have been in the Chiangmai area since at least the 13th century, and the Wa originated here but were chased out by Mengrai into the modern Shan States in the 1280's - before Chiangmai was built.

The true Khon Muang are the Tai who came out of Yunnan 1,000-650 years ago and became the ruling classes of the north and central plains before being supplanted by the Indianised Mon Burmese who took over the rulership after the collapse / defeat of the Siamese Kingdoms of the 18th century.

Even the much elevated King Taksin ( NO "h") was Mon Burmese (from Muang Tak, one of the Mon Dvaravati cities that preceded any form of Syam or Siamese settlement) and the progenitor of the Chakri dynasty was Indo-Siamese Mon from the central plains rather than Tai in origin.

Here in the north, there is a reason for the terms Khon Muang and Kham Muang - it refers to the pre-medieval township kingdom system and its peoples. If you ask people in the Samoeng valley for their names and lineages, you will find they are either of indigenous Lawa (aka Tamilla & Tai Lue) origin, or they are "immigrant" Tai minority in origin - there are almost no Syam or Mon in the north - Syam by the way way the name given to the 2nd - 5th century AD Shan, west of the Mekong in Yunnan, by the Han Chinese, and by later dynasties to all Tai / Dai / D'tai speaking peoples in the south west or to the west and south of Nan-chao - the precursor to Nanchao - which in turn was the predecessor to the D'ali kingdom that ruled Yunnan prior to the incursions of the Mongols' Yuan dynasty.

After 50 years of political brainwashing from the Thai Ministries, only the Sino-Thai and the hill tribes have ethnic memories of their racial origins, and even as recently as three years ago it was announced that all Thai schools' text books would be rewritten to tone down the Burmese aggression of the 16th and 18th centuries - I've noticed that foreign published guide books are following suit - probably as a sop to ensure the visas of their writers without thought of the wider academic implications or the effects on global knowledge of a much misunterstood region and era.

If half the kids had Karen mother tongue and the other half had K'mu - then 100% were not Khon Muang (basic maths). Being able to speak Kham Muang no more qualifies a Thai citizen as Khon Muang than an ability to speak Thai qualifies a farang as Thai. You are correct that Khon Muang are traditionally valley floor dwellers as opposed to hillside or hilltop dwellers in comparison to today's "hill tribes", yet some groups such as Karen and Hmong have for many centuries covered all altitudes (see in particular CIA records of Hmong jungle fighters during the Laos v North Vietnam conflict).

<paragraph edited out by author for self-preservation reasons - if you read it you can guess why>

As I've said to more than one official - there's only one way to stop me promulgating the truth, and so far they haven't used it ... no doubt they will one day.

[walker]

So Gaz, what is it you do (if anything, vocationally) in CM? Your history is spot on from my limited (english only) readings. Just curious.

[Johpa]

<rant mercifully shortened>

If half the kids had Karen mother tongue and the other half had K'mu - then 100% were not Khon Muang (basic maths). ...

As I've said to more than one official - there's only one way to stop me promulgating the truth, and so far they haven't used it ... no doubt they will one day.

Just a matter of perspective. Of course if one goes back several hundred years the peoples of Chiang Mai would have included many Mon, K'mu, Lue, and Lawa along with others. But over the centuries the various Tai groups did become dominant and much of the population assimlated towards a Tai identity. Up north that meant an assimlation towards Khon Muang identity. In some of the more remote places that assimilation only happened in the 20th century. In my wife's village only those well over 70 still speak K'mu except for some rather tart slang used by the men. In more remote places up in the hills asimilation has not taken place. There still exist some Lawa villages in the north as well as plenty of Karen villages. But the original lowland populations up north have, for the most part, long assimilated to Khon Muang identity.

It is true that the histories taught in the Thai schools are partly mythical, as is some of the history taught to my kids in the US. And shortshrift is given to the ethnic groups that pre-dated the Tai migrations. Fictional license is even taken with the Tai migrations as they are taught to the school kids as some sort of nice neat linear progresion from north to south. And the schools never teach about the tremendous impact the Khmer had on Thai civilzation: most Thais do not realize that Royal Thai (ratchasaap) is mostly ordinary Khmer. But the manipulation of the teaching of history is a different subject from that of people switching ethnic identites over time, a universal phenomena. For those interested in reading Thai related academic writings on the subject look for works by the Thai scholar Charles Keyes.

But is your point is what? That people who have been speaking Kham Muang for several generations are not really Khon Muang? Or perhaps you are hoping to find a genetic marker for some idealized Khon Muang individual? Or perhaps you wish to argue that people's ethnic identity can not be changed?

In our village everyone is cogniscent that the region was once a K'mu speaking region. But nobody, not even the oldest inhabitants, identify themselves as K'mu; they all identify themselves as Khon Muang, and see themselves distinct from Central Thai and Thai-Chinese folks.

[Foggy Bottom]

Hi Johpa

Apologies for the rant / diatribe - I wasn't in the best of moods when I posted it, and experience should have warned me to wait until later.

That said, what I posted was accurate, yet your description of assimilation is valid - the UK provides the best illustration of this, where internally we may tease each other about racial origins (e.g. Londoners being French and Yorkists being Viking etc.) but all will claim to be English or at least British, yet the principalities still claim seperate national identity - i.e. Sctoland, Wales & Ireland. Politically we are all one nation, yet culturally, linguistically, and pseudo-racially we are different peoples, though there is no visible difference to immediately spot after 1,000+ years of interbreeding etc.

The desire for identifying oneself as a member of a particular sub-group is often a stronger determinant of racial identity than the trappings that go with that sub-group, particularly after several generations - an example of this being the strength of Irish identity in the USA's north eastern cities, especially (if we are to believe Hollywood) within organisations like the police and fire departments. Another such sub-group would be the Italian/Sicilian/Corsican communities.

If the K'mu of Samoeng wish to be thought of as Khon Muang, then where does that derive from? Is it political expediency vis-a-vis obtaining national identity cards and the perks that go with it, or is it a genuine desire to abandon centuries of heritage and culture? The Chinese are the great assimilators - millenia of invaders who took the throne and founded new dynasties became fully Chinese in very short spaces of time - the Mongols being one of the best examples, and one which also illustrates the assimilation skills of upper south east Asia in that they were always stopped or diverted (in Yunnan) from entering the Thailand area. Yes, they did make several expeditions into Burma via the Irrawaddy valley (which skirted the Yunnan / Sichuan "traditional" invasion route - the most succesful under Mangu Khan in 1258 AD - the year before (and possibly the reason behind) Mengrai siezing the Ngoern Yang throne from his parents, and commencing a long military campaign to unify the Muangs of the Mae Kok & Mai Lawa (Mae Sai) basins. Mengrai himself was Lawa Tai (father Mai Sai Lawa, mother Chiang Hung Tai) and not Khon Muang. Yet by the time he built Chiangmai (1292-1297 but official start date in 1296 despite a city pre-existing here) he had converted to Khon Muangism, as had his friends Ngam Muang of Phayao (formerly also Lawa Tai) and Ramkhamhaeng (formerly Khmer).

However despite these arguments, all anthropologists continue to recognise modern Khon Muang as a distinct and seperate ethnic identity, with a countable minor populace remaining in the north, mainly in Chiang Rai, seperate from the modern Thai city dwellers and valley floor agriculturists.

Concerning the wet and sticky rice agriculture - a CMU report in the last few years looked at this and as the Faculty of Agricultural Economics conceded in 2002-03 ..... Historically wet paddy glutinous rice production has been focussed within the Yunnanese Sipsongpanna, northeastern Burmese, western Laos and northern Thai regions, which cumulatively harvested over 98% of world production. This began changing approximately 20 years ago when these regions were producing only 95% of harvest .... and ten years ago only 90% of world harvest. Today over 20 countries now grow glutinous rice varieties as commercial harvests and the traditional region's output is below 85% of world harvest ..... therefore, growing andf consumption of this rice type can no longer be attributed as an identifying ethnic Tai trait, especially in considering that over 99% of Thailand's export of this product goes to the EC and North American countries. {English paraphrased to suit my writing style}.

If they are willing to "give up ownership" of this trait to foreigners, then how much more so are they willing to concede it to non Tai agriculturists within Thailand? You have however added a note to my list of research tasks - to define a list of ethnic sub-groups within the medieval grouping known as Khon Muang, hopefully such a list will prove useful to other historical researchers and modern social anthropoligists conducting further study.

Now back to the OP - Is Chiangmai facing a tourism crisis (other than relating to the rewriting of history for political ends)? Comments please.

[Foggy Bottom]

So Gaz, what is it you do (if anything, vocationally) in CM? Your history is spot on from my limited (english only) readings. Just curious.

replied using PM

[sabaijai]

IMO khon muang can't be identified anymore as belonging to one particular race/lineage. I'd argue instead that anyone who speaks kham meuang as a first language can be considered khon muang.

Whatever your take on it might be, one must admit that deciding what defines ethnicity has always been a difficult and controversial task. However the modern trend in most countries is to make language the strongest marker. In Mexico, for example, anyone who speaks an Amerindian language as a mother tongue is considered indio or indigena. Across the border in the USA they still try to definite Amerindian ethnicity by ancestry, requring a certain percentage of Amerindian 'blood', etc.

Likewise I would argue that anyone who speaks Thai as a mother tongue and who has Thai citizenship is, in fact, Thai (whether of European/Chinese/etc ancestry). Feel free to disagree ... so would most Thais, who tend to confuse race with nationality

It's all up to the perceivers and their definitions of course. If Gaz wants to believe that to be called khon muang you must have Sipsongpanna ancestry, that's his privilege. But it's bit of a stretch to claim it as 'truth' for all time ... just a tidy opinion.

For one thing, many different Tai groups migrated into northern Thailand over the centuries, by the way, not just the Tai Neua and Tai Lue of Sipsongpanna.

[Johpa]

Hi Johpa

Apologies for the rant / diatribe - I wasn't in the best of moods when I posted it, and experience should have warned me to wait until later.

Concerning the wet and sticky rice agriculture - ....Today over 20 countries now grow glutinous rice varieties as commercial harvests and the traditional region's output is below 85% of world harvest ..... therefore, growing andf consumption of this rice type can no longer be attributed as an identifying ethnic Tai trait, especially in considering that over 99% of Thailand's export of this product goes to the EC and North American countries. {English paraphrased to suit my writing style}.

Now back to the OP - Is Chiangmai facing a tourism crisis (other than relating to the rewriting of history for political ends)? Comments please.

Gracious apology accepted as I too have all too often over the past many years online responded to a post at the wrong time. : )

But I still think the the distinction between regularly eating sticky rice and khao cao (non-sticky rice) is a valid ethnic marker that distinguishes the northern Tai groups such as the Khon Muang and the Lao from the southern Tai groups such as the Siamese. From my personal experience, the Khon Muang always take note of rice eating habits. They also refer to Siamese as being "Thai" whereas they call themselves Khon Muang. Of course they call themselves Thai when speaking about nationalistic identity, but not when identifying themselves from an ethnic perspective. Although large quantities of sticky rice are now exported, I doubt there are other regions of the world where sticky rice is eaten as the primary staple of the diet. (By the way, what is with the red sticky rice served at this new Isaan place my pals took me too in Chiang Mai?)

But like Europe a few centuies ago, the Khon Muang, as well as the younger generation of minority kids, for better or for worse, are slowly assimilating towards the capitol's ethnic identity, Siamese Thai, or perhaps arguably a Sino-Thai identity. One begins to hear less and less of the hard core Kham Muang spoken in the big city. My wife often speaks Thai to her youngest sibilings instead of Karen. The Karen villages connected to paved roads are slowly assimilating towards Thai identity just as many Lawa and Kh'mu people did a century ago. This is faciliated by the fact that much was/is shared by these traditional Southeast Asian cultures, not to mention intermarriage, as opposed to the more recently arrived minorities such as the Mong/Mien and the Lahu and Lisu. It is perhaps only a modern awareness of ethnicity that might preserve Khon Muang culture, just as it is trying to preserve Welsh culture in the UK.

And sorry that this self-professed history geek continues a bit OP.

[rishi]

Inspired by a post in the current "Oh my gaawwwd"-thread, I searched the forum for "old town" ... Up came this 1 1/2 year old thread.

I have no comments, except that I think it deserves to be brought to the attention to those who have an interest in this city, but wasn't around those old days when this thread was current.

[mogoso]

The Vermont guy

What Howard Dean has done is reminded people that they can and should determine their own country's destiny. They must all be involved and contribute, or watch it all being taken away from them.

Every country needs a few Howard Deans.

Please Deans a political hack so far to the left as to be laughable. He's the poster child of whats wrong with the Democratic party. But this isn't the forum to debate American politics, or pump up your shining socialist god. this is about Chiang Mai Thailand

[chanchao]

Needless to say, we're not going there with this topic.