Tai peoples

Tai peoples are the populations who speak the Tai languages. There are a total of about 93 million people of Tai ancestry worldwide, with the largest ethnic groups being Dai, Thai, Isan, Lao, Shan, Ahom, Zhuang, Tày, Nùng, Táy, and some Northern Thai peoples.
The Tai are scattered through much of South China and Mainland Southeast Asia, with some inhabiting parts of Northeast India. Tai peoples are both culturally and genetically very similar and therefore primarily identified through their language.

Names

Speakers of the many languages in the Tai branch of the Tai–Kadai language family are spread over many countries in Southern China, Indochina and Northeast India. Unsurprisingly, there are many terms used to describe the distinct Tai peoples of these regions.
According to Michel Ferlus, the ethnonyms Tai/Thai evolved from the etymon *kri: 'human being' through the following chain: kəri: > kəli: > kədi:/kədaj. This in turn changed to di:/daj. And then to *daj^A > tʰaj^A2 or > taj^A2. Michel Ferlus' work is based on some simple rules of phonetic change observable in the Sinosphere and studied for the most part by William H. Baxter.
The ethnonym and autonym of the Lao people together with the ethnonym Gelao, a Kra population scattered from Guìzhōu to North Vietnam, and Sino-Vietnamese 'Jiao' as in Jiaozhi, the name of North Vietnam given by the ancient Chinese, would have emerged from the Austro-Asiatic *kra:w 'human being'.
The etymon *kra:w would have also yielded the ethnonym Keo/ Kæw kɛːw^A1, a name given to the Vietnamese by Tai speaking peoples, currently slightly derogatory. In fact, Keo/ Kæw kɛːw^A1 was an exonym used to refer to Tai speaking peoples, as in the epic poem of Thao Cheuang, and was only later applied to the Vietnamese. In Pupeo, kew is used to name the Tay of North Vietnam.
The name "Lao" is used almost exclusively by the majority population of Laos, the Lao people, and two of the three other members of the Lao-Phutai subfamily of Southwestern Tai: Isan speakers, the Nyaw or Yaw and the Phu Thai.
The Zhuang in China do not constitute an autonymic unity. In various areas in Guangxi, they refer to themselves as pow^C2 ''ɕu:ŋ^B2, pʰo^B2 tʰaj^A2, pow^C2 ma:n^A2, pow^C2 ba:n^C1, or pow^C2 law^A2, while those in Yunnan use the following autonyms: pu^C2 noŋ^A2, bu^B2 daj^A2, or bu^C2 jaj^C1. The Zhuang do not constitute a linguistic unity either, because Chinese authorities include within this group some distinct ethnic groups such as the Lachi speaking a Kra language.
The Nung living on both sides of the Sino-Vietnamese border have their ethnonym derived from clan name Nong, whose bearers dominated what are now north Vietnam and Guangxi in the 11th century AD. In 1038, a Nong general named Nong Quanfu established a Nung state in Cao Bang, however was quickly annexed by Annamite king Ly Thai Tong in the next year. In 1048, Quanfu's son Nong Zhigao revolted against Annamese rule, and then marched eastwards to besiege Guangzhou in 1052.
Another name that's shared between the Nung, the Tay, and the Zhuang living along the Sino-Vietnamese border is Tho, which literally means autochthonous''. However, this term was also applied to the Tho people, who are a separate group of indigenous speakers of Vietic languages, who have come under the influence of Tai culture.

History

Origin

James R. Chamberlain proposes that the Tai-Kadai language family was formed as early as the 12th century BC in the middle of the Yangtze basin, coinciding roughly with the establishment of the Chu state and the beginning of the Zhou dynasty. Following the southward migrations of Kra and Hlai peoples around the 8th century BCE, the Yue started to break away and move to the east coast in the present-day Zhejiang province, in the 6th century BCE, forming the state of Yue and conquering the state of Wu shortly thereafter. According to Chamberlain, Yue people began to migrate southwards along the east coast of China to what are now Guangxi, Guizhou and northern Vietnam, after Yue was conquered by Chu around 333 BCE. There the Yue.
Comparative linguistic research seems to indicate that the Tai peoples were a Proto-Tai–Kadai speaking culture of southern China and dispersed into mainland Southeast Asia. Some linguists proposes that Tai–Kadai languages may descended from the Proto-Austronesian language family. Laurent Sagart hypothesized that the Tai–Kadai languages may have originated on the island of Taiwan, where they spoke a dialect of Proto-Austronesian or one of its descendant languages. Unlike the Malayo-Polynesian group who later sailed south to the Philippines and other parts of maritime Southeast Asia, the ancestors of the modern Tai-Kadai people sailed west to mainland China and possibly traveled along the Pearl River, where their language greatly changed from other Austronesian languages under the influence of Sino-Tibetan and Hmong–Mien language infusion. However, no archaeological evidence has been identified which would correspond to the Daic expansion in its earliest phases. Aside from linguistic evidence, the connection between Austronesian and Tai-Kadai can also be found in some common cultural practices. Roger Blench demonstrates that dental evulsion, face tattooing, teeth blackening and snake cults are shared between the Taiwanese Austronesians and the Tai-Kadai peoples of Southern China.

Early history in China and migration to Southeast Asia

The Tai peoples, from Guangxi began moving south – and westwards in the first millennium CE, eventually spreading across the whole of mainland Southeast Asia. Based on layers of Chinese loanwords in proto-Southwestern Tai and other historical evidence, Pittayawat Pittayaporn proposes that the southwestward migration of southwestern Tai-speaking tribes from the modern Guangxi to the mainland of Southeast Asia must have taken place sometime between the 8th–10th centuries. Tai speaking tribes migrated southwestward along the rivers and over the lower passes into Southeast Asia, perhaps prompted by the Chinese expansion and suppression. Chinese historical texts record that, in 726 AD, hundreds of thousands Lǎo rose in revolt behind Liang Ta-hai in Guangdong, but was suppressed by Chinese general Yang Zixu, which left 20,000 rebels killed and beheaded. Two years later, another Li chief named Chen Xingfan declared himself the Emperor of Nanyue and led a large uprising against the Chinese, but was also crushed by Yang Zixu, who beheaded 60,000 rebels. In 756, another revolt led by Huang Chien-yao and Chen Ch'ung-yu that attracted 200,000 followers and lasted four years in Guangxi. In the 860s, many local people in what is now north Vietnam sided with attackers from Nanchao, and in the aftermath some 30,000 of them were beheaded. In the 1040s, a powerful matriarch-shamaness by the name of A Nong, her chiefly husband, and their son, Nong Zhigao, raised a revolt, took Nanning, besieged Guangzhou for fifty seven days, and slew the commanders of five Chinese armies sent against them before they were defeated, and many of their leaders were killed. The Ahomese Tai chronicle relates the migrating event with the arrival of "9,000 Tai peoples, 8 noblemen, two elephants, and 300 horses" to Assam. Vietnamese scribers recorded groups of two- or three thousand "Mang savages" passing by. According to Baker, those migrants might have slowly exodused from their homeland via three routes. The early groups moved north to Guizhou. The second groups might have passed through the Red River Delta, crossing the Vietnamese cordillera into the Mekong Valley. The third and major migration direction crossed the valleys of the Red and Black River, heading west through the hills into Burma and Assam.
As a result of these three bloody centuries, or with the political and cultural pressures from the north, some Tai peoples migrated southwestward, where they met the classical Indianized civilizations of Southeast Asia. Du Yuting and Chen Lufan from Kunming Institute Southeast Asian Studies claimed that, during the Western Han dynasty, ancestors of the Tai people were known as Dianyue. Tai peoples migrated far and wide: by the Tang and Song periods, they were present from the Red River to the Salween River, from Baoshan to Jingdong. Du & Chen linked the ancestors of Thai people in modern-Thailand, in particular, to a 2nd-century Shan kingdom mentioned in the Book of Later Han, which located the Shan kingdom "at the end of the boundaries of what is now Baoshan and Deihong Prefectures" and stated that Shan ambassadors came to the Han court from "beyond Yongchang" and "beyond Rinan". Additionally, Du & Chen rejected the proposal that the ancestors of Tai people migrated en masse southwestwards out of Yunnan only after the 1253 Mongol invasion of Dali. Luo et al. proposed that Proto-Tais originated most likely from Guangxi-Guizhou, not Yunnan nor the middle Yangtze river.

Early city-states in Southeast Asia

The Tai migrants assimilated and intermarried with the indigenous Austroasiatic peoples of Southeast Asia, or pushing them off to marginal areas, but their full expansion was halted by the Indian-influenced kingdoms of the Mon, Khmer and Cham, although the Khmer were the primary power in Southeast Asia by the time of the Tai migrations. The Tai formed small city-states known as mueang under Khmer suzerainty on the outskirts of the Khmer Empire, building the irrigation infrastructure and paddy fields for the wet-rice cultivation methods of the Tai people. Tai legends of Khun Borom, shared among various Southwestern Tai peoples of Southeast Asia, Greater Assam and Yunnan, concerns the first ruler of Meuang Thaen, whose progeny go on to find the Tai dynasties that ruled over the various Tai mueang.
The Tais from the north gradually settled in the Chao Phraya valley from the tenth century onwards, in lands of the Dvaravati culture, assimilating the earlier Austroasiatic Mon and Khmer people, as well as coming into contact with the Khmer Empire. The Tais who came to the area of present-day Thailand were engulfed into the Theravada Buddhism of the Mon and the Hindu-Khmer culture and statecraft. Therefore, the Thai culture is a mixture of Tai traditions with Indic, Mon, and Khmer influences.
The formidable political control exercised by the Khmer Empire extended not only over the centre of the Khmer province, where the majority of the population was Khmer, but also to outer border provinces likely populated by non-Khmer peoples—including areas to the north and northeast of modern Bangkok, the lower central plain and the upper Ping River in the Lamphun-Chiang Mai region. The Tai people were the predominant non-Khmer groups in the areas of central Thailand that formed the geographical periphery of the Khmer Empire. Some Tai groups were probably assimilated into the Khmer population. Historical records show that the Tai maintained their cultural distinctiveness, although their animist religion partially gave way to Buddhism. Tai historical documents note that the period of the Khmer Empire was one of great internal strife. During the 11th and 12th centuries, territories with a strong Tai presence, such as Lavo, resisted Khmer control.
The Tai, from their new home in Southeast Asia, were influenced by the Khmer and the Mon and most importantly Buddhist India. The Tai kingdom of Lanna was founded in 1259. The Sukhothai Kingdom was founded in 1279 and expanded eastward to take the city of Chantaburi and renamed it to Vieng Chan Vieng Kham and northward to the city of Muang Sua which was taken in 1271 and renamed the city to Xieng Dong Xieng Thong or "City of Flame Trees beside the River Dong,". The Tai peoples had firmly established control in areas to the northeast of the declining Khmer Empire. Following the death of the Sukhothai king Ram Khamhaeng, and internal disputes within the kingdom of Lanna, both Vieng Chan Vieng Kham and Xieng Dong Xieng Thong were independent city-states until the founding of the kingdom of Lan Xang in 1354. The Sukhothai Kingdom and later the Ayutthaya kingdom were established and "...conquered the Khmers of the upper and central Menam valley and greatly extended their territory."