Of all Buddhist peoples, the Tai Buddhists have proved the best soil for Gospel sowing. The seed is everywhere the same. The sowers in all lands are equally diligent. But the almost pristine simplicity of the Tai; their singular freedom from hindrances to the reception of the Gospel message; the specific pro. phecies of the Tai cult of Buddhism, pointing so definitely to Christ and Christianity; and the unusually strong expellent force of Tai animism; these providential preparations of the soil have ensured the exceptional harvest.

CHAPTER XXI

A SUMMARY

In this summary the following translation from the French in the introduction to Silve's T'o Grammar will give a review of Tai history which cannot be excelled for brevity and conciseness. A footnote says that this is "a historical resumé founded upon translations of the Royal History of Siam; the historical collections of the Cambodians; the Chronicles of the Northern Tai, Chiengrai; and upon those of the Laos principalities of the Menam basin."

The history of the Tai dates back to a very remote period. About 850 B.C. the Annals of the Chinese give us a description of the Tai living in the country situated in the middle basin of the Yellow River, the country included in the modern provinces Hupeh and Honan. The Chinese who occupied about this same period the plateau situated in the upper basin of the Yellow River, the modern province of KanSu, vanquished and driven back perhaps by the ancestors of the Tartars, came into collision with the Tai people. This latter, inferior in numbers and in warlike valor, were driven southwards and in several directions. (After some 2,000 years! W.C.D.)

The majority fled along the course of the Yang-tzeu Kiang into Yünnan, where, after having conquered the country from the aborigines, they founded the kingdom of NanChau, in the region of Kosamphi, and Tali-fu was made the capital. This capital was later transferred to Pu-erh-fu. This kingdom covered the regions of modern Yünnan, upper Burma, and the northern part of the Sip-song-Panna.

Their history was the most glorious. This people revealed the most remarkable military qualities and powers of organization. It took possession of the whole of the eastern part of Thibet, and allied itself occasionally with China. During the warfare of three kingdoms, the Tai contingent took part in the struggle, now allied with the Chinese dynasties.

now with the Tartar invaders. This period of glory and success lasted about four centuries.

However, disturbed by the Chinese, they emigrated again, and proceeded to found a new kingdom at Chieng-Sen, on the Mekong, after having struggled during many centuries against the domination of the Cambodians. This new kingdom, known under various names, had a history as brilliant as the former one. The Tai abandoned their Chieng-Sen capital to go and found a kingdom further southwest, new and also quite ephemeral, of which the capital was PhouKam, a town situated on the Salween River. The proximity of the Cambodians embarrassing them, they drove them back and built for themselves the town of Chiengmai (on the Meping), of which they made a new capital.

The expansion into the south was continued. The Tai descended the valley of the Me-nam, and proceeded to found a new kingdom, of which the capital was Ayuthia ("The Impregnable'), which about 1315 was transferred to Bangkok, under the reign of Phra Uthong, and became the latest capital of the Tai power.

During this flight, rather than normal expansion, into the south, the Tai were divided into many tribes or clans. They replaced, after having conquered them, the ancient conquerors or aborigines, and are now established in the country. Some of them, especially those of Kwang-si and Tongking, have submitted to the rule of the Chinese or Annamites. Quite naturally their manners and their language, written and spoken, have been slightly modified by contact with the ethnical influences which they have encountered.

It is over eight hundred years since the Tai lost their independence in China, but they have not been absorbed, and in particular their language persists, and holds its own against Chinese. Of the great Tai race, the Tai of the North are racially and linguistically the purest representatives. Their western brothers, called Shans by the Burmese, have absorbed much of both blood and vocabulary from the Burmese. In like manner, their Siamese kinsmen have got much from the Peguans, Cambodians, Malays, and Chinese immigrants. But the Tai of southern China, eastern Burma, northern Siam and the French Laos States, have come into contact with no other great power or race except very locally. Their contact has been with illiterate hill

peoples, mostly scattered trails of the great Mon Hkmer (PeguanCambodian) race, in its long migrations southward. With these illiterate hill peoples the Tai do not intermarry to any great extent. God has had some purpose in preserving this great body of the Tai race down through more than four milleniums, so that from eighteen to twenty millions of them speak the same language, with only such dialectic differences as to be, after all, mutually intelligible.

And so, by looking up the Tai in history, we learn that the modern Tai people including the western Shan and southern Siamese, fellow descendants from the ancient Lao stock, are not indigenous inhabitants of the tropics. On the other hand, they lived and swayed scepters of dominion in "the belt of power, the north temperate zone, from about B.C. 2200 to A.D. 1234, some 3,400 odd years, a much longer period than they have lived in the tropics. They have had organized governments for more than 4,000 years. While our ancestors were still wearing skins and using flint knives, the Lao were a civilized race. When our American Republic, with a big R, has existed for one millenium, at the least, and shows at the end of that time something like the virility and vitality of the Lao race at the end of the fourth millenium, it will then be time for us to put on spectacles and begin to search for signs of decadence in the Lao race.

All exploration work among the Tai and all research into their history have a most enhancing bearing upon missionary work among them. We now know that the present day Tai people are great in numbers. They extend over a territory of more than 400,000 square miles. The long history of the race shows that it is a virile people from "the belt of power, " and the present birth-rate is satisfactorily Rooseveltian. Their history also shows that the Tai people are closely associated and bound up with the destinies of the 400,000,000 Chinese on the north, the 20,000,000 Cambodians and Annamese on the east, and many of the 10,000,000 people of Burma. Surely any one must rise from a study of their history and of the history of the surrounding peoples with the intense conviction that here is a people most strategically placed; what affects this people will react upon nearly a half-billion Asiatic neighbors.

Missions to the Tai Race have been named in such a way as to hide their real identity from the man in the street-and from most of the women also. The names "Shan Mission," "Siam Mission," and "Laos Mission," are localisms. They are

sufficiently appropriate as local geographical names. But not one of them is sufficiently broad to even hint at its relation to the whole race.

The reasons of these names are not far to seek. First of all, they were given in the early days, before exploration had revealed to even the missions themselves the extent and unity of the race. Coupled with this has been the tendency to deal with missions by countries. Until the Great War, people everywhere and in all lines thought and wrought by countries. And as the Tai Race overlaps into four countries, it was more natural to think of it as four races than as one. But the Great War has taught us to pay less attention to arbitrary civil boundaries, and more attention to racial lines. It ought to be easier, therefore, to comprehend the Tai task than it was in ante-bellum days.

This is a unique task. Mission policy in the past has been influenced by the prevailing tendency to deal with peoples according to civil boundaries. The partitioning of mission fields. according to comity agreement among the various Boards has usually followed national or provincial lines. But in the case of our Tai task, we anticipate the broadening effects of the War by following up a people, regardless of civil boundaries.

The Tai people at present are the most numerous and widely distributed race of people in the southeastern corner of continental Asia. Their history shows that they are of Mongolian stock, closely akin to the Chinese. Gathered from the Chinese and Burmese Annals, as well as from their own, this history shows older than the Hebrews or the Chinese themselves, to say nothing of such moderns as the Slavs, the Teutons or the Gauls. Without accepting or rejecting legendary details of the Chinese Annals, it is certain from the Annals themselves, and from the habit which the Chinese have of calling the Tai Race "aborigines," that the Chinese found this race when the Chinese first came to China. They found them in what is now the northwestern part of Szechuan Province, more than four thousand years ago. The race appears in the Annals under the name of "The Great Mung." They must have been an important people, even at that early time, to wrest from the cynical Chinese Annals the name "Great." Gradually they overspread some of what we know as modern China north of the Yangtze, and all China to the south of it. Successive waves of migration can also be traced from China southward, as we have seen, until