Shan Erotic

The Shan call themselves Tai Yai — "great Tai" — and they belong to the same broad family as the Thai of Bangkok, the Lao across the Mekong, and the Dai of Yunnan. What makes them distinct is the territory they hold: a high, folded plateau in eastern Myanmar that sits above the Burmese lowlands like a separate country, which for most of its history is exactly what it was. Until the British rolled the Shan princely states into colonial Burma in the late nineteenth century, the plateau was governed by some thirty-odd saopha — sky lords — each running a valley principality with its own court, currency, and treaties. That memory of statehood has not gone away, and it is the backdrop to nearly everything that has happened in Shan State since independence in 1948.

The Shan language is Tai, written in a rounded Burmese-derived script that looks nothing like Thai or Lao on the page even though a Thai speaker can usually catch the gist of a sentence spoken slowly. It is the lingua franca of the plateau, but the plateau itself is not ethnically Shan all the way through — Pa-O, Palaung, Wa, Lahu, Akha and others share the hills, and a Shan town is typically the market floor of a much larger non-Shan upcountry. Religion follows the Tai pattern: Theravada Buddhism, monastery-centered, layered over older spirit beliefs that nobody pretends are gone. Village nat shrines sit at the base of stupas; novitiation ceremonies for young boys, called poy sang long, dress the candidates as miniature princes in echo of the Buddha's own renunciation, and the festival is one of the genuinely distinctive things the Shan do that their Tai cousins do not.

Daily life on the plateau runs on wet rice in the valleys, tea and fermented tea-leaf salad in the hills — lahpet, which the Burmese borrowed and made famous, is a Shan habit at its root — and a long border economy with Yunnan that has been alternately legal, illicit, and the subject of armed dispute for seventy years. The civil war between Shan armed groups and the Myanmar military has shaped two or three generations now, and it accounts for the sizeable Shan diaspora across northern Thailand, where migrant workers, traders, and refugees have built a recognizable second home around Chiang Mai and Mae Hong Son.