Nine Peoples
One range of mountains

Nine peoples are named together on a Thai government list, as though they were one thing. They speak languages from three families that are not related to each other.

Start with the word, because the word is wrong

The Thai term is chao khao, usually rendered in English as hill tribe. You will find it on official forms, on signs at tourist markets, and through a great deal of mission writing. It is also a word many of the people it names would rather you did not use.

The objection is not delicacy. These are not tribes in any sense an anthropologist would recognise; several are larger than small European countries and have their own literatures and church conventions. And the category was built in 1959 to administer these peoples rather than to describe them, in the wake of a national opium ban. It frames them as recent, peripheral, and not quite of the country — which, for the oldest of them, is simply false.

How tangled it gets: the official list of nine includes a people the state calls Htin. Researchers working in Nan Province report that those so labelled call themselves Lua and find Htin insulting. But Lua is also the name used for a different people, in a different branch of a different language family, further west. The list manages to name one people by a term it rejects and to use one word for two peoples who are not the same.

Thailand's law moved in September 2025, with an Act protecting the way of life of ethnic groups. In January of that year the House voted, 252 to 153, to strike the words indigenous peoples out of it — the term the movement itself had organised under.

Three families, and the timing runs backwards from what you would guess

The nine divide into three language families with no relation to one another. The Karen speak Karenic languages and are by a wide margin the largest. The Akha, Lahu and Lisu speak Tibeto-Burman languages of the Loloish branch, and came down out of Yunnan and the Shan hills. The Hmong and the Mien speak Hmong-Mien languages, from further north and east in China. The Lua, Khmu and Htin speak Austroasiatic languages — the oldest layer, related to Mon and Khmer and to nothing else on the list.

Now the part that upends the usual picture. The Austroasiatic peoples were here before the Tai came down into the valleys. The rest arrived mostly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Lisu are generally said to have entered northern Thailand only around 1920 — more recently than the Ford Model T.

None of them crossed a border, because for most of that period there was not one to cross in any sense they would have recognised. The line between Burma, Laos and Thailand was drawn by colonial-era treaty and survey, and it was drawn across peoples rather than between them. The citizenship problem that still runs through these communities begins there.

The Hmong are not one story. They are at least three

If you want a single example of why the list misleads, take the Hmong.

Some Hmong families came south from China in the late nineteenth century, in the same movement that brought the other peoples down the ridges. Some arrived as refugees after 1975, when Laos fell and the men the CIA had recruited were largely left behind; well over a hundred thousand crossed into Thailand over the following two decades, and the largest camp held around forty-five thousand people, a quarter of whom were born inside it.

And some Thai Hmong spent those same years fighting for the Communist Party of Thailand — against the state that was hosting the refugees who had fought communism. They were called Red Meo. After the amnesties many stayed marginalised, without full rights to their land. Khek Noi in Phetchabun, now the largest Hmong community in the country, was substantially settled by former CPT fighters.

One ethnic name. Opposite politics. The same decade, and sometimes the same province. Anyone writing about the Hmong as a single actor with a single history has not looked.

Even inside one people, the picture splits

The Karen are usually described as a Christian people, and the description is half right. A 1977 government survey found 18.3 percent of Sgaw Karen Christian against 1.7 percent of Pwo Karen, with the Pwo overwhelmingly Buddhist. Both figures have risen since, but the gap has not closed. When someone says the Karen are Christian, it is the Sgaw who are mostly meant.

The Lisu carry the sharpest version of this. On the Chinese side of the border, the movement to Christ among them is one of the largest in modern Asia — roughly forty percent of Lisu in China. On the Thai side, among people of the same name who arrived from the same hills, the first baptisms did not come until 1970 and the great majority still follow the traditional religion.

Same people. Same century. One of the great movements of the age, and an unreached people, divided by a line on a map.

Why the gospel took root up here and not in the valleys

Thailand is overwhelmingly Buddhist, and the Christian share of the country sits near one percent after two centuries of effort. Yet roughly half of Thailand's Protestants are reckoned to come from the highland peoples — who are themselves well under five percent of the population. In the Diocese of Chiang Mai, church sources put the highland share of Catholics somewhere between seventy and ninety-five percent.

The honest answer is not that the missionaries who went up into the hills were more gifted than the ones who stayed in the valleys.

Several of these peoples carried traditions of a lost book — given by a creator to their ancestors, somehow forfeited, and one day to be brought back, sometimes by a white stranger from across the sea. Missionaries arrived carrying a book, and walked into a story that had already been written for them.

Thai national identity is also bound to Buddhism in a way highland identity was not bound to anything the state recognised. To be Thai is, in ordinary speech, to be Buddhist. Highland peoples were outside that already, so conversion cost them less nationally — though among the Akha, whose customs, religion and right to live in the village were one single thing, it could cost everything locally.

And Christianity was not the only faith arriving. From 1965 the Thai state sent Buddhist monks into highland villages and brought highland boys down to lowland temples. Families choosing a religion in those decades were choosing under pressure from more than one direction, and the pressure from the state ran towards the temple.

The part that keeps repeating

Read the mission records closely and one pattern surfaces so often it stops looking like coincidence.

Most of the pioneer evangelism among the Akha was done not by Westerners but by Sgaw Karen Christians, sent by their own churches. The script the Lisu still read was devised with a Karen evangelist. J. O. Fraser, whose name is on the whole Lisu enterprise, wrote that the work was practically begun and has been almost wholly carried on by the Lisu themselves. The Karen church in Thailand was planted by three unordained Burmese Karen evangelists who sailed from Rangoon in December 1880, and by a local man an American Baptist leader had ordered excluded as too vile for description.

And more recently, in the other direction: the Hmong district of the Church of Christ in Thailand traces its founding not to foreign missionaries but to Hmong Christians from the United States, who began evangelising in Thailand in 1987 — families who had left as refugees a decade before, coming back to their own.

Send a people away and some of them return as the mission. That is not a modern strategy anybody invented. It is what the record says happened.

What it means for how anyone should come

Set the nine side by side and the range is the point. The Karen have had churches for the better part of two centuries and have been sending their own missionaries since 1912. The Akha, resistant for sixty years, now count roughly a third of their number in Thailand as Christian. And the Lisu, on this side of the border, remain largely unreached.

That is not a blank map waiting for outsiders. Nor is it a finished work. It is churches that governed themselves before most American denominations existed, standing a day's walk from villages where nobody has heard anything at all.

It sets the terms. You do not arrive over the top of a church that was self-governing before your grandfather was born. You come under it, at its invitation, and you help it reach the valleys it cannot yet reach alone.

We have written the long version — the nine peoples one at a time, with their origins, their languages, what the state did to them, the citizenship problem that still bites, and the sources for every figure, including the ones that disagree with each other. It is at endsinitiative.org/hill-peoples, and it says plainly where we do not know.