The Peoples
Of The Hills.

The KarenSgaw and Pwo · Karenic (Sino-Tibetan) · the largest of the nine

The Karen story is told in full elsewhere on this site, because it is the one we know best and the one that shaped how we work. In short: a people with an old tradition of a lost golden book received the gospel in the nineteenth century, largely through one of their own, a freed slave named Ko Tha Byu; built churches that governed and funded themselves from 1912; and kept growing after every foreign missionary was expelled from Burma in 1966.

On the Thai side the same instinct shows. The convention formed in 1955 with its centre in Chiang Mai, but the Bible institute came first, in 1953. Teach our own, lead our own — before anything else.

One correction belongs here, because it is the strongest thing in the record and it is usually left out. The Karen church in Thailand was not planted by American missionaries. It was planted by three unordained Burmese Karen lay evangelists who sailed from Rangoon on 12 December 1880 — and by a local man named Maung Htwe, whom the American Baptist leader Justus Vinton had ordered excluded as, in Vinton's words, too vile for description. Maung Htwe became their first convert in Thailand, and then held the young Lampang congregation together for twenty-five years while the ordained men were elsewhere. Vinton also wrote, in 1881, that native preachers should be used as the English government uses sepoys, under white officers. The church that exists today came from the men he wanted supervised, and from the convert he wanted shut out.

The Karen also appear in other peoples' stories on this page, and that is the part most accounts leave out. Karen evangelists carried the gospel to the Akha. A Karen evangelist helped devise the script the Lisu still read. When a Western mission history says the gospel reached these hills, it usually means a Karen walked there.

One more thing the summaries flatten. The Karen are not one people religiously. A 1977 government survey found 18.3 percent of Sgaw Karen Christian against 1.7 percent of Pwo Karen — a tenfold difference inside what outsiders call one group, with the Pwo overwhelmingly Buddhist. Those figures are nearly fifty years old and current mission estimates put both higher, but the gap between the two has not closed. When you read that the Karen are a Christian people, it is the Sgaw who are mostly meant.

The Hmongalso called Meo or Miao, both now widely rejected · Hmong-Mien

The Hmong are among the largest of the nine and the one whose history is most often flattened. Their traditions place their origin far north in China, and their long movement south was driven in large part by conflict with expanding Chinese imperial power.

But there is no single Hmong story in Thailand. There are at least three, and they point in opposite directions.

The first are the oldest: Hmong who came south from China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the same movement that brought the other Loloish and Hmong-Mien peoples down the ridges. They were here for generations before anything that follows.

The second came out of the war next door. The Hmong of Laos were recruited in large numbers by the CIA from the early 1960s — nine thousand by 1961, perhaps forty thousand at the height of it, with the average recruit in the last years aged around fifteen. When Laos fell in 1975 the leadership was flown out and most of the men who had fought were not. What followed was one of the larger refugee movements of the era: something well over a hundred thousand Hmong crossed into Thailand between 1975 and the early 1990s. The largest camp, Ban Vinai in Loei Province, held around forty-five thousand people at its peak in the mid-1980s, and a quarter of the people in it had been born there. It closed at the end of 1992.

The third is the one almost nobody outside Thailand knows, and it cuts directly against the second. Through the same years, Thai Hmong joined the Communist Party of Thailand in significant numbers and fought the Thai state — the state that was hosting the Lao Hmong refugees who had fought communism. Fighting began in 1967 in Chiang Rai and Tak. They were labelled Red Meo, and after the amnesties many remained marginalised and 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.

Hold those two side by side. Within one ethnic name, in one decade, Hmong men were fighting for the CIA against communism in Laos and for the communist party against the government of Thailand — and some of both ended up in the same province. Anyone who writes about the Hmong as a single actor with a single politics has not looked.

The end of the refugee story is recent and hard. In December 2009 Thailand forcibly returned roughly four and a half thousand Hmong to Laos, among them a hundred and fifty-eight people whom UNHCR had formally recognised as refugees and whom four countries had already agreed to accept. Journalists and independent observers were kept away. Access to the returnees afterwards was largely refused.

On Christianity: the significant early movement was in Laos, not Thailand — the Christian and Missionary Alliance reached the Plain of Jars in 1949, and by 1955 counted around 5,500 converts across 96 villages, roughly seventy percent of them Hmong. The written Hmong script most widely used today came out of that period, devised between 1951 and 1953 by two Protestant missionaries working with a Catholic priest. In Thailand the Christian share is smaller, and we will not give you a number: no representative survey of Hmong religious affiliation exists, and the figures in circulation trace to undated estimates. One honest note from the literature — the largest documented expansion of Hmong churches came mostly through people transferring in from the camps and through children being born, rather than through conversion.

And one turn in the story that runs the opposite way to the usual telling. 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 from 1987 — people whose families had left as refugees a decade earlier, coming back to their own. Send a people away and some of them return as the mission.

The MienIu Mien, also called Yao · Hmong-Mien

The Mien are the most surprising of the nine to anyone expecting undifferentiated animism. They carry a written religious tradition derived from medieval Chinese Taoism, with ritual texts in Chinese characters and a priesthood able to read them. A people frequently described in tourist literature as a colourful hill tribe has in fact been a literate religious community for centuries.

That matters for how the gospel meets them, and there is a documented moment that shows it exactly. Around 1907, in Nan Province, missionaries reached a Mien village with Christian literature printed in Chinese characters — and the villagers were drawn in precisely because they could read it. Here was a book in a script their own priests used. The conversation ended when the missionaries required that the ancestor altars be burned. A Mien household considering Christianity was never choosing between a book and no book. It was being asked to set one textual tradition against another that its own ancestors had kept for centuries.

Their migration is unusually well dated. Mien in the Nan and Chiang Kham area are recorded as having left Guangdong around 1860 and settled in Nan by about 1880 — a journey of some twenty years across two countries.

The AkhaLoloish (Tibeto-Burman) · counted within the Hani in China

The Akha are usually described as the most resistant of these peoples to the gospel, and for the first sixty years that was true. Baptist contact in Burma began in 1907; the first Akha Baptist church was not founded until 1936. In Thailand missionaries arrived in the mid-1950s and the first Akha believers came only around 1962.

The reason is worth understanding, because it is not stubbornness. Akhazang is usually translated 'the Akha Way', and anthropologists insist it is not a religion in the sense of something believed. It is something carried, the way a load is carried — a whole system of genealogy recited back through dozens of generations, village priest, spirit gates renewed each year, offerings to ancestors, and the customs that make a person Akha. To stop carrying it was not to change opinion. It was to stop being Akha, and to lose the right to live in the village. Individual conversion, in that setting, was close to structurally impossible.

Two corrections to the usual telling. First, most of the pioneer evangelism among the Akha was done by Sgaw Karen Christians sent by their own churches, not by Westerners. Second, the picture has changed: Akha churches grew from roughly 16,000 members to 27,000 between 2009 and 2018, and one careful irony from the research is that the very ritual obligations which once made conversion unthinkable are now among the reasons Akha families give for converting.

Be careful with figures here, and we would rather show you the disagreement than hide it. A 2017 survey of church rolls counted about 214 churches and 27,000 members, which is roughly a third of the Thai Akha. A peer-reviewed study of Akha young people in Chiang Rai found two thirds identifying as Christian — though young people are not the whole community, and that questionnaire gave no option for the traditional religion. One widely used mission database says ninety percent. The honest answer is that Akha Christianity is substantial and growing and that nobody has counted it properly.

The LahuLoloish (Tibeto-Burman) · Muhsur in older Thai sources

Here is a fact that most published accounts get wrong, and it belongs to Thailand. The standard story is that the first Lahu Christians were converted by the American Baptist missionary William Marcus Young at Kengtung in Burma, around 1903 to 1905. It is not so. In February 1891, the Presbyterian Daniel McGilvary baptised two Lahu men at Mae Kon, some sixteen kilometres from Chiang Rai — thirteen years earlier, and on this side of the border. Both men were outcasts, expelled from their previous village on an accusation of witchcraft. The following year, thirteen more adults and seven children were baptised.

That first community did not last; it disappears from the record after about 1920, and the historians who have looked are not certain why. But the correction stands, and it has been accepted in the scholarly literature.

What happened at Kengtung afterwards was of a different scale. In 1903, weeks after a Lahu uprising across the Chinese border had been crushed, Lahu came to Young reporting dreams that followed the death of their own holy man, who had foretold a saviour appearing as a white foreigner. Hundreds were baptised in 1904, and a contemporary reference work records over two thousand in 1905. A joint Presbyterian-Baptist commission of the period noted that many Lahu took Young himself to be Jesus and called him by that name — a detail that ought to complicate any triumphant telling.

One further caution about the Lahu. Anthropologists who have studied G'ui sha, the Lahu creator god that missionaries were so encouraged to find, conclude that his prominence is relatively recent and traceable to a Buddhist movement through the Yunnan hills in the late eighteenth century. The 'traditional' high god the missionaries met had a history of his own.

A word on the numbers, because this is where accounts of the Lahu go wrong most often. Anthony Walker, who has spent a career on these people, wrote in 2016 that Protestant Lahu make up about a third of all Lahu living in Thailand. Health surveys among Lahu villagers in Chiang Rai have returned higher figures still, in the region of a half, though those are samples rather than counts and their questionnaires often offer no option for the traditional religion, which pushes people into other boxes. One widely used mission database, meanwhile, reports one Lahu sub-group as ninety-nine percent Christian and another as one fifth of one percent. Take a third as the working figure and treat anything more precise with suspicion.

The LisuLoloish (Tibeto-Burman) · the most egalitarian of the nine

The Lisu carry the most famous missionary story in these hills, and also the one most in need of correction. J.O. Fraser of the China Inland Mission reached Tengyue around 1909 and spent five fruitless years among Han Chinese, a period in which by his biographer's account he contemplated taking his own life. Then the Lisu came down from the mountains.

They had a story of their own: words from the Mother-God written on deerskin and eaten by a dog, and a prophecy that a white Lisu king would come from a far country bringing books in the Lisu language. A convert carried Fraser's photograph, in Lisu dress, from village to village. One of Fraser's colleagues observed drily that his white-man appearance so monopolised interest that no one remembered his message.

You will read that Fraser baptised sixty thousand Lisu in 1916 and 1917. He did not. The claim traces to an unsigned mission blog and is contradicted by every other source, including mission ones: the first Lisu baptism was in 1915, six hundred were baptised by 1918, and one district counted around two thousand communicant members by 1927. The real growth came later and largely through Lisu evangelists. Fraser's own verdict was that the work was practically begun and has been almost wholly carried on by the Lisu themselves. We repeat the correction because a hundredfold exaggeration in favour of a Western missionary is precisely the kind of story this ministry exists to stop telling.

The script, which the Lisu still use, was devised with a Karen evangelist named Sara Ba Thaw and refined by Fraser, somewhere between 1914 and 1920. The New Testament followed in 1938, the whole Bible in 1968, and China gave the script official recognition in 1992.

And then the part that ought to sober anyone. Almost none of that happened in Thailand. The Lisu who came south around 1920 were largely untouched by the movement across the border. Work began in 1951; a missionary named Lilian Hamer was murdered near Chiang Mai in April 1959; the first Thai Lisu baptisms came in 1970. There is no reliable count of Lisu Christians in Thailand today, and by every estimate the great majority still follow the traditional religion. The Lisu are, in the same century and among the same people, both one of the largest movements to Christ in Asia and an unreached people.

The LuaLawa · Austroasiatic (Mon-Khmer) · among the oldest inhabitants

The Lua are usually introduced as the old ones, in these hills before the Tai came down into the valleys. That is very likely true in substance, and it is worth being careful about how much weight it will bear.

What is certain is that the Chiang Mai and Lamphun basin was settled long before any Tai kingdom. What is not established is an unbroken ethnic line from those settlements to the people called Lawa today — the archaeologists who excavated the key sites never use the word, and the northern Thai chronicles asserting Lawa priority were written seven or eight centuries after the events they describe. A history that leans on those chronicles is leaning on something written far closer to our time than to the events.

The stronger evidence is not in the ground but in the ritual life of Chiang Mai itself. The city's own ceremonies acknowledge the Lawa as prior: the Pu Sae Ña Sae rite propitiates what are described as the ancestor spirits of the aboriginal Lawa, and the inthakhin city pillar carries the same acknowledgement. A conquering court does not usually invent a debt to somebody else's ancestors. When the city that displaced them still makes offerings in their name, that is a claim to priority written into the calendar rather than into a chronicle.

On Christianity among the Lua we know little, and the little in circulation should be handled with tongs. One widely used mission database credits Lawa Christians to the Baptist missionary William Young in the 1920s; Young worked among the Lahu, Shan and Wa in Burma and China, and the field record dates mission among the Lawa considerably later. The error looks like Wa material attached to the Lawa because the two languages are close relatives. We would rather record that we do not know than repeat it.

The KhmuKhamu, Kammu · Austroasiatic (Khmuic) · once called Kha, a word meaning slave

The Khmu are one of the major peoples of Laos — around 700,000, the country's largest ethnic minority — and one of the smaller of the nine in Thailand. Most of what has been written about them was written about somewhere else, which is part of why they are easy to overlook here.

They belong to the oldest layer. Khmuic speakers are held to be among the earliest inhabitants of mainland Southeast Asia, occupying a far larger area before Tai-speaking peoples moved into the lowlands. And as with the Lawa at Chiang Mai, the clearest evidence of that priority is ritual rather than archaeological: the Lao regarded the Khmu as the original inhabitants with authority over the local spirits, and the court at Luang Prabang used Khmu in exactly that capacity — as did the old principality of Nan. The kingdoms that subordinated them still needed them to address the land.

Their own name for themselves means, simply, person. The word outsiders used for centuries — Kha — means slave.

How they came to Thailand is unusually well documented, and it is not a story of migration so much as of labour. From about 1880, European teak firms wanted forest workers, and young Khmu men came down from Laos to get them: an estimated three to four hundred entering Chiang Mai every year at the height of it, in groups of fifteen to thirty, averaging around seventeen years old. They were recruited by other Khmu, and they came for a reason worth understanding — to earn a brideprice, and beyond that to become men wealthy enough to make the proper sacrifices to their ancestors. The work in the teak forests was in service of the spirits back home.

A third movement came later and matters legally. Many Khmu in Thailand today arrived fleeing the war and what followed it after 1975 — and a Khmu who crossed after 1975 fell under refugee and immigration policy rather than the hill-tribe programme, even though his ethnicity was on the official list. One people, one name, two entirely different legal situations.

On Christianity the honest summary is that the largest Khmu response happened in Laos, not here. The Presbyterian Daniel McGilvary found an opening among Khmu labourers at Muang Sai in 1897, and French colonial policy closed it by 1903; he recorded plainly that of some three thousand converts in his mission, barely half a dozen were Khmu. The work that grew came later and through the Christian and Missionary Alliance in northern Laos. In Thailand the Khmu work in Nan Province is Mennonite Brethren, beginning in 1991. There are Scripture portions in Khmu, first published in 1918 — and no New Testament and no complete Bible in the language to this day.

The HtinMal and Prai · Austroasiatic (Mon-Khmer) · a people who reject this name

This entry carries the name the Thai government uses, and the government's name is one the people reject. Researchers working in Nan Province report that those officially listed as Htin identify themselves as Lua, and that many of them consider Htin an insult. Mal and Prai, the two main varieties of their language, are sometimes used instead.

We have kept the official heading so that the nine on this page match the nine on every list you will encounter, and we have said in the entry itself what the people would rather be called. If that seems like an awkward compromise, it is, and the awkwardness belongs to the list rather than to them.

As with the Lua and the Khmu, the documentation available to us in English is thin, and we would rather leave the space visibly empty than fill it with inference.