Not long ago, I was asked to give an opinion about a proposal to write the history of the Shans. The proposal came from a Shan scholar for whom I have great respect, and who was as well- fitted as any Shan I know to do the work. He planned to assemble copies of all the Shan State Chronicles extant; toglean all references to the Shan States in Burmese Chronicles; andfinally to collect source materials in English. Such, in brief,was the plan. I had to point out that it omitted what, for the older periods at least, were the most important sources of all: the original Old Thai inscriptions of the north, the number of which, if those from East Burma, North Siam and Laos, are included, may well exceed a hundred;1 and the dated contem- porary records in Chinese, from the 13th century onwards.
I do not know if these sources have been adequately tapped in Siam. They certainly have not in Burma. And since the earlier period, say 1250 to 1450 A.D., is the time of the mass-movements of the Dai2 southward from Western Yünnan, radiating all over Further India and beyond, the subject is one, I think, that concerns Siam no less than Burma. I am a poor scholar of Thai; so I shall confine myself here to Chinese and Burmese sources. The Chinese ones are mainly the dynastic histories of the Mongols in China (the Yuan-shih) and the history of the earlier half of the Ming dynasty (the Ming-shü). The short, well-dated entries in the Court annals (pên-chi) of these histories can often be amplified by reference to the sections on geography (ti-li-chih), to the biographies of individuals (lieh-chuan), and accounts of foreign countries
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