Clustered Communities and Transportation Routes: The Wa Lands Neighboring the Lahu and the Dai on the Frontier

Introduction

This article aims to provide a perspective on the historical change of Wa society. The article locates these developments in the history of frontier formation from the 17th to the early 20th centuries in a context of Qing state extension toward the southwest mountains. The society of the Wa lands was a clustered system due to a historical chain of developments whose components included variable entities and occurrences, like the mining industry, migration, religious movements, and the change of markets. The latter was bound up with the change in the salt policy, the integration of Dai chieftain into different socio-political arrangements, the rise and fall of the religious movement among the neighboring Lahu, the establishment of Han Chinese gentry power, and so on. Historical reformations were not only linked with dynasties in the Burmese kingdoms and the Qing’s frontier policy to integrate the Dai chieftains into the official county system. They were also linked to the demographic reconstruction in Qing China, as well as the coming of British colonial power. In this perspective, the reconstruction of the Wa society should be rechecked against a historical process of clustered fragmentation in the systemic transformation, from a long-term dynamic between interior Yunnan and Shan-Dai chieftains through tributaries and markets, to a system of early modern states with a distinctive borderline on the map.

Map of the Yunnan-Burma Frontier between Rivers and Dai Chieftains

These dynamics not only changed the relationship between China and Burma, but also changed the social landscape of local societies as the frontier of empires. In this way, the author argues that, in the last several centuries, many native groups were clustered into a terrain of fragmentation related to the power of the Dai chieftains, the Five Buddha Districts system among the Lahu, and the Han Chinese gentry based in Mianning. Through this long-term frontier reconstruction since the 1720s, the Lahu were initially mobilized but fell due to the attacks of the Qing army. Meanwhile, the Dai chieftains were integrated gradually into a new, Han-gentry-controlled, frontier power, but the segmented Wa communities remained to become the border in a border-making process after the 1880s. Thus, the Wa lands were not a system of isolated areas, remote and outside the state power.¹ A detailed review of the history of frontier-making shows that the Wa lands were not an instance of unique developments but integral components in social systems, sharing a certain political structure. The author argues that the so-called “autonomy” is also a foggy concept to explain social relationships. The article’s arguments are grounded in an analysis that takes into account the historical dynamic of the setting and continuing reconstruction among communities on the Wa lands.

In fact, social actors inhabiting the Wa lands participated actively in a chain that connected states and anti-state movements. This positively helped the Wa to strive for political and economic benefits, even if their efforts and struggles occasionally failed. Additionally, the Wa lands had been a long-term hinterland between some Shan-Dai chieftains, using the Quan (圈) system in the mountains,² before that hinterland became the border between China and Burma after the 1880s. Thus, the borders between the states had to be drawn from territories controlled by these Shan-Dai chieftains, from Yunnan to Burma. The borders of the Shan-Dai chieftains were also used to highlight the states of Burma and China. However, the modern state borders are situated along the mountain range and rivers in the region, and this border drawing created pressures that in turn were crucial for the reconstruction of the Wa communities.

In this article, based on Chinese historical documents and long-term field work, the author points out that the system of the communities on the Wa lands between the Shan-Dai chieftains had not been a unique political and social system with a homogeneity of ethnic boundaries against the Han, the Dai and the...