Descendants of Ming royalists fleeing the Manchu conquerors in China, the Khokant are ethnic Chinese who live in a thin strip of land along Myanmars north eastern Shan State. Like many of the ethnic communities they have endured decades of conflict, though unlike many of the ethnic groups their language and literature has escaped relatively […]
Pu Loi Hom and Pu Loi Tun are two of the leading ethnic Shan writers. Here, they have rendered into faultless English, a collection of tales from their community which meanders through time and across different lands. Each oral tale imposes – as they were designed – its own moral lesson to the reader …
The Ta-ang are a Mon-Khmer group of thirteen communities who live in the hills of northern Shan state with their ancestral homeland centred on Namhsan, a stunning one road town that clings to the knuckle of a mountain overlooking steep, tea-leaf terraces …
Namhsan, a town in the hills of north eastern Shan State, has taken on an almost mythical status – at least among foreign writers – a town hidden among mountains, unreachable, a lawless place where anything can happen. Some of that is partly true I guess.