A thousand miles on an elephant in the Shan States

by Holt S. Hallett

Meh Laik valley and gorge at 1.3 P.M. 15th February.

From Loi Tong Wai we had a magnificent view of the hills in all directions. The great plateau of Bau, 15 miles to the east, and about the same level as the ground we were standing on, was clearly outlined against the sky; and the great trough of the wave between it and us was filled with a multitude of great spurs, crested with fine timber and divided from each other by steep-sided narrow valleys.

To the south-west, 10 miles distant, was the gorge where the Meh Laik passes through Loi Kom Ngam on its way to the Meh Nium; beyond was a sea of hills stretching as far as the eye could reach to the high peak lying to the south-east of our pass over the Karroway Toung. The cliff-faced gap through which the river rushes, tumbling hundreds of feet at a time, is impassable even to the sure-footed Karens. In the 24 miles’ course of the stream between our two crossings its bed falls 2049 feet. The greater part of this drop is said to occur in this short gorge, which must be one of the wildest and grandest scenes in the world.

If the railway from Maulmain is carried up the valley of the Meh Laik, gradually rising along the hill-spurs, a gallery cut in the face of the gorge would enable the line to proceed towards Zimmé without passing, viâ Maing Loongyee, over the hills we have been crossing since we left the city. A better path, however, most likely exists up one of the valleys to the north of Loi Pwe, which would cross the Zimmé hills, descending by the valley of the Meh Sai, which lies between Loi Kom and the Bau plateau.

A gradual descent for four and a half miles brought us to the Meh Laik. Sandstone and quartz, and claystone veined with quartz, cropped up on the sides of the plateau and its spurs, but the bed of the river, 15 feet broad and 4 feet deep, is composed of black-speckled white granite. Our crossing lies 123 miles from Hlineboay and 2508 feet above the sea.

Leaving the stream, we ascended a few feet, and, continuing for half a mile through pine-forest, descended to a rice-plain, where the road traversed in 1879 by Colonel Street and Mr Colquhoun, when on their mission to Zimmé, joins our route. Crossing the Meh Tha Ket, a small stream which flows through the plain, and two dry streams which exposed a great depth of soil, we passed to the north of the Lawa village of Bau Sa Lee, and, fording the Meh Hto, camped for the night on its bank, 125 miles from Hlineboay. A thousand feet down-stream from our camp the Meh Hto is joined by the Meh Tyen. Both streams flow in a bed of granite boulders, and the village is situated at their junction.

In the evening I enticed two of the head-men to the camp, and gained some information about them and the features of the country. They told me the Lawas still occupied the village sites held by them before the Shans and Karens settled in the country. They had no written language, and were now Buddhists like the Shans, and had the same manners and customs. Their villages are scattered through the hills and plateaux as far south as the latitude of Bangkok, and they believed themselves to be the aborigines of the country.

The only difference between their customs and those of the Ping Shans lay in their always burying their dead, whereas the Ping Shans, except in cases of death from infectious diseases or in childbirth, burn them. Burial, however, is still observed by the British Shans. When a Lawa dies, a coffin is made by scooping out the log of a tree, and the corpse is placed in it and covered with a stout lid. After three days the priest is called and the body buried. As amongst the Karens, the personal property of the deceased is interred with the corpse.

The practice of burning their dead amongst the Shans must be of recent date, for in the middle of the sixteenth century, when they first became feudatory to Burmah, burial was the rule—elephants, ponies, and slaves being interred with the chiefs. The Burmese emperor Bureng Naung strictly prohibited the continuance of the custom. Similar observances were usual in olden times amongst the Turkish or Hiung Nu and Scythian tribes in Asia, and with the Tsin dynasty in China as well as amongst the ancient Greeks, as evidenced by Homer’s ‘Iliad.’ The latest record of such human sacrifices in China concerns the obsequies of the Emperor Chi Hwang, B.C. 209, when all the members of the harem having no sons had to follow him in death.