A thousand miles on an elephant in the Shan States

by Holt S. Hallett

The Buddhist legend that gives the origin of the name of this State is by no means complimentary to the people. It states that, when Gaudama Buddha arrived at Ngow and sent to the people announcing his arrival, they were engaged in fishing. Instead of returning home at once and putting on decent clothes, they stopped to finish their haul, and then presented themselves to him in their dripping clothes. On their approaching him, he exclaimed, “The people of this place are ngow (fools). The Buddha came to visit you, you did not hasten to him, and when at length you come, it is in this plight.” This legend, I need hardly say, was not told me in Ngow, but by a Chow Phya of Lakon.

The temperature during the day varied between 69° at 5.30 A.M., 87° at 10 A.M., 92° at noon, 96° at 2.30 P.M., and 95° at 4.10 P.M. During the hot season it is desirable that the day’s march with elephants should commence at daybreak and end by noon; afternoons are very oppressive, and the animals get jaded, particularly when travelling in an open plain or in a leafless forest.

We left Muang Ngow just as it was getting light, on April 11th, and crossed the plain to Ban Hoo-art, a village situated on the Meh Hoo-art, an affluent of the Meh Ngow. We then skirted the stream for five miles, and halted for breakfast on its bank, under a shady grove of trees. Many teak-logs had been dragged from the forest into the bed of the stream for floating to Bangkok during the rainy season. One of the teak-trees in the forest measured 16 feet in girth 6 feet from the ground. During our morning’s march we passed two large villages, a party of Burmese Shans returning to Kiang Tung from Maulmain with their purchases, and a caravan of fifty laden cattle.

In the afternoon we journeyed through a teak-forest, and after crossing two low spurs, halted for the night on the bank of the Meh Lah. Our camp was 81½ miles from Zimmé, and we had risen 614 feet since leaving Muang Ngow.

A mile to the east of our crossing, the Meh Lah, which enters the Meh Ngow near the site of the ancient city of Muang Teep, is joined by the Meh Lah Noi, a tributary from the south, which drains a valley six and a half miles long, formed by a long low spur, which is connected at the head of the valley with the plateau on the west. This valley has the appearance of having been cut lengthways out of the former flat slope of the plateau, the spur seeming to be the lower continuation of the original slope. On ascending the plateau on the morrow, I noticed that in the space between the spur and the north end of the range of hills lying to the east, which commences some ten miles to the south-east, the only hill visible was a short precipitous mass of mural limestone, standing up several hundred feet in height, with its top looking like a great coronet.

It thus became apparent that a similar freak of nature to that already described in the water-parting between the Meh Ing and the Meh Ngow was present in that between the Meh Ngow and the Meh Wung. The ranges between the basins of the rivers are not continuous, and a railway can be constructed from Bangkok viâ Lakon, to Kiang Hung, which lies at the foot of the Yunnan plateau, through a series of great plains, which are only separated from each other by slightly undulating country.

Leaving the Meh Lah early the next morning, we ascended the slope of the plateau for two and a half miles by a good broad road, passing through a teak-forest to the Pah Took (Stone Tent), a pillar of limestone with a small cave in its western face. For the greater part of the way the ascent lay along a natural terrace 300 and 400 feet wide, bordered on the east by the slope of the plateau, and on the west by cliffs of mural limestone. In this neighbourhood a pitched battle is said to have been fought between a Zimmé army and one of Burmese Shans, but I could get no further particulars of the event.

At the Pah Took we turned west and ascended 90 feet to the Pah Too Pah (Stone Gate)—a gap 200 feet broad, in the line of limestone cliffs that fringe the eastern edge of the summit of the plateau. The cliffs on either side of the gap rose like the wall of a fortress to a height of 300 feet, and the ground at the gap was 1941 feet above the level of the sea.

Continuing along the eastern edge of the plateau, which sloped from north to south, we reached the base of Loi Pah Heeng. Leaving Loi Pah Heeng trending away to the south-west, we descended the eastern slope of the plateau—the same that we had previously mounted from the Meh Lah—and after marching a mile, reached the head of the Meh Lah Noi valley.

The crest of the spur at this point is 1564 feet above the sea, and I have assumed that elevation as the height that the railway would have to cross between the valleys of the Meh Wung and the Meh Ngow; but it is evident that a considerably lower pass might be found between the spur and the coronet-topped hill which still loomed above it in the distance.