From Peking to Mandalay / A Journey from North China to Burma through Tibetan Ssuch'uan and Yunnan

by Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston

[317] In Tibetan Sa is "earth" or "land," and t'am is "seal" (sigillum) or "offering." Possibly the Tibetan is in this case the transliteration of a Mo-so word.

[318] We have seen on pages 249-250 that the plain west of that of Li-chiang is called Lashi-Pa, or Plain of the Mo-so, and that a village therein bears the same name. M. Paul Vial mentions what he calls a Lolo tribe named Ashi, apparently dwelling in the south-east of Yunnan (Les Lolos, p. 25). Now only a few miles west of Lashi-Pa, on the road from Li-chiang to Chung-tien, there is a village called Ashi, which gives its name to a ferry on the Yangtse river. It is possible that the sound in both cases was once either Lashi or Nashi, for, when we find from experience that the L and N are interchangeable, it may well be that in some districts inhabited by Mo-so the initial has been dropped altogether. I do not know the derivation of the word Lashio, the British settlement near the Salwen valley, in the North Shan States. There is also a district called Lashi, in British territory, north-east of Myitkyina, the people of which appear to be a connecting link between the Kachins and the Burmese. (See Sir George Scott's Burma, p. 70.)

[319] See above, p. 222.

[320] As in the common expression, ka-li ka-li ndro a, "walk slowly" or "there's no hurry."

[321] For some account of the Bon religion see Rockhill's Life of the Buddha, pp. 205 seq., and Sarat Chandra Das's Journey to Lhasa.

[322] 力□.

[323] Mr G. C. B. Stirling, quoted in Gazetteer of Upper Burma, pt. i. vol. i. p. 588.

[324] Gazetteer of Upper Burma, pt. i. vol. i. p. 616.

[325] The Mantse and the Golden Chersonese, and Ancient Tibet and its Frontagers, by T. W. Kingsmill, in vols. xxxv. and xxxvii. of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (China Branch).

[326] The name still survives in the province of Theinni and in the classical name Tien (滇) for the Chinese province of Yunnan. The connection between Tien and Theinni was pointed out by Terrien de Lacouperie in his introduction to Colquhoun's Amongst the Shans, p. xlviii.