Manasara Series (I. A Dictionary of Hindu Architecture; II. Indian Architecture according to Manasara-Shilpashastra; III. Manasara on Architecture and Sculpture: Sanskrit Text; IV. Architecture of Manasara: Translation; V. Architecture of Manasara: Illustrations; VI. Hindu Architecture in India and Abroad; VII. An Encyclopaedia of Hindu Architecture) v6.c41.s15.5

v6.c41.s15.5

The ancient Chinese empire claims to have extended in 585 B.C. up to the regions of the barbarians, including all the provinces south of the great Yang-tse-kiang.² Many and various tribes appear to have been included amongst these barbarians. ‘Most of them were Tai people, the ancestors of the Siamese, Lao, and Shans of today.’³ These Tai people were driven from their original home, Nanchao, and became ‘the first inhabitants of Siam, long before the dawn of history.’ ‘Later on, Siam was inhabited by three races whose descendants may still be seen. In the south were two types, a curly-headed people of Negrito origin, and a wavy-haired Indonesian race,’ represented by the naked and squalid Sewang and Sakai respectively, still wandering in the forests of the Malay Peninsula.⁴ The northern Siam was inhabited by the Was or Lawas, distinguished as wild and tame, the former ‘chiefly known through their habit of collecting human heads and decorating the approaches of their villages with rows of skulls,’ and the latter inhabiting Shan States and Siam and professing Buddhism, known ‘as peaceful cultivators or hunters in their mountain villages.’ ‘Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years before the Christian era, another race of men settled in Southern Siam, known as the Khmers, represented by the Cambodians, the Mohns or Talaings of Pegu, the K’amuks of French Laos, and the K’as and other smaller tribes in the Shan States.’⁵