Zhang Dage, born in a mountain village in Shan State, Burma, in 1962, is one of my key informants. Like many Yunnanese migrants, his life has been marked by a series of migrations. Since 1980 he has settled in Taiwan, but every Chinese New Year he takes his family back to his parents’ home in Reshuitang Xincun (often called Xincun), a primarily Yunnanese Han village in Chiang Mai Province in northern Thailand. We met there for the first time during the Chinese New Year in 1996 when I was conducting my doctoral fieldwork on the history of the KMT Yunnanese...

Ae Maew, meaning cat girl, is the Shan nickname of a Yunnanese graduate student I met in Taiwan in 2004 when I was invited to lecture at her university on the diasporic Yunnanese consciousness of time and space. After the lecture, Ae Maew came to see me and shared briefly her own migration experience, which sparked my interest in her Yunnanese origins and her effort to come to Taiwan for higher education. She was a second-generation migrant in Burma who had grown up in Laikha in Shan State. I hired her during two winter breaks (2005 and 2006) to assist...

I met Mr. Li and his eldest son, Guoguang, during my third field trip to Taunggyi in June 2007. Zhang Dage had mentioned the father to me two years earlier. He told me that Mr. Li had been in the Ka Kwe Ye (KKY)¹ force and could tell me much of its history. Zhang Dage originally tried to arrange a meeting for me with Mr. Li in 2006 while I was conducting fieldwork in Taunggyi, but electronic communication was not convenient in Burma at that time, and when he finally got in touch with Mr. Li via one of Mr....

If the Yunnanese Han feel marginal in Burma, the Yunnanese Muslims sense their peripheral position even more. While the mainstream Burman-Buddhist majority constitutes Burma’s core in terms of ethnicity and political power, the Muslims in the country have experienced acute social and religious discrimination imposed by the government, including random arrest, destruction of mosques, confiscation of property, closing of religious schools, and denial of citizenship (Aung Su Shin 2003; Berlie 2008; Priestley 2006; Selth 2003; Tagliacozzo 2014). In addition, since June 2012, ethno-religious violence organized by Buddhist fundamentalists against Muslim communities in Arakan State, Meikhtila, Lewei, Pegu, Yangon, and Lashio...

Economic ventures across borders have been a significant part of Yunnanese life, and the mule caravan trade, which lasted for more than two millennia, was, as noted in the introduction, the most distinctive commercial practice in the region. The ways in which the trade was carried out were connected to the mountainous environment, which obstructed fluid communication and contributed to arduous living conditions. Able to endure hard work, mules were central for the transportation of commodities to different corners of the region. With their help, the Yunnanese traversed upper mainland Southeast Asia. The accrued knowledge and ethos regarding this peripatetic...

These are a few old songs and poems in Yunnan that vividly describe the stressful situation faced by women left behind by their husbands and sons for the sake of long-distance trade. In contrast to the mobility of Yunnanese men engaging in this type of trade, Yunnanese women⁴ were traditionally confined to domestic life and restricted from the public sphere (buke paotouloumian). Men were considered the active participants in economic undertaking, although women (especially those in the lower class) in practice also contributed to the family income by weaving, making clothes, raising animals, and working on farms (Fei and Chang...

In September 2006, I made my first field trip to Guangzhou via Hong Kong in order to extend my earlier research on the jade trade among the Yunnanese migrants of Thailand and Burma that I began in 2000. The purpose of my trip was to research the expansion of the Yunnanese trading networks of the jade business from Burma—where the most precious jadeite in the world is procured—to Guangzhou, current developments in state and non-state trading regulations, new forms of transaction, capital flows, and shipments of jade stones and products. My second field trip to Guangzhou took place...