Kadu Erotic

The Kadu are a people of upper Myanmar. What sets them apart most clearly is their language, which sounds nothing like the Burmese spoken all around them. A Kadu village among the rice valleys and forested hills of Katha District looks much like any other farming settlement in the region: wood and bamboo houses, paddy on the flats and a monastery at the center. You hear the difference before you see it. Kadu belongs to the small Luish branch of Sino-Tibetan. Its closest living relatives are Ganan, spoken by a closely related people in the nearby Mu River valley, and Chak, spoken hundreds of miles away in the hills of southeastern Bangladesh. Burmese is only a distant cousin.

That scattered family says a lot about Kadu history. Two other Luish languages, Andro and Sengmai, were once spoken in Manipur in northeast India and have since died out. Burmese chronicles name a people called the Thet among the country's early inhabitants, and historians have long linked that name to Sak, an older name for the Kadu and their kin. Together these point to a language group that was once far more widespread than it is today and was slowly absorbed into Burmese-speaking society over many centuries. The Kadu are among the communities that held on.

Their heartland lies around Banmauk, Indaw and Pinlebu in Sagaing Region and spills into southern Kachin State. The railway from Mandalay to Myitkyina runs straight through it. In 1944 the war came through the same country, when Allied Chindit columns fought for the airfields at Indaw and blocked the railway near Mawlu. Most Kadu are Theravada Buddhists, and the village monastery sets the calendar of festivals and merit-making. Older ways of honoring local spirits carry on beside it, as they do across rural Myanmar.

The Myanmar state counts the Kadu among its 135 official national races and places them, along with the Ganan, in the Bamar group. That grouping reflects a shared religion and way of life more than a shared language, and the closeness cuts both ways. Burmese is the language of school, trade and government, and many young Kadu grow up speaking it first. Kadu itself is strongest among older people and in outlying villages. Since the 2021 coup, rural Sagaing has been one of the hardest-hit parts of Myanmar's civil war, which adds displacement and upheaval to the slower pull of assimilation.