Kula Erotic

Kula started out as a word other people used. Thais, Lao and Cambodians gave the name to the traders who walked in from Burma during the nineteenth century, and their descendants kept it. The label covers several peoples: the Shan, also called Tai Yai; the Pa'O, once known as Taungthu; and the Burmese. They did not share a first language. What they shared was a way of making a living. They were outsiders who earned their money on the road, and later the families who settled where the money was.

In Siam the Kula were peddlers first. Their caravans crossed the Khorat Plateau and sold from village to village, and the region still remembers them in a place name. Thung Kula Ronghai means "the plain where the Kula wept." It is a wide, dry stretch across several Isan provinces, and the local story says even hardened traders broke down trying to cross it. Other Kula went after gems. Sapphire and ruby deposits around Chanthaburi, and across the border at Pailin, drew Kula miners and dealers. Pailin grew up around their digging, and the Burmese-style temples they built there still stand.

Empire shaped their place in the world. Many came from lands Britain had taken in Burma, so Kula in Siam could register as British subjects. That legal status set them apart from the villagers they traded with. In 1907 Siam handed Battambang, including Pailin, to French Indochina, and the Pailin community found itself under yet another flag.

Religion held the mix together. The Kula are Theravada Buddhists, and their temples, built in Shan and Burmese styles, became the natural gathering places for a community with no single homeland to point to. The heritage languages have mostly given way. Younger Kula grow up speaking Thai, Isan Lao or Khmer, and marriage into neighboring communities has been common for generations. In Cambodia, decades of war around Pailin, a Khmer Rouge stronghold into the 1990s, hit the community hard.

Today the Kula are hard to pick out from outside but easy to find if you know where to look: a temple roofline that belongs in Mandalay, or a family story about an ancestor who came down from the Shan hills with goods on his back. The trade routes made them a people, and their origins still define them more than the language they speak at home.