Lawa Erotic

The Lawa hold an unusual place in northern Thailand: they are widely regarded as the people who were there first. Before Tai lords built the kingdom of Lanna, Lawa communities lived in the hills and valleys around what is now Chiang Mai, and the region's own chronicles and ceremonies still concede the point. Today most Lawa live in upland villages in Chiang Mai and Mae Hong Son provinces. They grow rice, raise livestock and switch easily between their own language and Northern Thai.

Lawa belongs to the Palaungic branch of the Austroasiatic family. That ties it to Wa and Blang in Myanmar and China, not to the Tai languages spoken all around it. There are two main varieties: Western Lawa in the Mae Sariang and Mae La Noi districts of Mae Hong Son, and Eastern Lawa on the Bo Luang plateau of Chiang Mai. The name causes confusion, since unrelated hill peoples in Thailand and Laos have also been called Lua.

The Lawa claim to be first lives on in story. The best known concerns Khun Luang Wilangkha, a Lawa chief who wanted to marry Queen Chamadevi of the Mon city of Hariphunchai. She told him to throw a spear from the mountain above Chiang Mai into her city. Then she sent him a hat sewn from her own skirt cloth, which drained his power, and the spear fell short. The guardian spirits Pu Sae and Ya Sae, remembered as Lawa ancestors, still receive a buffalo offering every year in the hills just outside the city. Lanna court ritual made the same point: when a new ruler entered Chiang Mai, Lawa went in ahead of him leading a dog, a nod to the original owners of the land.

Religious life has layers too. Most Lawa are Buddhist and some communities are Christian, but duties to ancestral and village spirits still shape household life, with offerings of chickens, pigs and, on major occasions, buffalo. Villages traditionally looked to hereditary ritual leaders, the samang, who came from particular family lines. Fieldwork in Lawa villages in the 1960s documented a closely managed rotation of hill fields alongside irrigated terraces, far from the image of careless slash-and-burn farming. Women's dress is the clearest outward marker: a handwoven tube skirt banded in horizontal stripes, a plain blouse and heavy strands of glass beads, still worn by older women and at festivals.