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as the Minchias and Yaos of South-West China are Mon Khmers. If this is so—and there is certainly a mass of linguistic evidence to bear the theory out—we have the missing chain leading us up northwards to a point near the 28th parallel of latitude where the ancestors of the Khasis may reasonably be supposed to have branched off south-westwards from the main Mon Khmer body along the valley of the Brahmaputra. However this may be, the question need not detain us; we are here directly concerned not with the Miaotzus and Yaos but with the tribes on the western fringe of the Mon Khmer country. These are now separated from their original home and their relations in part by the Tibeto-Burman swarms which must have spread over the country long centuries ago, in part at a far more recent date by the irruption of the Tais. When this latter movement began, some six centuries after the commencement of the Christian era, the Mon Khmers had in Cambodia and in the Talaing country of Lower Burma already attained to some measure of civilization. Pressing southwards along the Sal ween and Mekong valleys, the Tai new-comers, the ancestors of the Shans, the Laos and the Siamese, passed down the western edge of the Mon Khmer country, severing the outermost communities from their sister communities in the east. In this way the Mons or Talaings of Pegu were completely cut off by a Tai belt from Cambodia, and the Palaungs, the Yangs and the Was of the Shan States were more or less isolated from their near relatives in the south-east. Before this, however, the Talaings had started carving out a political destiny for themselves, their long residence in the plains having caused them to diverge widely in speech from the hill tribes of similar ancestry who lay to the east of them. Thus it is that the affinities between Talauig and the other Mon Khmer languages in Burma are somewhat remote,
