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occupied by the Chins and their cognates, they turned, probably within the last hundred years, to the east again and descended into and crossed the valley of the Irravvaddy, moving southwards on one side of the river as far as Katha and finding on the other an outlet in the Shan States, down which they are still continuing to press, This eastern thrust in the southward movement of the Kachins has had a somewhat puzzling result, for it has brought them down, within the last sixty years or so, into the country of the Eastern Tibeto-Burmans and has caused them to be erroneously classified with the Marus and other hill tribes, whose path from the north had lain in the Salween neighbourhood. The reader must not, however, be misled by their present habitat into assigning the Kachins an Eastern Tibeto-Burman origin.
Of our Eastern Tibeto-Burmans, the Burmans are the most important. The Burmans themselves have been purposely excluded from the scope of this note, but it is essential here, in order to understand the distribution of the Tibeto-Burman branch as a whole, to bear in mind the following facts regarding them. When first heard of their capital was at Tagaung on the Upper Irrawaddy. How long they had been there before the commencement of the historical period we do not know, but in their first beginnings as a nation, their trend—till they were brought up at Prome and Toungoo by the Talaings—-was towards the south, and even if we had no other guide we should have every reason, from this southward tendency, to infer an origin from further north. Tagaung lies at the northern end of what is now the Burmese country proper. Above this the population of the Irrawaddy valley is mainly non-Burman, and it is clear that the Burmans, when they reached Tagaung in those far off days, must have descended from a region now mainly inhabited by Shans, Kachins, Marus and the like.
