THE SIAMESE-CHINESE WAVE.
For those who know both the Karens and the Shans it is hard, at first sight, to understand how it can be scientifically demonstrable that the former are more closely related to the latter than to the other hill dwellers of Burma and the Shan States. The Karen has in th^ past been looked upon as so different from his neighbours that he has tended to become more or less an engiina, but philology has now assigned him, at any rate provisionally, a place in the order of peoples. Save for the language test, one might be disposed to class him with the Kaw, the Riang or the Muhso, but it is now established that his speech is more closely allied to Shan than to the vernaculars of the Tibeto-Burman branch or of the Mon Khmer family, and his language must be looked on as indicating his racial origin. This classification has the result of, so to speak, cutting the Karen off from all intimate connection with the hill tribes with whom he would naturally be held to have an affinity and to leave him still somewhat of a puzzle, but till it has been proved to be fallacious it must be accepted. We can take it in any case, however, that the Shan-Karen connection runs extremely far back, for, whether the Karens entered Burma long before the dawn of civilization or only shortly before the beginnings of history, it is clear that they and the Tais (the common ancestors of the Shans, the Laos, the Siamese and a number of communities in French Indo-China) must have wholly separated from each other long before their earliest representatives drifted into the region we are here concerned with, and it is beyond question that they have been
