episodeThe leg-tattoo zone

เขตลายขา

Burma, the Shan States and Lanna — and the border is not the border

What it is

One custom, four peoples, and a boundary that runs through the middle of modern Thailand rather than along its edge.

The long version

Put the sources side by side.

Burma, 1882. Shway Yoe: every up-country man is tattooed from the navel to below the kneecap. Not a single taw-tha, the sturdy man of the small towns and villages, is without it.

The Shan States, 1910. Milne: a Shan boy is a child until he is tattooed; the rule is both legs, waist to knee, and often on to the ankles. Shway Yoe adds that the Shans go further than the Burmese — up the back, to the nape, and among a chief's retainers, everywhere but palms and soles.

Lanna. The Lanna volume: men tattooed until it looked as if they wore black trousers, waist to ankle, torso, arms, fingers — and "this fashion was widespread among the Burmese and the Tai Yai, who tattoo yantras no less than the Lanna."

Siam. Milne, in the same paragraph where she says the Shans learned it from the Burmese: "the Siamese, who are so closely related to them, tattoo themselves very slightly, or not at all."

Inference — that last line is usually read as a fact about Thailand. It is a fact about central Thailand. Milne was comparing the Shan to Bangkok, and Lanna — which was a tributary kingdom, not a province, until 1899 — is on the other side of her comparison. The leg tattoo's territory is the Tai-Buddhist upland: Burma, the Shan States, the Tai Khuen and Tai Lue towns, and Lanna. The edge of the zone runs through modern Thailand, roughly where Lanna ended, and the colonial record could not see it because it was reading the map by kingdoms.

This is what the map on this page is drawing, and it is the one map on the site that no source draws for it.

Notes

The zone is drawn from four written sources and one manuscript. It is not a survey, nobody counted tattooed men anywhere, and the outline is this project's reading rather than anyone's measurement.

Connected to

• Sak kha lai The Thai side.
• Htoe kwin The Burmese side.
• Shan leg tattooing The middle.
• Kengtung A town in the centre of it.
• Leslie Milne Whose sentence this turns on.

Named here by

• Shan leg tattooing The zone this belongs to, and where its border runs.
• Kengtung The zone.

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