VI.] THE SOUTHERN MONGOLS. 2OI 



Shan ingredients. Mr Colquhoun also, during his explorations 

 in the southern provinces, found that "most of the aborigines, 

 although known to the Chinese by various nicknames, were 

 Shans; and that their propinquity to the Chinese was slowly 

 changing their habits, manners, and dress, and gradually in- 

 corporating them with that people 1 ." 



This process of fusion has been in progress for ages, not only 

 between the southern Chinese and the Shans, but 



Shan and 



also between the Shans and the Caucasic aborigines, 



_ . . Contacts. 



whom we first met amongst the Kakhyens, but who 

 are found scattered mostly in small groups over all the uplands 

 between Tibet and the Cochin-Chinese coast range. The result 

 is that the Shans are generally of finer physique than either the 

 kindred Siamese and Malays in the south, or the more remotely 

 connected Chinese in the north. The colour, says Mr Bock, 

 "is much lighter than that of the Siamese," and "in facial 

 expression the Laotians are better-looking than the Malays, 

 having good high foreheads, and the men particularly having 

 regular well-shaped noses, with nostrils not so wide as those of 

 their neighbours 2 ." Still more emphatic is the testimony of 

 Dr Kreitner of the Szechenyi expedition, who tells us that the 

 Burmese Shans have "a nobler head than the Chinese; the dark 

 eyes are about horizontal, the nose is straight, the whole expression 

 approaches that of the Caucasic race 3 ." 



Notwithstanding their wide diffusion, interminglings with other 

 races, varied grades of culture, and lack of political 

 cohesion, the Tai-Shan groups acquire a certain tonedSpSch. 

 ethnical and even national unity from their gene- 

 rally uniform type, social usages, Buddhist religion, and common 

 Indo-Chinese speech. Amidst a chaos of radically distinct idioms 

 current amongst the surrounding indigenous populations, they 

 have everywhere preserved a remarkable degree of linguistic 

 uniformity, all speaking various more or less divergent dialects 

 of the same mother-tongue. Excluding a large percentage of 

 Sanskrit terms introduced into the literary language by their 



1 Op> cit. p. 328. - Temples and Elephants, p. 320. 



3 " Der Gesichtsausdruck uberhaupt nahert sich der Kaukasischen Race " 

 (Imfernen Os/en, p. 959). 



