4 THE RELATION OF CHINESE AND SIAMESE 



even forty-five centuries ago the institutions of the Chinese 

 people, their language, arts, government and religion, had 

 begun to develop on lines from which no departure has ever 

 been made." A fourth historic certainty is that the earlier 

 migrations of that section of the Tai known in early times as 

 the Ai-Lao, which occurred well within what all critics 

 recognize as historic times, were from this same region 

 where the race is located in the first mention in the Annals, 

 and under the same name as given in the first mention. 



Putting these four historic certainties together we may 

 say that if the Annals did not mention the Tai under the 

 name Mung about this time and in this locality, they would 

 be inconsistent with the whole later history of the race. 

 Incidentally it is worthy of note also that the very name 

 given in the Annals is a further mark of credibility. The race 

 is called a "Great" one. While it is perfectly natural to find 

 these early chroniclers calling one of their own rulers the 

 Great Yii, it would have been inconsistent with Chinese 

 custom and their well-known assumption of superiority for the 

 chroniclers of that early time to have called a small and 

 unimportant tribe of "aborigines" Great; and it is doubtful 

 if more modern chroniclers would have given that title to 

 the Tai. It seems a legitimate inference that the Tai, then 

 known as Mung, must have been already an important 

 people, and that the Annals of that date were really compiled 

 by very early compilers. Now, races do not attain greatness 

 at a bound. Racial development is slower than is national 

 development. The inference from this application of the title 

 "Great" to the Mung is that they must be much older as a 

 race than the date of their first mention : that is much older 

 than the time of the Great Yii, 2208 onward. 



We do not swear by Bishop Ussher as a chronologer. 

 But it is at least interesting to note that according to> him, 

 at about 2200 B.C. Babylonia and Assyria were less than 

 twenty years old, and Menes or Mizraim had not yet founded 

 Egypt ! This would make the Tai Race not only older than 

 the Chinese, but older than the Babylonians, Assyrians or 

 Egyptians ! The saner conclusion would seem to be that while 

 these three great nations were developing farther west, pos- 

 sibly the same wave of migration from the common center as 

 brought the Aryans to the northwest frontiers of India 

 brought the Great Mung to the extreme west of China, 

 There, simultaneously with the Babylonians, Assyrians and 

 Egyptians, they were being differentiated into a separate 

 race — the one which the Chinese found when a later wave of 

 migration brought them also, with a higher degree of 

 civilization, from the same western center to China. As a 



