250 
MESSRS. A. ROSE AND J. COGGIN BROWN ON 
have made the geography and history of the little-known and deeply interesting region 
marked out by Nature as the Burma-China Frontier. 
The province of Yunnan and its surrounding areas form the present home of 
numerous tribes, which have been driven towards it in a succession of human waves, 
and there is probably no district in the world where the tides of humanity have left 
so varied a deposit as in these mountain tracts forming the frontier lands of two great 
empires. Whilst the forces of Nature have been driving man from his northern home, 
the Chinese have been making a steady and irresistible advance from the east, till the 
high mountainous tracts of Yunnan, Kueichow, and Ssu-chuan in part, have become 
the refuge and the home for those whose physical or numerical weakness has compelled 
them to cede the fertile places of the earth to a more powerful invader. The earlier 
migrations have been gradually pressed back, the Thibetan races proper have been 
unable to force their way further south and the Chinese have pressed slowly in, occu- 
pying the favoured places and leaving, in western Yunnan for example, only the 
malarial though fertile valleys to the once powerful race of Shans. 
Century after century the same process has been repeated throughout the provinces 
of China, new races have been met and conquered, or absorbed with untiring patience, 
leaving a people with the striking physical dissimilarities of the Cantonese, the Shan- 
tung men and the Ssuchuanese, but with a common language and literature and a 
common social system which has welded them into a great empire. In the outlying 
province of Yunnan the same process is at work at the present day, the Chinese have 
posted themselves as far west as Tengyueh and even here, where they form an island 
community amidst a sea of varying tribes, the forces of law and wealth, of organiza- 
tion and intermarriage, are gradually impressing their neighbours with a terror of the 
Chinese power and winning them to a desire for absorption without appeal to arms. 
Of all these early races the Shans for a time succeeded in founding an empire, but, 
after a term of power lasting five hundred years, they fell back before the advance 
of the Mongol emperors in the 13th century, whilst the wilder tribes have probably 
remained un-united, and are now isolated in their mountain fastnesses, awaiting the 
time when their call shall come and ‘ ‘ the dew-drop slip into the shining sea.’ ’ 
Glancing back over the early history of western Yunnan, — a history known to us 
chiefly through the researches of Professor E. H. Parker 1 and his translations of the 
Chinese Annals, — we find that the Chinese had clearly defined relations with the Shan 
or Ailao empire of (modern) Talifu in the first century of our era. In about A.D. 50 
the Ailao king Hien-lih came into conflict with the Chinese, was defeated and became 
a vassal of China. The submission of other chiefs followed, and upwards of half a 
million of their subjects were grouped together to form the prefecture of Yung-chang 
Fu. In A.D. 220 China was split up into three empires, and the Ailao drop out of 
sight for some four hundred years, when they reappear again (A.D. 650) as the Nan- 
chao. On the west the Nanchao empire touched Magadha (modern Bengal), on the 
1 “Translation of the Annals of the Chinese Dynasty of Tang,” by Prof. E. H. Parker, taken from his book 
“ Burma, with special reference to her relations with China.’’ 
