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Description: Although the history of Chinese overseas migration to Southeast Asia is widely known, the untold story is the overland movement of Chinese as traders and settler into the domains of Southeast Asia's mountain chieftains and lowland princes. With roots in the early trade on the periphery of the Chinese empire, the overland Chinese network brought thousands of migrants from China's Yunnan Province into Northern Thailand in the second half of the twentieth century. Known colloquially in Northern Thailand as <i>haw</i>, the Yunnanese Chinese inherited the legacy of entrepreneurial and mediating roles from early traders. At the same time, their identity in contemporary Thailand has been shaped by cold war politics and, most recently, the forces of globalization in the Southeast Asia region. Ann Mawell Hill's work on the premodern caravan trade and the Yunnanese Chinese illuminates hitherto unexplored corners of Southeast Asian history and ethnography. It acknowledges the variety of cultres characteristic of the Sino-Southeast Asian uplands, but brings to it an encompassing perspective based on the far-flung Yunnanese trade network and its regularities. This study of Yunnanese Chinese stands as a critique of the prevailing assimilationist model of Chinese accommodation to Thai society. Drawing inspiration from E. R. Leach and his successors, Hill demonstrates how ethnic identities change in response to both the process of localization and the larger structures of state, region, and their economies.
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