Lua or Lawa

The Lua were originally peoples of the Salawin and Mae Khong rivers, and are believed to have migrated to South China, Burma, Laos and northern Thailand long long time ago. The Mae Ping valleys in the North of Thailand used to be settlements of the Lua, long before Thai peoples came to conquer and take these lands to live here.

The Lua are linguistically related to the Mon-Khmer. They have been now so much and so well absorbed into Thai cultures and way of life that it is hardly possible to identify them from the Thai. Those retaining their own identity live almost only in Chiang Mai and Mae Hong Son.

The Lua can live both at a very high altitude and in valleys. They have now adopted a cyclical bush fallow and, like the Karen, a skill of making paddy rice on terraces. The Lua are monogamous and their kinship is patrilineal, although not so strictly. They are originally animists and ancestor worshippers; now they have combined their traditional beliefs with Buddhism.