The Delineation of the Kayah States Frontiers with Thailand: 1809–1894
In 1809, representatives of Chiang Mai and the Kayah State of Kantarawaddy marked their mutual boundary by releasing a buffalo on the summit of a range of mountains and erecting markers on the line it followed. As this episode suggests, these Kayahs and Thais (and also Burmans) translated the world into cognitive maps quite different from those of the British colonialists who would later rule in Burma. The anthropologist, Edmund Leach, noted this difference in his “The Frontiers of ‘Burma’”, observing that European concepts of frontier, state, and nation are not always applicable to Burma where the frontier is not an absolute division but “a border zone through which cultures interpenetrate in a dynamic manner”. This paper examines the interaction between the Kayah-Thai-Burman and the British conceptions of frontier in the working out of demarcated borders between the Kayah states and Thailand during the nineteenth century.