From Southwest China into Upper Indochina: an overview of Hmong (Miao) migrations 1 Jean Michaud Abstract: From southern China through mountainous Vietnam, Laos and eventually as far south as the Chao Phraya basin in Thailand, groups of Hmong swiddeners were seen migrating during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When, and under what circumstances did large chunks of this sub-group of the Miao from Guizhou and its periphery move their settlements to the southern part of the continental Southeast Asia Massif? Who were they? What was their history before these migrations? This paper makes use of early evidence to shed some light on the main causes of that march into the mountain ranges of the Peninsula. Keywords: Hmong, Miao, ethno-history, highland minorities, South-East Asia. Over several centuries, even millenaries in certain cases, multi shaped human migrations have occurred in the Peninsula. Majorities of the Mon and Burmese groups have gradually settled in Burma, as did the Thai in Thailand, the Lao in Laos and the Kinh in Vietnam. In doing so, these stronger groups have pushed more ancient settlers like remnants of the first indigenous, or the later Proto- and Deutero-Malays, most of whom are members of the Austro-Asiatic linguistic family, further away or higher in the continental South-East Asian Massif. At this point, it is useful to keep in mind that all these early highland settlers, precisely because of their earlier arrival, formed societies quite distinct from the Hmong, the one we will be discussing here. For more than a century now, and since the establishment of modern national borders in the Peninsula, only tiny, mostly fragmented migrations from southern China continue to occur. Micro-societies of swiddeners, following mostly hill top paths, have arrived in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Burma to establish more or less permanent settlements in the higher parts of the Massif, away from lowland societies with which they share almost no cultural characteristics. These societies, it must be recognised, also have major cultural differences Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Vol. 38, No. 2, August 1997 ISSN: 1360-7456, pp119–130 ß Victoria University of Wellington, 1997. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Author: Dr Jean Michaud, Deputy Director, Department of South-East Asian Studies, University of Hull, Hull, HU6 7RX, United Kingdom. E-mail: J.Michaud@seas.hull.ac.uk