The Dai’s Homecoming Queen

It was after the seventh or eighth tumbler of rice whiskey that the tears began to flow. Nai Tong, the weather-beaten, gold-toothed village chief, blinked hard, splashed the whiskey jug around and raised his glass. “Welcome to Sipsongpanna, daughter of the Dai. Welcome home.” It was a magic moment and the culmination of an emotion-charged journey for my wife, Sawitree. She is the first of her large northern Thai family to travel back to the land of her ancestors, the Dai people, who inhabit the southern tip of China’s Yunnan province. The region is now known as Xishuangbanna, a Sinicization of the Dai name, which means “12,000 fields.”

Exactly 130 years ago, my wife’s great-grandmother, then a seven-year-old named Bua, left her village to walk with her parents to a new life in old Siam. Why they left is lost in the mists of timemost likely it was amid turmoil as colonial powers bickered over the region, sandwiched between Burma’s Shan states and modern-day Laos. They were following a well-worn path. For centuries, the Buddhist, rice-farming Dai have been tempted by the wide open spaces of Thailand’s north, and have ventured across the Mekong to start anew. Sawitree grew up speaking Dai Lue, the main Dai language, which remains the lingua franca of many northern Thais.

Our first glimpse of her roots had come two days earlier. Our passenger plane from Thailand dropped through a thick layer of cloud to reveal steep, wrinkled peaks flanking a jade patchwork of paddies. As we whizzed over the treetops to land outside the main town of Jinghongor in Dai Lue, Chiang Rung, “the city of the dawn”what looked like dozens of Pizza Huts peeped from the verdure. This was the unique architecture of the Daitheir signature, high-canted roofs perched atop thick teak pillars.

With no clue other than the name of Bua’s childhood village, Baan Yandee, we decide to start at the palace of the Dai King, Jau Phaendin. After hours of wandering Jinghong’s wide, quiet streets, we spot two elderly Dai women in traditional dresslong, silk sheaths and blouses, cinched by wide, silver belts. “Jau Phaendin?” asks my wife. “Don’t you know?” whispers one of the women. The last Dai King, she tells us, was exiled to Kunming during the tumultuous early years of the People’s Republic of China, and his magnificent teak palace was torn down by rabid Red Guards. The Dai were a feisty people, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and it was felt they did not need a monarch around to stir up ethnic pride or notions of independence. (These days, the septuagenarian King works at the Yunnan Research Institute for Nationalities, and the Chinese government prizes the bright costumes and quaint villages of the Dai as a lucrative tourism draw.)

Does the old woman know of Baan Yandee? “Of course,” she replies. “It’s the village where Jau Phaendin was born.” My wife explains her quest and the woman leads us through a maze of backstreets to a house with a handsome Dai roof, crouched in the shadows of tiled apartment blocks. We knock, and a man named Saengau answers the door with a scowl that fades as Sawitree explains her story. “Come in, come in,” he smiles, calling his wife. They were once dancers at the King’s palace, Saengau explains, and he is related to Jau Phaendin. “Very sad, very sad,” he says. “I had to run when they came to smash the palace.”

Saengau rummages in a drawer and puts on a video of Baan Yandee’s New Year festival. It shows a noisy, musical procession, where an elderly chap is carried though cobbled streets on a moth-eaten throne. “That’s Jau Phaendin,” he says reverently. “He is allowed to come back to his village once every year.”

Next morning we’re bumping over dirt roads through rice fields, on our way to meet the past. Word of our arrival at Baan Yandee gets around quickly. Within 10 minutes, dozens of smiling villagers have materialized, each trying to drag us to his house. Nai Tong, the headman, introduces himself and listens with rapt attention to my wife’s story.

“Bua? Bua?” he ruminates. One of the oldest women mutters and squawks, professing vague memories of a cousin of that name who left as a little girl. “Come,” says the chief, “we must eat and drink.” His house, a magnificent example of the Dai style, was built 10 years after Bua would have begun her long trek. I soon lose count of the glasses of firewater raised and quaffed, as the women bustle about, assembling a feast. My wife is the center of attention, showered with questions and hugs. Overwhelmed, she chokes back sobs. The chief raises his glass and asks for silence. Then he clasps her hands and says once more “Welcome home.”