The Mon (; Mon: ဂကူမည်; , ; , ) are an ethnic group who inhabit Lower Myanmar's Mon State, Kayin State, Kayah State, Tanintharyi Region, Bago Region and the Irrawaddy Delta. They also live in several areas of Thailand, mostly in Pathum Thani province, Phra Pradaeng and Nong Ya Plong. The native language is Mon, of the Monic branch of the Austroasiatic family. It shares a common origin with the Nyah Kur language, spoken by the people of the same name in Northeastern Thailand. A number of languages in Mainland Southeast Asia are influenced by the Mon language, which is also in turn influenced by those languages.
The Mon were one of the earliest to reside in Southeast Asia, and were responsible for the spread of Theravada Buddhism in Mainland Southeast Asia. The civilizations founded by the Mon were some of the earliest in Thailand as well as Myanmar and Laos. The Mon are regarded as a large exporter of Southeast Asian culture. Historically, many cities in Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos today, including Yangon, Pathum Thani, Lamphun, Lampang, and Vientiane were founded either by the Mon people or Mon rulers.
Nowadays, the Mon are a major ethnic group in Myanmar and a minor ethnic group in Thailand. The Mons from Myanmar are called Burmese Mon or Myanmar Mon. The Mons from Thailand are referred as Thai Raman or Thai Mon. The Mon dialects of Thailand and Myanmar are mutually intelligible.
Ethnonyms The Mon have been referred to by different names by different groups throughout history. During the pre-colonial era, the Burmese called them Talaing (တလိုင်း), which was adopted by the British during the colonial era. The term "Peguan" was also used by Europeans when Pegu was the capital of Lower Myanmar.
The use of "Talaing" has been found on inscriptions dating back to the 11th century, but it is now considered pejorative and is little used. It survives in fixed historical terms, among them the eponymous song genre in the Mahagita, the corpus of Burmese classical songs. The etymology of Talaing is debated; it may be derived from Mon, or is a reference to Telinga or Kalinga, a geographic region in southeast India. During the 12th century, the term acquired a derogatory connotation within the Mon community, when it became used by the Mon as a disparaging epithet for the mixed offspring of Mon women and foreign men.
The term "Mon" (spelt in Mon and in Burmese), which is synonymous with the Burmese word for 'noble,' was likely derived from Old Mon "rmeñ" by way of Middle Mon "rman" (ရာမန်). The ethnonym "rmeñ" was first recorded in the Kyanzittha's New Palace Inscription of AD 1102 in Myanmar. Derivatives of this ethnonym have been found in 6th to 10th-century Old Khmer and 11th-century Javanese inscriptions. One such instance is the pre-Angkorian inscription of Prasat Bassac, K.71, where ramañ stands in the name of a slave. Walailak Songsiri cites it in arguing that the Rāmanya of the Khmer inscription K.1198 need not denote a Mon country. A later Khmer instance may stand in the Preah Khan stele of Jayavarman VII, dated śaka 1113 or 1114, that is 1191 or 1192. Its closing verse asks that the people attached to the king's foundations be preserved, Pukāṃ and Rvañ among them. Cœdès took the two for Burmese and Mon; Thomas Maxwell, editing the inscription, reports the reading and does not adopt it. The geographic term Rāmaññadesa, which now refers to the Mon heartland on the Burmese coast, was coined by King Dhammazedi in 1479. The usefulness of Mon as an ethnic category has itself been questioned. Michael Aung-Thwin holds that Mon and Pyu as ethnic units are constructions of British colonial scholarship. Elizabeth Moore calls the terms over-simplistic and would read pre-Bagan Myanmar through landscape and interaction instead. Donald Stadtner defends both categories, and objects in particular to the claimed lack of archaeological evidence in lower Myanmar.
The Mon of Myanmar are divided into three sub-groups by ancestral region in Lower Myanmar. Mon Nya (; come from Pathein (the Irrawaddy Delta) in the west, Mon Tang (; ) from Bago in the central region, and Mon Teh (; ) from Mottama in the southeast.
History Prehistory On a long-standing account the Mon descend from Proto-Austroasiatic speakers who migrated from the Yangtze Kiang valley in southern China to Southeast Asia between 3,000 and 2,000 BCE. The routes given are the Mekong, Salween, Sittaung, Irrawaddy, Ping and Chao Phaya rivers. They eventually settled in locations including as far south as Malaya. Along the way, they brought with them the practice of riverine agriculture, including the cultivation of wet rice. Modern linguistic research by Sidwell (2021) suggests that the locus of Proto-Austroasiatic people was in the Red River Delta area of Northern Vietnam, around 4,000–4,500 years before present. (Video presentation)
Early history
The ancient Mon are believed to have been one of the earliest peoples of Mainland Southeast Asia. They established some of the earliest states in the region. These include Dvaravati in Central Thailand, whose culture spread into Northeastern Thailand, Sri Gotapura in Central Laos (modern Sikhottabong, Vientiane Prefecture), the Hariphunchai Kingdom in Northern Thailand, and the Thaton Kingdom in Lower Myanmar. The Mon were the first to receive Theravada Buddhist missionaries from Sri Lanka, in contrast to their Hindu contemporaries such as Cham peoples. An early establishment of Sri Lankan Buddhism in the Dvaravati sphere has been argued from the Sinhalese verses of the Noen Sa Bua inscription in Prachin Buri. Nicolas Revire holds that the argument carries methodological problems and has been refuted, and dates the inscription itself to the 10th or 11th century rather than the 8th. They adopted the Pallava script, and the oldest form of the Mon script was discovered in a cave in modern-day Saraburi, dating back to around 550 CE. Although no remains have been found from the Thaton Kingdom, it is widely mentioned in Bamar and Lanna chronicles.
According to the Northern Thai Chronicles, the city of Lavo (modern Lopburi) was founded by Phaya Kalavarnadishraj in 648 CE. He reportedly came from Takkasila, which is assumed to be the city of Tak or Nakhon Chai Si. Another historical figure, Phaya Kakabatr, is believed to have also come from Takkasila and established the Chula Sakarat era in 638 CE, which was used by the Siamese and Burmese until the 19th century. Phaya Kalavarnadishraj, the son of Phaya Kakabatr, founded Lavo a decade later. By the late 7th century, Lavo had expanded to the north. The legendary Queen Camadevi, who was said to be a daughter of a Lavo king, according to the Northern Thai Chronicle Cāmadevivaṃsa, came to rule as the first queen of Hariphunchai (modern Lamphun) around 750–800 CE. A few years later, her son Prince Anantayot founded Khelang Nakhon (modern Lampang), playing a significant role in the history of the Hariphunchai Kingdom.
Charles Keyes wrote that after 1000 CE the Dvaravati Mon faced constant pressure from Tai migrations from the north and Khmer invasions from the east. Many Dvaravati Mons fled to join other Mon civilizations in the present-day Lower Myanmar, while their descendants, the Nyah Kur people, still reside in Northeastern Thailand. Stephen Murphy has questioned readings of this kind. Comparing the inscribed boundary stones of Mueang Fa Daet with those of Thaton, he finds the narrative subjects similar or at times identical but the form, composition and ornament markedly different. He concludes that the lower Myanmar tradition developed on its own. His general objection is that ideas travel more easily than people, and that a migration on the scale proposed should have left a much larger archaeological, epigraphic and artistic trace than survives. McCormick and Jenny name the assumption that readings of this kind rest on. The study of the Mon, they write, has been concerned with their originariness, the expectation that whatever Mon, Thai and Burmese share must descend from the older Mon. They point to Michael Aung-Thwin's reappraisal of the historical and archaeological evidence, while noting that many scholars do not accept it.
Christian Bauer read the same centuries from the epigraphy, as a history of language use rather than of population. Mon was in use in the lower Chao Phraya basin until the 8th or 9th century, and by 1167 the same ground must, on his reading, already have been Khmer-speaking. He took the area north of Nakhon Sawan to have been Khmer-speaking by the 10th century, and marked that as an assumption. Mon lasted longer in the region south of Lamphun and Chiang Mai, where inscriptions in it are attested from the 12th to the 13th centuries before the shift to Thai. Five Old Mon inscriptions from Chiang Mai province that Shorto's dictionary of the Mon inscriptions does not carry antedate all of those from the Lamphun sites. In the same epigraphy he named the earliest vernacular gloss in Mon that identifies an illustration, an amulet-type object of the 6th century inscribed on the obverse in Old Mon, from Chan Sen in Nakhon Sawan province. He set the practice in a regional frame, Jātaka illustrations at Pagan of the 11th and 12th centuries carrying glosses in Old Mon, and the Thai glosses on the Jātaka slabs at Wat Si Chum following the same pattern. Despite the pressure from the Northern Thai people, the Hariphunchai kingdom managed to survive as a Mon polity in Northern Thailand.
Conquest of Thaton and Hariphunchai In 1057 CE, King Anawrahta of the Pagan Kingdom conquered the Thaton Kingdom of the Mon people in Lower Burma. The Mon culture and script had a significant influence on the Bamar, bringing the Mons under Bamar control for the first time. Despite this, the Mon remained a majority in Lower Burma.
On one hand, the Hariphunchai Kingdom of the Mon prospered during the reign of King Aditayaraj in the early 12th century. He is said to have fought wars with Suryavarman II of Angkor between 1113 and 1150 CE and constructed the Hariphunchai stupa.
In 1289, Mangrai also known as Mengrai was visited by merchants from the Mon kingdom of Hariphunchai. Hearing of the wealth of that kingdom, he determined to conquer it, against the advice of his counselors.Wyatt, D. K. Thailand, A Short History, p. 35–38, Bangkok 2003 As it was thought impossible to take the city by force, Mangrai sent a merchant named Ai Fa as a mole to gain the confidence of its Phaya Yi Ba. In time, Ai Fa became the Chief Minister and managed to undermine the King's authority. In 1292, taking advantage of discontent among the people, Mangrai defeated the Mon kingdom of Hariphunchai and added it to his kingdom. Phaya Yi Ba, the last king of Hariphunchai, was forced to flee south to Lampang. A few years later, Phaya Yi Ba's son, King Boek of Lampang, attacked Chiang Mai with a large army. King Mangrai and his second son, Prince Khram, led the defence against the Lampang army. Prince Khram defeated King Boek in personal combat on elephant-back at Khua Mung, a village near Lamphun. King Boek fled by way of the Doi Khun Tan mountain range between Lamphun and Lampang, but he was caught and executed. King Mangrai's troops occupied the city of Lampang, and Phaya Yi Ba was made to flee further south, this time to Phitsanulok. The Mon culture was integrated into Lan Na culture. The Lan Na adopted the Mon script and religion.
Hanthawaddy kingdom
In 1287, the collapse of the Pagan Kingdom created a power vacuum. Wareru, who was born to a Mon mother and a Tai father in Donwun Village in the Thaton District, went to Sukhothai for trade and later eloped with the daughter of the king. He established himself as king of the Mon in Martaban (present-day Mottama), and later moved the capital to Pegu. His Hanthawaddy Kingdom, which existed from 1287 to 1539, was a period of prosperity and power for the Mon.