Hill tribes are ethnic communities from nearby countries who have settled for hundreds of years in mountainous northern Thailand, where their culture has interwoven with mainstream Thai traditions yet remains distinct from it.
Many hill tribes specialize in weaving and creating handicrafts that are popular souvenir choices among travellers, providing additional income while simultaneously maintaining traditional ways of life.
Akha
The Akha are a hill tribe closely related to China’s Hani people. You’ll find them living in northern Thailand (Chiang Rai & Chiang Mai), Laos and northern Vietnam in small villages at higher elevations where agriculture and tourism provide their primary income sources.
The Akha are known for their intricately hand embroidered clothing/costumes including jackets, skirts, leg wraps and beetle wings adorned with beads or silver balls as a form of “rite of passage”, especially around entering womanhood and celebrating adulthood. Each year towards the end of August hundreds of young Akha girls attend this spectacular swing ceremony which marks their transition into womanhood – usually featuring hundreds of young Akha girls wearing fine hand made/hand embroidered indigo dyed cotton cloth adorned with beads silver balls tassels long red boas or long red boas beetle wings or French, Indian or Chinese coins from generations past!
Even though the Akha have relied on land for subsistence and are isolated from other Thais, they have managed to preserve their culture and way of life despite becoming less dependent on traditional methods over time due to Thai education, land restrictions, missionary activities, technology & modern lifestyle changes. Unfortunately, as Thai schooling, land restrictions, missionary activities & technology begin to have an impact on traditional lifestyles this could all change soon enough.
Visits to Akha are a wonderful opportunity to witness their culture’s rich traditions. The Akha take pride in embracing visitors with open arms.
Hmong
Hmong Hill Tribe in Thailand is well-renowned for their commercialism. Their embroidery skills and use of hemp textiles make them prized silversmiths; their exquisite designs can be found throughout northern Thailand tourist souvenir shops. Although sometimes wary of strangers and difficult to communicate with, Hmong people are well educated and intelligent people.
Hmong life traditionally revolved around agriculture; most families own livestock such as cows, pigs, water buffaloes and horses as means of transporting goods in the mountains. Coffee, tea and vegetables were grown on terraced fields. Furthermore, itinerant traders would frequently buy Hmong opium grown on highland fields for cash or exchange it for grain or silver that often served as bridewealth gifts.
Today, many hill tribe villages are connected to the electricity grid and some even have cell phone coverage. Children attend Thai government-run schools where they learn English as well as native dialects from teachers specializing in each.
40-50% of hill tribe members do not possess full citizenship status, which greatly limits their employment prospects and ability to seek justice through Thai courts. Some victims of human traffickers have even been coerced into prostitution or slave labor by human traffickers; yet tourists continue to flock to these villages on vacation; it is therefore crucial for travelers to book with responsible travel agencies who respect and value indigenous communities.
Lisu
The Lisu are one of the newest hill tribes to arrive in Thailand around 1910, with less than 30,000 living there at any one time. While they were once active opium farmers and sellers, today their focus lies more in farming high altitude land and hunting than opium production and sales. Like other hill tribes they practice animist beliefs and revere their ancestors.
They inhabit villages at altitudes between 3,000 to 6,000 feet, ideal for growing opium poppies as their main cash crop. Their houses are constructed from wood and bamboo; hunting equipment includes crossbows with poisoned arrows for crossbow hunting as well as crossbows used with poisoned arrows for crossbow hunting; they collect medical herbs, honey, wild mangoes and ginger for medicine collection, bird eggs for breeding purposes, bamboo shoots as well as medical herbs collected locally – while women excel at needle working skills as they sew applique patchwork onto clothing as an extension to make up another garment or layer that gives off another dimension altogether.
Their religion combines animism and ancestor worship, believing that all living things possess spirits which interact with matter to produce life. They respect gods who represent earth, sky, wind and lightning as well as forests and mountains.
Lisu women are skilled artisans at weaving cloth using a technique called “tue-tue” (thread of life). Thread is sewn into thin strands 8-12 meters long that burst with life and color before being tied together into thick masses that look like chicken intestines to accent sashes worn around waist. In addition, their clothes may feature fabric that has tufts resembling tails of bows, snake eyes or fangs to complete the effect.
Mlabri
The Mlabri are an enigmatic hunter-gatherer people living in remote high mountain forests in northern Thailand and western Laos. Although one of the smallest hill tribes, they have only been studied briefly in detail; Austrian anthropologist Hugo Bernatzik described them in his 1938 book, Spirits of Yellow Leaves. These hunters and gatherers follow few social rituals and are said to believe in forest spirits or other nature spirits; no central authority controls their lives; although they sometimes barter food for local villages.
Genetic data indicate that the Mlabri people were founded recently – possibly no more than 500-800 years ago from a small founder population. Their low levels of mitochondrial DNA diversity, Y chromosome haplotype diversity and reduced genetic variability at autosomal loci suggest they suffered a severe population reduction event which drastically shrunk their numbers.
DNA evidence also supports a close connection between the Mlabri and Htin hill tribes who speak a dialect of Austro-Asiatic of Northern Highlands language. Both model-free and Bayesian clustering analyses show them belonging to one tightly clustered group indicating shared ancestry; oral tradition as well as other anthropological studies provide further support that these are descendants from one founding population; furthermore their small population sizes and geographic isolation may explain low genetic diversity levels among them.
Lahu
The Lahu hill tribes stand out as being among the most distinctive among Thailand’s hill tribes in terms of culture and lifestyle. Like other mountain peoples, Lahu hold deep beliefs in spirits and practice animism, providing daily offerings to ensure that spirits will act favorably towards them. They also possess an impressive oral tradition and dedicate one room in their dwellings specifically to honour ancestors.
Lahu people reside mainly in Thailand’s northeast and live as self-contained village communities. Though predominantly farmers, Lahu also specialize in hunting and are famous for producing intricately woven fabrics. Though mostly farmers, Lahu are well known as being serious people governed by strict principles of right and wrong governed by their elder council of elders – making them among Thailand’s most gender equal societies.
Many Lahu people struggle to make ends meet in their villages, leading them to relocate into town for jobs in construction, restaurants or karaoke bars. Others remain and earn additional income by producing handicrafts such as scarves; these scarves are then purchased directly from artists at fair market rates by Counting Flowers who sell them through its marketplace.
Though Hill Tribes have been granted protection and are free to speak their own languages, many still lack basic education and depend on government aid for healthcare and housing assistance. Furthermore, 30-35% have not acquired Thai citizenship which would give them access to public services and social benefits.
Karen
Even though many hill tribes share similar cultural traditions, they vary significantly in cultural practices and religious observance. Some hill tribes such as Lisu and Lahu practice nomadism with Tibetan-Burman roots while others like Karen have become predominantly assimilative since arriving in Thailand more recently. With no written language to represent their culture or history this is often difficult.
The Karen, Thailand’s largest ethnic group, sought asylum here after fleeing Burma’s military regime some decades ago. Rice farmers by profession, they specialize in crop rotation, cultivating both irrigated paddy rice as well as slash and burn fields alongside cultivating slash-and-burn fields with regular burning cycles and cultivating fields adjacent to each other for crop rotation purposes. Living in villages consisting of clustered bamboo houses with thatch roofs near streams or rivers for washing water and drinking supplies while married women wear black outfits while unmarried women wear long white tunics for washing/drinking purposes.
The Karen who live in Thailand are predominantly Buddhists, with some Christians and animists mixed in as well. Unfortunately, government-provided education is a double-edged sword for these people as it both imparts Thai norms and values while simultaneously eroding their traditional cultures – as evidenced by children at Ban Toon Pong village school drawing pencil sketches of US celebrities and fast food chains as examples of Western cultural imperialism encroaching on even marginalized hill tribes.