SHAN, a southern Mongoloid race, one of the most numerous and important of Asia, constituting a large proportion of the pop ulation of Assam, Burma, Siam and probably southern China. Their own name for themselves is Tai (Thai), "Free." "Shan" is probably a Chinese term meaning mountaineer and the same word as Siam, where, however, the name for the race is Lao. In Assam they are called Ahom; Pai and Ngiou are other terms used in China and Burma. They seem to have come originally from the Kinlung mountains north of Szechwan, and to have fused with the Chinese, and with the leucoderm aborigines who survive all over the uplands between Tibet and the coast of Cochin-China. The expansion of the Shans towards the sea, at the expense of the Mon Khmer nation, took place about the seventh century A.D. The Chinese invasion of Burma in the thirteenth century gave them the predominant position in ASIA: Farther Asia, which they held till the sixteenth century. Assam they invaded in the thirteenth cen tury and held until the eighteenth.
They are widely diffused, and having amalgamated with other races are to be found in varying grades of culture, but although without political cohesion they display marked ethnical uniformity. Their written languages, based on the Devanagari script, may be also connected with the picture-writing system of the Lolo (q.v.).
In the case of the Ahoms the language is virtually extinct, though many "putis"—books written on strips of palm leaf—are extant.
In religion the Shans are Buddhists, except in Assam where most of them have been Hinduized. The body is usually cremated, sometimes buried. They are notorious for gambling, but otherwise fairly industrious, growing cotton, tea and irrigated rice, breeding horses, catching elephants, mining for jade and amber. They are renowned for metal-work, swords in particular. The men tattoo their bodies as a rule and incise the skin for the insertion of precious stones as talismans. Their political organization is mostly in small states under princelings known as Tsawbwa. Polygamy is permitted, but monogamy is usual; and though the family is patrilineal, the bridegroom frequently resides with the bride's parents. They use a variation of the Chinese calendar system, reckoning by cycles of sixty years, each cycle containing five stems of twelve years each. Their language is highly tonal.