The Lau or Shan race speak a language which was primarily East Himalaic, like Mon, Kambojan, Annam, and Pa-long. Like them, it was carried at some remote period into the Brahmaputra Gangetic province, and received soine Dravidian roots. Subsequently it shared in the great eastern movement of Himalaie dialects from the basin of the Ganges into that of the Irawadi, where it was intimately connected with some of the intrusive 1Vest Iliumlaic or Tibeto-Burman dialects. It was then pressed further into the east, into the basin of the Upper Mei-kong and Tonkin, and became the language of Yunnan. During the Han dynasty, Chinese colonies began to occupy the valleys of Yunnan, and from that time Lau was exposed to the influence of Chinese, and began to receive the modified form it possessed when the pressure of that great race on the older tribes of Yunnan caused the Lau to swarm to the westward and southward. When tbey re-entered the basin of the Irawadi, tbey had acquired from their partially Chinese civilisation, a superiority over the Tibeto-Burman tribes of northern Ultra India, which made the Lau clans predominant along the central belt of Ultra-India, from the Himalaya to the mouth of the Menam.
The Shan are great workers in silver, and the art of embossing on different utensils of silver seems to be known to the Kathay Shan, of whom there were in the middle of the 19th century 20,000 or 25,000 between Ava and Amirapura. Tin exists in the Shan States to the south-west of Mandalay, but the mines have never been worked. The tin consumed in the country now is all imported. Iron abounds in the Shan States, and the district of Pagan, to the south of Man dalay, is noted for it. A manufactory exists on a rough-and-ready scale in this district at Ponpah Toung, but the out-turn is inconsiderable. To the west of &Tiling:, for miles up the Irawath river, the ore abounds—a licit limmatite.—Fule, Jour. Geog. Soc. xxvii., 1857 ; Mason, Tenasserini; Lathanes Ethnology, pp. 157-257.