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 Chinese languages of Burma take off from one of two main branches, the Tibeto-Burman and the Siamese-Chinese. It will be safe to take the above linguistic division as a basis for ethnical classification and divide the tribes (always excepting the Salons) up into Mon Khmers, Tibeto-Burmans and Siamese-Chinese.

We need not at this stage concern ourselves with the composition of the different groups and sub-groups of these families and branches, of which there are many, but for convenience of reference it may be mentioned here at the outset that the main representatives in Burma of the Mon Khmer race family are the Talaings, the Was and the Palaungs, while those of the Tibeto-Burman branch of the Tibeto-Chinese family are the Burmans, the Chins and the Kachins, and those of the Siamese-Chinese branch of the Tibeto-Chinese family the Shans and the Karens.

It is impossible, as stated above, to give any idea of the order in which these migration waves came down from Central Asia, for they were not single streams, but rather a succession of intermittent spates, the first separated by millenniums from the last; but it is probable, if for no other reason than that its traces seem the most diffuse and faint, that the Mon Khmer was in its beginnings the remotest in point of time. We know that the Shans and the Kachins represent comparatively late movements; but it wrould be most unsafe to hazard a conjecture as to whether the Chins or the Karens were the first to arrive in the country they now occupy, whether the Palaungs were in Tawngpeng before the Marus reached the Confluence, or even whether the Burmans had come down into the Irrawaddy valley before or after the Talaings had crossed the Salween.

In the map attached to this article an attempt has been