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The connection between the Burmans, as we now know them and the races of a cognate stock in Tibet and China has by now been as closely followed up and as clearly defined as circumstances permit. Research has declared with no uncertain voice that the Burmans are related by a common ancestry in the far north on the one hand to the Tibetans and on the other to the far-spread Lolos of South-Western China, and the language test shows that the relationship can be traced up through a host of allied tribes occupying the country that now separates the three peoples. Although the precise spot cannot now be fixed, we know that it must have been somewhere in the eastern portion of the Central Asian table land that the Tibeto-Burman race acquired an identity of its own and that it was from this region that, century after century, it sent its off-shoots out along the valleys and hill ridges into Burma and Indo-China.

With the Tibetans we need not now concern ourselves, their seats are well-defined. Tibet is far from the frontier of Burma as at present marked out, our main interest is in the ethnic chain that stretches across the for the most part unexplored region dividing the two countries. The Lolos need only be considered shortly. Their home almost touches the north-eastern border of the Shan States and conceivably some of them may hereafter themselves immigrate into British India, but on the whole the course of their wanderings from their northern home has kept beyond the Mekong in the Yangtze region, well to the east of the Burmans and their nearest congeners.