“From around the last century BC, these people (Mon-Khmer) had trade contacts with India which eventually brought ideas and technologies from a region where urban centers had already developed. Larger settlements began to appear, especially in the lower Mekong basin, and to the west in an area stretching from the lower Chaophraya basin across the hills on the neck of the peninsula to its western coast. In the sixth century AD, by adapting scripts borrowed from southern India, these two areas began to write the languages of Khmer and Mon, respectively. In the Khmer country, the farmers became expert at trapping and storing water from rainfall, lakes and rivers to support a dense population. Rulers marshaled this manpower, along with Indian ideas about urban living, construction, religion and statecraft to create new urban centers, state systems and monarchies. The magnificent capital at Angkor became a model which was honoured and mimicked by smaller centers scattered westwards across the Khorat Plateau and Chaophraya river sytem.
This early Mon-Khmer tradition was anchored on the coast and spread inland. A second inflow of people and culture came from the north through the hills.
The group of languages now known as Tai probably originated among peoples who lived south of the Yangzi River before the Han Chinese spread from the north into the area from the sixth century BC. As the Han armies came to control China’s southern coastline in the first few centuries AD, some of these peoples retreated into the high valleys in the hills behind the coast. Then, over many centuries, some moved westwards, spreading Tai language dialects along a 1000-kilometer arc from the Guangxi interior to the Brahmaputra valley.”
“Their communities became identified with rice growing. They may also have acquired some martial skills (that’s martial….not marital
) from their encounters with the Chinese because other peoples saw them as fierce warriors.
Some of the earlier, mainly Mon-Khmer inhabitants retreated upwards into the hills.
Others coexisted with this farmer-warrior elite, often adopting a Tai language and gradually losing their own separate identity.”
“Probably they coexisted with earlier inhabitants because their different techniques of rice growing dictated a preference for different types of land. The Mon-Khmer trapped rainfall in ponds. The Tai adapted their skill with water flows to using the rivers. Eventually the Tai language now known as ‘Thai’ became dominant in the Chaophraya basin.”