Hmong people

Hmong
Hmoob (White Hmong) · Moob (Green Hmong) · ม้ง (Thai) · Méo (older exonym)
Total population
595,028 in Laos (2015 census); 558,043 in Vietnam (1989); 83,969 in Thailand (1990): 37: 94, 98
Regions with significant populations
Laos: above all Xieng Khouang, Vientiane, Sayaboury and Luang Prabang provinces Vietnam: the northern uplands, from Cao Bằng and Hà Giang to Nghệ An Thailand: 13 provinces of the north, among them Tak, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai and Nan China: Guizhou, Yunnan and Sichuan United States: above all California, Minnesota and Wisconsin
Languages
Hmong, of the Hmong–Mien family
Related ethnic groups
Miao (China), Iu Mien
Accessions
7

The Hmong (White Hmong Hmoob, Green Hmong Moob; older exonym Méo or Meo) are an upland people of southern China, northern Vietnam, Laos and northern Thailand. Their language is classed with that of the Iu Mien in the Hmong–Mien family. In China they are counted within the Miao nationality.^{: 79–80, 82} Most of the Hmong of mainland Southeast Asia descend from people who left southern China in the 19th century and settled in the mountains, as a rule above 1,000 m.^{: 85, 90} The 2015 census of Laos counted 595,028 Hmong, 9.2 per cent of the population.^: 37 During the war in Laos many Hmong fought in the army of the Hmong general Vang Pao, paid by the United States. More than 116,000 Hmong from Laos and Vietnam fled to Thailand between 1975 and 1990. Most of them went on from the camps there to the United States, France and other countries.^{: 95–96, 98}

Hmong households have grown hemp for the cloth of their clothes. A herbarium sheet of 1933 from Doi Langka in Thailand reads "Cultivated by Mêo people for weaving". At Ban Mae Sa Noi near Chiang Mai and among the Hmong of Wenshan in Yunnan the dead are dressed in hemp for burial. In 2021 and 2022, 326 Hmong farmers in Phop Phra, in Tak Province, were registered as hemp growers. A herbarium label of 1993 from a Hmong village in Chiang Mai Province describes cannabis grown for spice and smoked. In 2012 a Vietnamese border officer said that Hmong on the Lao side of the border grew cannabis for sale. In the United States, Hmong farmers in Siskiyou County, California, were reported in 2021 to be growing marijuana illegally.

Name and identity

The people call themselves Hmong; in the region they are also known as H'mong, Mong, Méo and Miao.^: 79 In Thailand the two main groups speak White Hmong (Hmoob Dawb) and Green Hmong (Moob Ntsuab).^: 88 In 1987 the linguist David Filbeck wrote that "the Meo (Miao) are now called Hmong (or Mong), because this is what the Meo people call themselves". In northern Vietnam the name Méo was given to the Hmong and Mán to the Yao groups of the Chinese border.^: 86

In Chinese sources from the 10th to the 18th century the name Miao was at times a general term for the non-Han peoples of south-western China. It is not certain which groups it named before the 14th and 15th centuries. In the People's Republic, Miao is the name of a national minority made up of four related peoples whose languages are not mutually intelligible: the Hmong, the Hmou, the Qoxiong and the Hmau. The Hmong of the Indochinese peninsula descend from this stock.^: 82–83 J. Mottin estimated that more than 85 per cent of the Miao never left China.^: 86

Population and distribution

Laos counted 595,028 Hmong in 2015, the third largest group of the country after the Lao and the Khmou.^: 37 In the 1990s more than 70 per cent of the Hmong of Laos lived in four provinces: Xieng Khouang, Vientiane, Sayaboury and Luang Prabang. Vietnam had 558,043 Hmong in 1989, in the provinces of Cao Bằng, Hà Giang, Lào Cai, Lai Châu, Sơn La, Hòa Bình, Thanh Hóa and Nghệ An.^: 94–95 In 1990 the Tribal Research Institute of Thailand put the Hmong of the kingdom at 83,969 in 233 villages of 13 northern provinces, above all Tak, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai and Nan. They made up 14.9 per cent of the highland population and 0.15 per cent of the population of Thailand.^: 98 A census of 1931 found 830 Hmong in Burma.^: 89

The largest Hmong community in the West is in the United States. It numbered about 100,000 in the late 1980s,^: 98 and 183,265 in a count of the Census Bureau published in 2005, most of them in California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Colorado. In the 1990s there were close to 10,000 Hmong in France, 1,400 of them in French Guiana. Smaller groups had settled in Canada, Australia, China and Argentina.^: 99

Language

Hmong and the language of the Iu Mien (Yao) belong to one language family.^: 80 The Hmong of Thailand speak the White and Green dialects. The ethnologist Jacques Lemoine proposed that both are close to a Hmong dialect of southern China.^: 88 The Barney–Smalley romanisation in common use was created in Laos in 1953. In it the final consonant of a syllable marks one of the eight tones of the language.^: 94

History

Leaving China

After maize reached China from the Americas in the 16th century, Han farmers moved onto the plateaus and slopes of southern China that the minority peoples had held. Some Miao went higher into the mountains of Guizhou, Sichuan and Yunnan, some took up arms and a small number left the empire.^: 83 Revolts in 1698, 1732, 1794 and 1855 scattered the Miao. A rising of the Miao of south-eastern Guizhou began in 1854. By one estimate the population of Guizhou fell from 16 to 6 million in 20 years of revolt and repression. In the second half of the 19th century most of the Hmong who reached the Indochinese peninsula left China, in many waves, along with Iu Mien, Lahu, Akha and the Muslim Chinese known as Haw.^: 83–85

Jean Michaud and Christian Culas find no eyewitness or court chronicle that places Hmong in the peninsula before the 19th century. The White Tai chief Đèo Văn Trị recalled that around 1848, when he was 15, the "Méos" from Sichuan had overrun his country and that his father let them settle on the high plateaus. Western sources first note Hmong in Indochina in 1860, when several thousand Black Hmong soldiers came into northern Vietnam from Yunnan.^{: 86, 88} Around the beginning of the 20th century the missionary François Savina wrote that the Hmong of Tonkin had all come from Yunnan and those of Laos from Tonkin; they were still moving south along the Annamite chain.^: 87 In Siam the Hmong settled in numbers only in the last years of the 19th century. An English traveller noted "a growing population of Meo" in the principality of Nan in 1880. Hmong villages were reported near Phitsanulok in 1928 and in Tak in 1929.^: 88 The Hmong of Khiri Rat, in Phop Phra, came from Omkoi District in Chiang Mai. The Highland Research and Development Institute dates the move to 1925; Phrommatham and colleagues date it to 1943.

In Michaud and Culas's account the Hmong moved towards land: forest fit for swidden, far from the lowlands and close to the caravan routes of the Haw, who sold salt, metal and cloth in the hill villages and later bought their opium. Old Hmong in Laos and Vietnam remembered travelling with the caravans as guides.^: 89–90

Opium and the lowland states

The opium poppy became a cash crop of the Hmong in the 19th century. Beijing encouraged local poppy growing from 1858. The French and British administrations to the south welcomed the poppy growers who came out of China.^{: 89, 91} In Thailand the government decided in 1947 to encourage poppy growing. The historian Alfred McCoy writes that the edict "drew many Hmong farmers into the nearby mountains" around the market village of Ban Wat in the north.^: 350 A memorandum of the Central Intelligence Agency of October 1971 estimated that Thailand produced at most 150 to 200 tonnes of opium a year, practically all of it grown by seven hill peoples in the north. The Meo, it said, "reportedly account for about half". Haw Chinese, it said, visited the villages to buy the crop for dealers in the towns. In Vietnam the legal cultivation of the poppy by the Hmong was officially stopped only in 1993.^: 94

War in Vietnam and Laos

Vang Pao, then a major commanding a Lao infantry battalion, with the American adviser Jack F. Mathews at Nong Het, Xieng Khouang, in 1960.

In the Tai federation that the French set up in north-western Tonkin, most Hmong sided with the communists against the Tai lords. Many fought on the communist side at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. A few Hmong lineages that had worked with the French, above all in opium production, fled to Laos. Anti-communist Hmong resistance was put down by about 1957, sending a second wave of Hmong refugees from Vietnam into Laos.^: 93–94

In Laos the French paratroopers sent to organise resistance to the Japanese in 1945 were hidden and guided by Touby Lyfoung of the Ly clan, who became a district governor in Xieng Khouang in 1946. Michaud and Culas trace the later division of the Hmong of Laos to the rivalry between the Ly and the Lo clans, the Ly siding with the French and the Lo with the Japanese. Several thousand Hmong fought against the Pathet Lao and the Viet Minh, while perhaps as many served in the communist armies.^: 94–95 Vang Pao's special force was paid generously by the United States. A soldier earned far more than a Hmong farmer growing rice or even poppy. Food aid from the Americans could hardly be had without a relative in the administration or the army.^: 95 McCoy writes that the Hmong were unified under Vang Pao "through an Air America network of agile aircraft that landed rice in their villages and carried away their men to battle or their opium to market". American air power, he writes, moved Hmong villages to refugee camps under Vang Pao's control inside Laos.^: 291 The population of Xieng Khouang Province fell by more than 40 per cent between 1961 and 1985.^: 95

Flight and the camps

Between May 1975 and June 1985, 309,694 people left Laos for Thailand. Of them 115,474 belonged to upland peoples, most of them Hmong. Michaud and Culas write that the flight was hastened by massacres in some Hmong villages by Viet Minh soldiers, in reprisal for their close work with the Americans. Taillard, whom they cite, estimated that about 30 per cent of the Hmong of Laos left the country after 1975.^: 95 The Hmong of Laos and Vietnam who took refuge in Thailand between 1975 and 1990 numbered more than 116,000. They were held by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees until a third country took them. In 1990 there were still 50,200 Lao Hmong in the camps of northern Thailand.^{: 96, 98}

In 2004 the Thai government closed Wat Tham Krabok, the last of its Hmong refugee camps. About 15,000 of its people were then resettled in the United States. On 28 December 2009 the Thai army emptied the camp at Huay Nam Khao in Phetchabun Province and began to send its people back to Laos. Colonel Thana Charuvat, who oversaw the deportation, said that they numbered 4,371. Journalists and independent observers were kept out. Human Rights Watch called it the "illegal forced return" of 4,689 Lao Hmong from Huay Nam Khao and Nong Khai, among them 158 UNHCR "persons of concern".

Hill policy, insurgency and relocation in Thailand

A Hmong village in the forest of Doi Suthep–Pui National Park, above Chiang Mai.

For about a century the Siamese state left the hill peoples of the north alone. Michaud and Culas write that from the early 1950s the United States pressed the Thai government to take control of its border lands. In their account the policies towards the hill peoples, above all against insurgency and opium, were induced and financed by the United States, with money, equipment and technical help.^: 96–97 Armed opposition in the northern hills began in 1967, after poppy fields and some Hmong villages near Nan were destroyed. The fighting went on in four border zones until 1982 with Chinese backing. Thousands of Hmong from Nan crossed into Sayaboury in Laos to escape the bombing from 1967. Many came back in 1975.^: 97 The Meo Handbook of 1969, compiled by the Joint Thai–U.S. Military Research and Development Center in Bangkok, called the Meo "so far the most deeply involved in the insurgency". It found that "relatively few Meo have voluntarily entered resettlement centers".

In the 1980s the Royal Forest Department began to treat hill villagers in wildlife sanctuaries and national parks as encroachers to be moved. Ardith Eudey writes that only the Regional Armies had the power to move hill peoples, so the department sought the army's help. By February 1985 it had planned with the Third Regional Army to evacuate the Hmong of nine villages in the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary. In March 1986 the chief of the neighbouring Huai Kha Khaeng sanctuary ordered the 176 people of Huai Yew Yee to leave. On 14 April army officers and forest officials arrived by helicopter and gave them until 15 May. The villagers had come from Phop Phra about 18 or 19 years before, at the request of the government. The department planned to resettle the Hmong of the two sanctuaries in Phop Phra subdistrict. The United States Agency for International Development offered help with the move in 1986, but the department never sent it a proposal. In February 1987 the department announced that the Thai government had set aside 9 million baht for the resettlement and that 180 million baht would come from the United Nations Fund for Drug Abuse Control. In May 1987 the Third Army took 270 Hmong by truck to Phop Phra.

The Hmong village of Doi Pui, on Doi Suthep above Chiang Mai, was declared a village of the Royal Project in 1969 after a visit by King Bhumibol Adulyadej. By the 1990s, Michaud and Culas write, the Thai state's aims for its Hmong were settled villages, crops grown for the market and national schooling, so as to bring them into a Thai identity that is monarchical and Buddhist.^: 97

Farming

The Hmong of the peninsula were shifting cultivators of the mountains.^: 79 The Meo Handbook of 1969 lists among their field crops "maize, buckwheat, sugar cane, yams, cucumbers, beans, tobacco, onions, hemp and some cotton". At Huai Yew Yee in the 1980s the larger households had 30 to 100 rai under rice and maize and at most 4 to 6 rai under poppy. In Laos, at the Green Hmong village of Pha-Hok in Xayaboury Province, Lemoine recorded that maize was sown in the swidden at the first rains together with pumpkins, banana plants, hemp and papayas.^: 54

Cannabis

Hemp for cloth

A women's money bag in the Economic Botany Collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, filed under the Hmong of north-eastern Thailand (Bag (Kew EBC 91926)).

Poilane's sheet of 1920 from Houaphanh, a hemp plant with a textile bark that he found planted near a Meo house.

On the account of the colonial agronomists Charles Crévost and Charles Lemarié, writing between 1919 and 1921, a variety of hemp grown on the high plateaus of Laos and Tonkin gave the cloth for the skirts of the Hmong and the Nùng. They held that the Hmong had brought textile hemp from China in the 17th century. The botanist Auguste Chevalier quoted them in 1944 on Hmong and Nùng women spinning hemp as they walked to market and making their pleated skirts from the cloth.^: 70 French herbarium labels from Laos and Tonkin name the Meo as growers. In 1920 Eugène Poilane collected in Houaphanh a plant with a textile bark "plantée près d'une cái nhà meo", planted near a Meo house (Poilane 1897 (1920)). Two months later he collected a plant "Cultivé chez les Meos de Ban na Punh" in Xieng Khouang (Poilane 2365 (1920)). In 1937 he labelled a plant 3 m tall near Phong Thổ in Tonkin "cultivé par les meo" (Poilane 26699 bis (1937)). Jules Vidal's sheet of 1952 from Sam Niou, near Xieng Khouang, notes its use: chanvre mèo, Meo hemp (Vidal 1526 (1952)). The label of a seed sample in Paris names the Meo of Van Bu on the Black River (Orléans s.n., Van Bu (s.d.)).

In the Green Hmong village of Pha-Hok that Lemoine studied from 1964 to 1967, hemp was sown at the first rains of the fifth month in the swidden with the maize, cut and trimmed in the eighth month and spun by the women at home in the third month for the lower bands of their skirts.^: 54 In northern Thailand H. B. G. Garrett collected two sheets on Doi Langka on 2 December 1933, shrubs about 10 ft tall with the local name Pān (ป่าน), "Cultivated by Mêo people for weaving" (Garrett 851 (1933)). The Meo Handbook of 1969 states of the Meo: "Cloth for clothing is made of hemp or cotton grown locally or bought from the town market". In the two White Hmong villages of Chiang Mai Province that George Binney studied from 1965 to 1967, Ban Khae and Mae Nai, the fibre crops were cotton and a tree whose bark was twisted into rope: "All other fibre materials used by the White Meo of Ban Khae and Mae Nai are purchased from the Thai".^: 26 The anthropologist Nicholas Tapp wrote in 1989 that many White Hmong villages in Thailand "still cultivate some Indian hemp for spinning into cloth". Ronald Renard contrasts Karen groups who grew cotton with the Hmong, who "used hemp for their cloth".

In January 2018 a researcher of the Highland Research and Development Institute said that hemp grown from villagers' own traditional seed was found mostly in Hmong villages, above all in Phop Phra, where it was woven into cloth for daily use. Phrommatham and colleagues surveyed 180 of the 326 Hmong farmers of Khiri Rat registered as hemp growers between February 2021 and June 2022. At Ban Mae Sa Noi in Mae Rim the Daomong enterprise grew hemp on more than 3 rai in 2023 and made cloth and clothing from the bark fibre. At Ban Mae Sa Mai in 2019 a group making hemp goods used seed from the Royal Project; the village head said that in the past the Hmong had grown the plant themselves. The Hmong of the Doi Yao–Doi Pha Mon hills in Chiang Rai once wove hemp cloth. After Queen Sirikit visited them in February 2004, they wove cloth for sale through her crafts project, but the work found no successors. In February 2020 soldiers of a royal-initiative project ran a weaving course there with hemp grown in the project area. In a survey of 82 craftswomen of Doi Pui in June 2020, fewer than 10 per cent did the whole work of hemp cloth, which begins with planting and harvesting the plant.

The Economic Botany Collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew holds two Hmong objects of cannabis fibre: a women's money bag that Kew files under the Hmong of north-eastern Thailand (Bag (Kew EBC 91926)) and an indigo-dyed hemp textile from Vietnam (Textile (Kew EBC 99880)).

Hemp at death

At Ban Mae Sa Noi a Hmong villager told a reporter in 2018 that every household must have a hemp garment for its dead to wear at the funeral. Every household therefore had to plant hemp. Among the Hmong of Wenshan in Yunnan, cotton replaced hemp in everyday dress from the 1980s, but burial clothing must still be of hemp so that the soul of the dead can reach the ancestors. In Wakana Sato's summary of Chie Miyawaki's ethnography, the Hmong value hemp because it decays together with the body. Sirinee Wongvilarat, writing on the Hmong of Phop Phra, calls hemp a sacred plant whose cultivation and use span the whole of life. The Real Seed Company, which sells a hemp line from Hmong villages of Houaphanh (RSC-LAO-HOU-0120250001), writes that the fibre goes into clothing, shoes and funeral garments.

Hemp under Thai law

Thai calls hemp กัญชง (kanchong) and drug cannabis กัญชา (kancha). In November 2017 an episode of the Thai PBS series Pae (Scapegoat) told of Hmong on the Phu Doi Yao range in Chiang Rai who were arrested for growing cannabis and whose field officials pulled up and burned. The programme said that what the police saw was a local plant of the Hmong, one that has sustained the Hmong way of life from birth to death. A ministerial regulation on hemp approved by the Cabinet on 6 September 2016 opened 15 districts in six provinces to the crop, Phop Phra, Mae Rim and Thoeng among them. For the first three years only government bodies could apply for a licence. In 2020 hemp was still a controlled plant that ordinary villagers could not grow.

Cannabis in Hmong fields

The sheet J. F. Maxwell collected on 21 August 1993 from a home garden near Ban Bah Gluay in the Op Luang hills of Chom Thong, which his label calls a Mong village.

The geographer Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, citing the ethnobotanist Edward F. Anderson, writes that cannabis is often grown as a border plant in Hmong poppy fields, mostly for its strong fibres. Two herbarium sheets from Chom Thong in Chiang Mai Province show cannabis in Hmong fields and gardens. On 9 December 1984 Chamlong Phengklai labelled a plant near the Siriphum waterfall on Doi Inthanon "Exotic herb in Maeo plantation". On 21 August 1993 J. F. Maxwell collected a branching herb 2 m tall from a home garden near Ban Bah Gluay, which his label calls a Mong village, in the Op Luang hills. The label says it was cultivated for spice and also smoked for its narcotic effect.

In February 2013 police found 100 rai of opium poppies interplanted with cannabis, on forest land cleared in Mae Ramat District of Tak and the adjoining part of Omkoi District. A police commander said that a group of financiers had hired Hmong and Karen people to plant and tend the fields.

In April 2012 an officer of the Vietnamese border guard in Hà Tĩnh, who had worked on joint operations with the Bolikhamsai police in Laos, said that it was the cannabis harvest season and that the growers were mainly Hmong on the Lao side, who planted it secretly among other crops in the high mountains. He said that traffickers drove cars into the Hmong villages to trade for the crop, offering a new car for a tonne of dried cannabis. The Real Seed Company sells a ganja line that it says was grown by a Hmong household in Bolikhamsai (RSC-LAO-BOL-0120240002). It writes that hemp "was and is a crop grown by the Hmong for cordage and textiles", that "ganja landraces have only recently begun to be cultivated by Hmong villages" and that Hmong communities acquired them through contact with Lao and Thai people.

Siskiyou County

In September 2021 a federal judge in California, Kimberly Mueller, barred Siskiyou County from stopping trucked water deliveries to Hmong farmers in the Mount Shasta Vista subdivision, near Big Springs, saying the ban raised "serious questions" about racial discrimination. The Associated Press called them Hmong farmers "who are illegally growing marijuana". Authorities estimated that 5,000 to 6,000 greenhouses grew cannabis in the Big Springs area, tended by 4,000 to 8,000 people, most of them Hmong and immigrants of Chinese descent who had arrived in the previous five years.

Accessions

Accession ID	Name	Locality	Country	Collected
Garrett 851 (1933)	Garrett 851 herbarium specimen, Doi Langka (1933)	Doi Langka	Thailand	2 December 1933
Garrett 852 (1933)	Garrett 852 herbarium specimen, Doi Langka (1933)	Doi Langka	Thailand	2 December 1933
Orléans s.n., Van Bu (s.d.)	Henri d'Orléans' hemp seed sample, Van Bu, Black River (undated)	Van Bu, Black River	Vietnam
Poilane 2365 (1920)	Poilane 2365 herbarium specimen, Ban na Punh (1920)	Ban na Punh	Laos	19 November 1920
Poilane 26699 bis (1937)	Poilane 26699 bis herbarium specimen, col des Nuages, Phong Thổ (1937)	Near the col des Nuages, east of Phong Thổ	Vietnam	1 December 1937
RSC-LAO-BOL-0120240002	Hmong Ganja General Population 2024		Laos	2024
RSC-LAO-HOU-0120250001	Hmong Hemp General Population 2025		Laos	2025

See also

• Bolikhamsai
• Chom Thong
• Doi Langka
• Doi Yao–Doi Pha Mon
• Karen people
• Laos
• Mae Rim
• Northern Thailand
• Phop Phra
• United States and cannabis eradication abroad
• Xayaboury