Dai

The Dai are the Chinese name for Southwestern Tai peoples, notably the Tai Lue, ancestors spreading from Yunnan to the Vietnam–Laos borderlands. They settled river valleys, grew wet rice in stilt villages and organized into muang, chiefly principalities.

In the twelfth century the Tai Lue raised Jinghong. Further south the Black Tai built Ngưu Hống, sending tribute to Vietnam as early as 1067 and fighting the Trần in the early fourteenth century. In 1337 these remained independent Tai muang: Ngưu Hống held the upper Black River.

Ming forces subdued the Black Tai in 1416, and after the Vietnamese reconquest Lê Lợi's 1431–1432 campaigns folded their lands into Hưng Hóa; the Yunnan Tai kept hereditary chieftains under tusi rule. The Yunnan Dai adopted Theravada Buddhism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the Black Tai long kept animist rites and their own script.