Lisu

The Lisu are a Tibeto-Burman highland people. Their earliest home was the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, near modern Xichang, whence they drifted south into the gorges of north-western Yunnan; the name Lisu appears in Fan Chuo's Manshu of about 862.

From the 1100s they passed under the Lijiang command of the Yuan and then the Mu chieftains of the Ming, for whom Lisu warriors fought in the Luchuan campaigns of 1438–1449, a service remembered in the Knife-Pole festival.

In the mid-1500s, fleeing the exactions of the Mu tusi, a host under the headman Kuomubi crossed the Mekong into the Nujiang valley, beginning a series of migrations that spread Lisu clans through the Salween country. From the mid-1700s groups moved into Burma, and the Lisu, divided into more than fifty-eight clans, share culture with the Yi, hunting and farming steep slopes.