Tai Nüa

The Tai Nüa, or upper Tai, are the northernmost of the Shan-Tai peoples, their old Muang Nuea homeland tied to Mong Mao in the Shweli and Salween valleys of Dehong; hereditary saopha lords ruled their mueang, and their scribes used the Tai Le script.

Their most far-flung branch is the Ahom. In 1228, tradition relates, Mong Mao prince Sukaphaa led followers over the Patkai hills into the Brahmaputra valley and, after thirty years among the hill peoples, planted his capital at Charaideo. The newcomers intermarried with the Borahi and Moran, drawing them and later peoples into Ahom clans through Ahomisation, recorded in the Buranji chronicles.

The Ahom kingdom pushed west in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in 1671 Lachit Borphukan shattered a Mughal invasion at Saraighat, near Guwahati. By then the Ahom had largely exchanged Tai speech and spirit cults for Assamese and Hindu forms, and the kingdom lasted until the 1826 Treaty of Yandabo passed it from Burmese to British hands.