Mueng Yuam

Muang Yuam lies in the valley of the Yuam River, west of Chiang Mai and east of the Salween. The old settlement of Yuam Tai stood south of the later town of Mae Sariang. Its position made it an outlying centre of Lan Na in a mountainous borderland inhabited by Tai Yuan, Shan, Karen and Lua communities. The northern chronicles remember Yuam as a frontier town of Chiang Mai. In the eighteenth century warfare and raids left it sparsely inhabited; a contemporary account described only a handful of households in the town itself. Following floods in 1809, the settlement's centre moved northward to the site later known as Mae Sariang.