Description

Shan Folk Lore Stories from the Hill and Water Country by William Charles Griggs

63 pages

INTRODUCTION
The following stories have been taken from the great mass of unwritten lore that is to the
black-eyed, brown-skinned boys and girls of the Shan mountain country of Burma what
“Jack the Giant Killer” and “Cinderella” are to our own children.
The old saw as to the songs and laws of a country may or may not be true. I feel confident,
however, that stories such as these, being as they are purely native, with as little admixture
of Western ideas as it was possible to give them in dressing them in their garment of
English words, will give a better insight into what the native of Burma really is, his modes
of thought and ways of looking at and measuring things, than a treatise thrice as long and
representing infinitely more literary merit than will be found in these little tales; and at the
same time I hope they will be found to the average reader, at least, more interesting.
It may, perhaps, be not out of place to say a little of the “hpeas” who appear so frequently in
these stories. The hpea is the Burman nat, and is “a being superior to men and inferior to
Brahmas, and having its dwelling in one of the six celestial regions” (Doctor Cushing’s
“Shan-English Dictionary”). They are universally worshiped by the inhabitants of Burma. If
a man has fever, the best thing to do is to “ling hpea,” that is, to feed the spirits, and the
sufferer therefore offers rice, betel-nut, painted sticks, etc. Some kinds of hpeas live in the
sacred banyan trees, and frequently have I seen men, after a long day’s march in the jungle,
sit shivering on the ground when within an arm’s length lay good dry fire-wood. It had
fallen, however, from a tree in which lived a hpea, and not a man would dare touch it. Big
combs of honey may be in the nests of the wild bees, but it is safe from the hungry traveler
if it is sheltered by such a tree. Some watch over wells, tanks, and lakes, and it is notorious
throughout the Southern Shan States, that a promising young American missionary, who
was drowned while shooting, met his death by being dragged to the bottom of the lake by
the guardian spirit, who had become incensed at him for killing a water-fowl on his
domains.
In Shan folk-lore the hero does not “marry and live happy ever after,” but he becomes the
king of the country.