3 - Diversity and Entanglement of Historical Memory of Lue People Based on Murals in Northern Thailand

Tai Lue who are living in Chiang Kham District, Phayao Province in northern Thailand, were mostly moved forcibly from Sipsongpanna (present Xishuangbanna in China) by soldiers from Muang Nan in the early 19th century. This followed the common Tai Yuan practice of moving people into cities (muang) to strengthen the polity, then with the help of Siam. After more than 200 years, there are not many visible differences in lifestyle and cultural customs between Tai Lue and Tai Yuan. However, the Tai Lue still firmly uphold their Lue memory and identity through language, guarding spirit rituals, cultural festival activities, village museums and murals, writings, and oral histories.

This study focuses on murals in three temples in Chiang Kham, depicting the Lue migration history and ethnic identity. Based on Pierre Nora's “Realms of Memory” and Aleida Assmann's “Space of Memory”, temple murals and their related writings, drawing on oral culture, constitute a source of various individual memories of Tai Lue migration and marginalization. Taken together in their diversity across space and time, (re)written by different local historians and (re)drawn by different painters inspired by ever-changing ideas, these murals form a constantly changing, differently interpreted, yet collective memory. This complex entanglement of individually diverse and culturally collective memorization processes serves as the base for a dynamic consciousness of a distinct Tai Lue cultural identity rooted in a diasporic history of multiple marginalities.