Tai Culture ID

The Tai culture belongs to the broad family of Tai-speaking peoples who spread southward from southern China into the valleys of mainland Southeast Asia, founding many of the region's enduring societies.

Tai life centred on wet-rice farming in the river valleys, organised around local polities known as muang, each gathered under a chief or lord, that formed the building blocks of larger states.

Religious life rested on the veneration of spirits, the phi, that were believed to inhabit the world and the ancestors, a tradition that endured alongside the later faiths the Tai adopted.

Spreading across a wide swathe of the region, the Tai peoples reshaped the map of mainland Southeast Asia.