Over the centuries, the Hmong people have attracted the interest of Asian and Western observers — in particular that of the Han Chinese, the English missionaries in southwest China, and the French colonials in Indochina. It was, however, only after World War II that international interest in the Hmong of Southeast Asia began to intensify, particularly during the Indochina Wars of 1946–54 and 1963–75. American intelligence services produced or commissioned ethnographic studies on highland populations in Laos, Thailand, and both parts of Vietnam, and the Hmong were the subject of several of these studies.

In the 1990s, after the period of political seclusion that followed the communist take-overs in Vietnam and Laos in 1975, the minority regions were rapidly being re-opened, and this could also soon happen in southern China. The possibilities today of doing field research will surely contribute significant additions to the information that has existed ever since the mid-1970s or, in the case of northern Vietnam, for more than five decades. With the present pace of modernization and acculturation of highland societies, along with the forced sedentarization process taking place over the last few years, the task of collecting information is urgent. This chapter provides an account of the migration of the Hmong from China into peninsular Southeast Asia — a critical moment in their history.

WHO ARE THE HMONG?

The ancient history of the Hmong is intimately linked to that of today's Miao of southern China. It is, however, quite another story to pretend that the earlier history of the Hmong is linked also to that of the historical “Miao” as they appear in ancient Chinese texts. The Chinese term Miao was for a long time used in a broadly generic sense and referred to many non-Han ethnic minority groups. In much the same way, no definitive conclusions can be made to ascertain the real identity of the groups called Miao by the earliest Western writers.