Note 318 — Chapter XV

We have seen on pages 249-250 that the plain west of that of Li-chiang is called Lashi-Pa, or Plain of the Mo-so, and that a village therein bears the same name. M. Paul Vial mentions what he calls a Lolo tribe named Ashi, apparently dwelling in the south-east of Yunnan (Les Lolos, p. 25). Now only a few miles west of Lashi-Pa, on the road from Li-chiang to Chung-tien, there is a village called Ashi, which gives its name to a ferry on the Yangtse river. It is possible that the sound in both cases was once either Lashi or Nashi, for, when we find from experience that the L and N are interchangeable, it may well be that in some districts inhabited by Mo-so the initial has been dropped altogether. I do not know the derivation of the word Lashio, the British settlement near the Salwen valley, in the North Shan States. There is also a district called Lashi, in British territory, north-east of Myitkyina, the people of which appear to be a connecting link between the Kachins and the Burmese. (See Sir George Scott's Burma, p. 70.)