Constructing native chieftains as an imperial frontier institution: Endogamy and dowry land exchange among the Shan-Dai chieftains in Yunnan-Burma borderland since the thirteenth century

This chapter reveals an intermarriage political system in the Shan-Dai chieftaincy that functioned as a frontier institution between China and Southeast Asia. There has been a long tradition of intermarriage within an endogamic class among the chieftains. Their political authority should have been identified by the Chinese and the Burmese courts but was mainly authorized by the Chinese imperial central governments. The courts of Chinese dynasties required the chieftains to provide a patrilineal genealogy, a testimonial report provided by all neighboring chieftains, and a report provided by the neighboring prefecture magistrate for the succession permission of a chieftain. In order to satisfy these requirements, a system of intermarriage had been well maintained and had guaranteed correlation and cooperation between the chieftains. Meanwhile, the dowry land custom in the intermarriage chieftaincies was a means of empowerment used by a chieftain’s father-in-law, the parents of a chieftain’s wife. After the colonization of Southeast Asia, the shifting borders of these dowry lands gradually became fixed into the hard borders of modern nation-states between China and Southeast Asia.