The Karen people are one of Asia’s ancient tribes, one of the very few that survive to this day. They call themselves the Padaung. The tribe is thought to have originated in central China, in Yunnan province, before migrating to Burma — present-day Myanmar — around a thousand years ago and settling near the Salween River.
By the 1990s, the tribe numbered around 25,000 people, living largely off the land through subsistence farming. Sadly, when a fresh wave of persecution against ethnic minorities swept through Myanmar in 2011, the Karen were forced to flee across the border into Thailand. By royal decree, they were granted refuge and given land in the country’s north, where the tribe could live in peace. They have never, however, been granted Thai citizenship, and so remain excluded from benefits available to the local population — free basic schooling among them.
The Karen are one of five traditional villages that have preserved their historical way of life intact. Yet their once-unified way of living has since split into two distinct threads. The first is agriculture and the everyday business of running the tribe. The second is the tourism side, sustained entirely by the tribe’s famous long-necked women.
A girl’s future is decided when she turns five. If she remains an ordinary woman, she’ll grow up to take on the tribe’s regular labour. If, instead, brass rings are fitted around her neck, she’s exempted from that ordinary work altogether, and her life unfolds largely within the village’s tourist quarter, where she lives, and learns to weave and spin.
The long-necked women of the Karen are renowned for their woven textiles. They spend their days weaving, demonstrating the process to visiting tourists, and selling the finished pieces.
The village itself is split into two halves: the tourist section, and the part where everyone actually lives. The ordinary houses are kept largely out of sight, though a careful look will reveal them if you know where to search. At first glance, you might assume the whole place is nothing more than a tourist attraction — I fell into exactly that same mental trap myself, and ended up visiting almost by accident. But once inside, after only a few minutes, it became clear this was nothing of the sort. I found I simply couldn’t bring myself to talk to the women there — I’m constitutionally incapable of treating another human being as a museum exhibit. Even working up the nerve to approach them and ask permission to take a photograph took me a while. Mostly, I just sat, rocking gently on a swing, taking everything in, trying to let the village’s atmosphere settle over me.
And the atmosphere there is genuinely different — nothing like, say, neighbouring Pai. The long-necked Karen women are not exhibits, and the village is no reconstruction: they truly live this life, and they have genuinely, deliberately chosen this path for themselves. Their faces are calm, and happy. Look at the eyes of the woman in the photograph — a grandmother by now, though it’s genuinely difficult to guess ages here; she could be sixty, eighty, ninety. They radiate kindness, warmth and love, even towards tourists like us, who, I’d imagine, are perfectly capable of behaving badly from time to time. They feel different, somehow — as though they’ve simply remained where they always were, in that calm, ancient way of life, close to nature, close to one another, bound together by mutual understanding and a shared sense that every member of the tribe genuinely matters.
