The author has treated elsewhere the Wu Man and Pai Man, two tribes of considerable age in Yunnan province, China. According to him, the Wu Man spoke a Tibeto-Burman language such as Lolo or Moso, and remain in present-day Yunnan, while the Pai Man spoke a Tai language and remain along the southern border of Yunnan. In the present paper the author asserts that the people who established the kingdom Nan-chao in Yunnan in the T'ang period belonged to the Wu Man, while the kingdom Ta-li was established by the Pai Man who had taken power out of the hands of the Wu Man. Concerning the Minkia or La-ma, the author agrees with Lietard's and Makino's recent opinions that they are the surviving descendants of the Nan-chao and Ta-li, but does not agree with the views of Mankino, Wen Yu and Credner that they speak a Tibeto-Burman language, nor with that of Davies that their language belongs to the Mon-Khmer family. He assumes that the ancestors of the Minkia were the Pai Man who formed the kingdom of Pai or Pai-tzu in Yunnan prior to the T'ang dynasty. They were called Pai-min or Pai-erh-tzu and spoke a Tai language. Although Tibeto-Burman language and culture might have diffused to them under the rule of the Nan-chao (which was the kingdom of Wu Man), the Minkia have preserved their own language and old customs without being assimilated to the latter. The Minkia and the La-ma have been regarded as one and the same tribe. Whence the two different names? La-ma must be identical with la-mu in Lolo, la-ma in Lisu and lo in Moso, and like the name Lolo itself, probably derives from the name of some Wu Man tribal chief. The root lo or la means "tiger" in the Indo-Chinese language family. There are the Black Lolo and White Lolo, and the Pai Man under the rule of the Lolo was in some cases called the White Lolo. Most of the Pai Man tribes adopted the Wu Man's names under the latter's rule. As the La-ma, divided into the White and Black La-ma, have been governed by the Moso, the name La-ma was most probably given by the Moso. On the other hand, the name Minkia seems to have been given by the Chinese who had migrated to the area of distribution of the Wu-Manized Pai Man after the Ming dynasty.

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