The Moken people

The Moken are an Austronesian ethnic group that occupies the west coast of Thailand on the Andaman Sea. They also occupy the Mergui Archipelago off Myanmar’s coast.

Austronesians include populations of migrants, nomads, farmers, and especially seafarers who colonized an area of several million square kilometres. They crossed great distances through cultural or geographic boundaries, the Sulu Empire, maritime powers, mainland empires, emerging nations, straits... that temporarily stopped their movements and allowed them to recompose their fragmented ethnicity.

The Moken language belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. The Moken live as hunters and gatherers of the resources found on the land and in the sea. Moken ethnohistory asserts their ancestral ties to mainland SEA. According to these accounts,

Moken ancestors lived in settlements of the Myanmar–Malaya mainland and practiced agriculture, but were driven to the coast by the Burmese to the north and the Malays to the south, and subsequently settled in the Mergui Archipelago. Continuous raiding by pirates further forced the Moken to adopt a sea-based lifestyle to avoid capture.
The Moken people

Ten Lui Mei

Ten Lui Mei is today presumed to be the Chinese name for Tenasserim province. The name Tenasserim is believed, like Phuket to originally be a Malay name derived from “Tanahsari” or “land of the Fragrant Aloe woods”.

Tenasserim provinces has a climate an environment more closely akin to those of Island Southeast Asia (Indonesia and Malaysia) than to continental Burma, has abundant tropical fruits such as coconuts, durians, mangosteens and rambutan.

Historically Tenasserim included the whole deserted but thickly forested northwestern peninsular coasts from roughly Phuket up to Tavoy in Burma today.

In 1460s, Ayutthaya controlled Tenasserim along with its twin port of Mergui which had the best natural harbor on this coast.

Even of the Tenasserim region was successfully claimed and conquered by both Thai and Burmese kingdom during history, it was never the place for actual integration to the “states”, rather a buffer zone between them.

The Mergui Archipelago lies along the southern part of the Tenasserim coastline on a north to south axis. It extends in the north to the littoral town of Dawei and to the South as far as Phuket in Thailand. Its islands are inhabited at least since the seventeenth century by the Moken, a populating of sea nomads of Austronesian origins. The term Moken is used for all the tribes in the region that speak the Malayic language.
Ten Lui Mei