Htaw Meh Pa is the founding ancestor of Karen origin legend, the forefather who led the people out of a distant northern homeland on the long migration that ended in the hills of Burma and Siam. The best-remembered episode of the journey is the crossing of the 'river of running sand', a phrase the tradition applies to a great desert the ancestors had to traverse and which nineteenth-century writers linked speculatively to the Gobi. As eponymous culture-hero he anchors the Karen sense of themselves as a people who came from elsewhere and preserved their identity through wandering; the migration narrative he heads is recited in oral hta and was recorded by Marshall and later collectors.