Cheuang

Cheuang is the great warrior-hero of Khmu legend, a martial champion whose deeds are recited to assert the antiquity and valour of the Khmu people. The same hero stands at the center of the vast Tai-Lao epic Thao Hung Thao Cheuang, but Khmu tellings appropriate him as their own ancestral figure, a claim that answers the political subordination the Khmu long experienced under Tai and Lao neighbours by insisting that their champion, and their tenure on the land, came first. In this guise Cheuang crystallizes the recurring Khmu theme of autochthony: the Khmu as the original 'masters of the soil' whose ritual precedence was acknowledged even by Lao kings. Sources differ on whether the figure is best understood as a shared regional hero adopted by the Khmu or as an independently Khmu tradition later absorbed into the Tai epic.

Domains

• war
• autochthony

Powers

• wages war against invaders
• embodies Khmu precedence over the land

Epithets

• Thao Cheuang

Sources

• Frank Proschan, 'Cheuang in Kmhmu Folklore, History, and Memory,' in Sumitr Pitiphat (ed.), New Research on the Literary Heritage of Thao Hung / Thao Cheuang (Bangkok: Thammasat University, 1998).
• Olivier Evrard, Chroniques des cendres: Anthropologie des societes khmou et dynamiques interethniques du Nord-Laos (Paris: IRD Editions, 2006).