Hero-King Cheuang
Thao Hung, honored under the title-name Cheuang, is the hero of the verse epic Thao Hung Thao Cheuang, which James Chamberlain has called perhaps the most important piece of literature of the Southeast Asian mainland and which is prized as a rare window on the Tai world before Buddhism. The poem follows the prince of the Suan Tan country through courtship, rivalry, and immense campaigns fought between Tai lords and the peoples of the middle Mekong uplands; struck down at the height of his power, the hero does not rest but marches again at the head of ghost armies in the land of the dead. The single surviving manuscript, recovered by the Lao savant Maha Sila Viravong in the National Library in Bangkok in 1943, preserves a poem whose hero is also remembered in chronicles and local hero-lore from Laos and northern Thailand to Sipsong Panna, where Chueang figures as a founding king. Because the epic's cosmology turns on the phi (spirits of the dead) and the old sky world rather than on Indic gods, scholars treat it as the outstanding monument of pre-Buddhist Tai religion and heroic ancestry.
Domains
- war
- afterlife
Powers
- to lead vast armies in war
- to lead the armies of the dead after his own death
Sources
- Thao Hung, also called Cheuang, is the hero-king of the pre-Buddhist Tai epic Thao Hung Thao Cheuang, remembered across Lao, Isan, and wider Tai traditions as a paragon warrior who continues to lead phantom armies after his death.: James R. Chamberlain, 'Thao Hung or Cheuang: A Tai Epic Poem', Mon-Khmer Studies 18–19 (1989–1990), pp. 14–34 (secondary); Martin Stuart-Fox, The Lao Kingdom of Lān Xāng: Rise and Decline (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 1998) (secondary)