One of the first people to write about the origins of Thai people was a European man named W. C. Dodd, who was an American missionary who lived in Thailand and travelled throughout Asia. He believed that Thais came from a mountainous region (a place with a lot of mountains) in northern China, where modern day Hubei, Hunan, and Anhui intersect (meet each other). Dodd wrote this theory in his 1923 book titled The Tai Race: The Elder Brother of the Chinese. He based his theory on his own field notes that he took about the characteristics of local people in China. He also used information from a book written by Terrien de la Couperie (who we will discuss later).

Five years after Dodd published his book, a Thai scholar named Kun Vichit-Matra added to this theory. Kun Vichit-Matra wrote in his own book called Lak Thai that Tai people originally came from even further north, in the Altai Mountain region of Mongolia. He said that Tais were a “mogul race” and that Mongol people came from that region, so Tais must also have come from there. This theory influenced future historians who claimed that the Tai people were forced out of Mongolia and that they had to travel south, first to the province of Sichuan, and later to the province of Yunnan, before finally travelling to Thailand.

Today, these ideas are considered to be wrong. First of all, if Tai people came from the Altai mountains, they would have had to cross a vast desert called the Gobi Desert. This would have been very difficult for them to do. Secondly, the Tai people had a society based on rice agricultural and lived in houses built on stilts, which were suited specifically to a wetland lowland environment. If Tais travelled all the way from Mongolia, they would have lived a nomadic lifestyle. That means they would have been constantly moving and adapting to new environments. It is unlikely that they would have suddenly developed the skills to harvest rice and the knowledge needed to build houses suited to wet lowland environments.