June 21, 2026June 21, 2026
The Kachins of Burma
Donald Seekins
On the 23rd of last month, Reverend Misa conducted a Pentecost service at St. John’s Church in Kyoto which I attended. After the service, we enjoyed a barbeque cooked by students from Burma. I was surprised to learn that the students weren’t Burmans, or Burmese, but members of the Kachin ethnic minority. You don’t hear much about Burma’s problems recently. Given the crises in Ukraine and the Middle East, Burma’s brutal civil war since 2021 gets very little attention in the mainline media. And practically nobody in Japan or elsewhere knows who the Kachins are, or where in Burma they live.
The Kachins are mostly – indeed, over 90 percent – Christians, but they are largely forgotten among the world’s many Christian communities. Living not only in Burma but in southwestern China and northeastern India, they are estimated to number between one million and 1.5 million people. The largest subgroup of the Kachins are the Jingpo, or Jinghpaw, a word that means “man” or “person” in their own language.
Most of the people who live in Burma today have ancestors who originally came from Tibet or southwestern China and migrated over the centuries in waves through the mountains down into the country. We know this from the fact that they speak languages which are closely related to Tibetan. The Kachins are relatively recent migrants, who established small, tribal communities in the northernmost part of Burma, now known as Kachin State. During the British colonial period from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries, they were introduced to the outside world through the medium of indirect British rule, leaving local tribal or clan rulers largely in control of their people, recruitment into the British colonial army and conversion to Christianity by mostly Baptist and Catholic missionaries. Although most Kachins have abandoned their traditional animistic beliefs, some of them still give offerings for spirits whom they believe can cause them much harm. Their old religion possessed a creator god known as Karai Kasang, who they believed was so benign they did not need to make offerings to him. In their language today, Kachin Christians refer to God as Karai Kasang much as Chinese Protestants refer to God as Shangdi, a term for the Supreme Deity in ancient China.
The first Protestant missionaries in Burma, the American Baptists Adoniram and Ann Judson, arrived in the country in 1813. Since the great majority of lowland, rice-growing Burmese were Buddhists and were content with their beliefs, the Judsons did not have much success making converts. But they were able to make many converts among the Karens who, like the Kachins, are an upland ethnic minority or “hill tribe.” Despised by the Burmans as the “cattle of the hills,” the Karens’ traditional religion was animism but also included a creator god known as Ywa, which coincidentally sounds very much like Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. One of their prophecies foretold the arrival of “white men” in their country who would bring a book – the Bible – which would set them free. Although most Karens today are Buddhists or animists, about one quarter of the total Karen population identify as Christians and have played the most prominent role in the development of a distinctly Karen – as opposed to Burman or Burmese – nationalism.
The Judsons’ success with the Karens encouraged other Baptist missionaries to attempt to convert other, more remote mountain-dwelling peoples, and in the 1870s another American Baptist missionary named Josiah Cushing started working among the Kachins. By the 1880s, he had converts and had even ordained Kachin pastors. In the following decade, missionaries George Geis and Ola Hanson continued his work, so that at present – in contrast to the Karens – something like 90 or 95 percent of Kachins today are Christian and a majority of them are Baptists.
The missionaries transformed Kachin society. They established not only churches for local congregations but schools teaching a modern, western curriculum, hospitals and orphanages, devised a written script (using Roman letters) for the Kachin language and translated the Bible into Kachin, just as earlier missionaries had translated the Bible into the Karen language. Above all, they gave the Kachins an identity of their own, through which they could associate with each other, other peoples in Burma and westerners.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Kachins’ homeland was “wild” and largely isolated from the outside world, even other parts of Burma. They were a warlike people, constantly fighting each other and their non-Kachin neighbors. Like many Karens, Kachins joined the colonial army. Both ethnic groups remained loyal to the British during World War II while the ethnic majority Burmans collaborated with the Japanese occupation. Seeds of suspicion and hatred had been sowed during the colonial period between the Burmans and the Kachins, Karens and other “hill tribes” because of their loyalty to the British. World War II opened up a deep and hostile gap between them that even now has not been closed.
In 1944, the Allies started construction of the 1,079-mile long Stilwell Road, which started at Ledo in northeastern India, passed through Kachin State and ended in Yunnan, China. Its completion in January 1945 enabled the Allies to transport weapons and men overland from India to China. Kachin soldiers, known as the “amiable assassins,” fought alongside the British and Americans during the construction of this road and played a huge role in the liberation, or reoccupation, of northern Burma in 1944-1945. The Japanese viewed all Kachins as enemies, and treated Kachin civilians with great brutality. In consequence, the war destroyed what little trust remained between the Kachins and the Burmans, who as mentioned collaborated with the Japanese up until almost the end of the war.
After 1945, one Kachin veteran said: ‘What have the Burmese public done towards the hill peoples to win their love and faith? It was through the influence of a section of the Burmese public, who while saying we all belong to the same race, blood and home, called in our enemies, the Japanese, that the hill peoples have suffered miserably during those dark years that followed.’
Much as they left the Palestinians in the lurch when they granted Israel independence in 1948, the British ignored the interests of the “loyal” minorities such as the Kachins, Karens and Chins when they agreed to grant Burma independence in the same year. The new state was supposedly democratic, with a parliamentary system, but it was in fact controlled by the Buddhist Burmans. In 1949, the Karens initiated an armed insurrection, and attempted unsuccessfully to establish a new Karen homeland known as Kawthulay, the “flowery land.” Eleven years later, in 1960, the more remote Kachins established a movement known as the Kachin Independence Organization to which an armed force, the Kachin Independence Army, was attached. The KIA’s commander was Brang Seng, a former war veteran and school principal in the town of Myitkyina, Kachin State’s largest, who succeeded in turning the Kachin insurgents into one of the best led and organized forces fighting the Ne Win military regime in Rangoon during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
Kachin State, the homeland of the Kachins, has many natural resources. These include the finest quality jade in the world, coveted by the Chinese, gold, amber, forest resources, iron and hydropower, since the region encompasses the headwaters of the Irrawaddy River and the Chinese intend to dam it to obtain hydropower for themselves. The richness of these natural resources could be a great blessing to the Kachins, but outsiders have come in to exploit them and little if any benefit has come to the local people.
Two factors have made their situation worse. In the past, the Kachin homeland had been so remote that few outsiders – apart from the missionaries – entered it. But now Kachin state is squeezed between an economically powerful and resource-hungry China to the north and a corrupt Army-State to the south, both of whom view the Kachin lands primarily as a cash cow. Secondly, a ceasefire between the military regime and the Kachin Independence Organization in 1994 opened up the region completely to outside so-called “entrepreneurs.” The Army-State gained control of the lucrative jade mines in Hpakant, while to earn revenue the KIO has sold forest resources to the Chinese along the border, causing extensive deforestation. Entrepreneurs large and small and of many nationalities have exploited gold, iron and amber deposits, and although the Chinese have postponed their construction of a huge dam to exploit the headwaters of the Irrawaddy, it seems to be only a matter of time before they re-start their dream project. At present, Burma is an economic colony of the Chinese. Once a pristine land, Kachin State is now terribly polluted.
The Kachin people remain poor, divided against each other, divided against other people in Burma and afflicted by pervasive drug addiction. When fighting broke out again between the central government and the KIA in 2011, ending the ceasefire, tens of thousands of Kachin people had to flee to internally-displaced refugee camps. And many young Kachins have fled abroad, including those whom I met at St. John’s Church in Kyoto.
They told me that they have no intention of going back home because the situation there is so bad. And given the rise of rightwing anti-immigrant, or xenophobic, movements in Japan, embodied in the political opportunism of not only Kamiya Sohei’s Sanseito but also the Takaichi administration, their future in this country has become increasingly uncertain.
Like the Palestinians, the Rohingyas in Bangladesh who fled from Burma a decade ago and many other minorities, the future prospects for the Kachins are uncertain and dark.
