There is almost no evidence as to what sort of law, written or unwritten, prevailed in the rice plains of the pre-classical Tai states (müang Tai) before Indian influence. However, contemporary legal anthropology might fill up some gaps here. Assam possibly provides useful evidence of the legal system that was in use among the pre-Buddhist Tais. There is convincing evidence that irrigated rice growers, whenever and wherever they lived, needed and used more detailed regulations than other farmers. Looking back at the post-classical law texts and subtracting what is clearly of Indian origin in these texts, the remaining, one might presume, represents survivals of indigenous pre-Indian law. This technique makes sense for the Khmer and Mon, who have been living in Southeast Asia for the last two thousand years or so, and it also makes some sense for the Burmese. Even if they arrived in the territory of what is now Burma (Myanmar) as late as the ninth century, they adopted the irrigation techniques and presumably the legal systems of their close relatives, the Pyus, who had been living there centuries before. But it seems problematic in applying these techniques to the Tai people. They, it is usually assumed, arrived in Southeast Asia in the tenth and eleventh centuries from a homeland on the borders of today’s Vietnam and China. They seemed to have known how to cultivate wet-rice by applying water irrigation systems before they arrived in Southeast Asia. It is likely that they with their irrigation technique brought heir own distinctive rice plain laws with them, though possible, as Leach argues, that their law was influenced by Chinese law conceptions.