evidence: The latter was a settlement of Muslim refugees from the nineteenth-century Panthay wars, and a new factor in the local power balance, especially after the Wa–Panthay War of 1926–28, in which the better-armed Muslim traders won their own emancipation from tribute obligations to the local Wa, and afterwards overcame a Wa boycott.Footnote 62 However, even if power was shifting away from Wa natives and their ‘Hulu kings’ to ‘bandits’ such as the Panthay – and to the reformed Chinese state looming in the background, in the shape of Yunnan’s semi-independent governor, Long Yun, who pushed for interventions responding to British advances – the Wa clearly still remained in control of the mines until the 1930s. In 1929, Barton interviewed a military representative of the Chinese Republic at Mengding, Yao Hsiang, who remarked candidly on the Maolong mines: [...] These factors also reduced the importance of the hereditary o lang, who may indeed have been a more commanding figure in the past, even if he was no king but rather a Wa solution to the fundamental problem of constraining delegated authority (as in Clastres’ American account). In the process outlined by Friedman, he then became an illustration of chieftainship manqué, as Lehman described Kachin gumlao chiefs.Footnote 101