The Sino-Burmese, the people of Chinese heritage in Burma, live on multiple peripheries in a state of palpable uncertainty. They often feel like second-class citizens, abused by the government of their resident country, cast off by the governments of their ancestral homeland, and ignored by the world at large. Despite these challenges, they have managed to survive and even thrive in Burma.

This dissertation traces the ethos of the Sino-Burmese in the urban fabric of Yangon to peel back the overlapping and intersecting layers that constitute their lives and history. It puts forth a set of characteristics that cohere through time and are understood as Sino-Burmese by the Sino-Burmese themselves and the various Burmese peoples living in Yangon. Through descriptions and stories of various places and events, this dissertation highlights the attributes and practices of the Sino-Burmese community that consistently repeat themselves through time and in different contexts, and thus have become the discernable characteristics that serve to gather the Sino-Burmese of Yangon together as a distinguishable population. This assemblage of characteristics that coalesce dynamically is the ethos of the Sino-Burmese: their common way of dwelling that continually reproduces a shared understanding of who they are as a distinct and integrated population in Yangon.

This work is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork focused on everyday places and interactions in Yangon. It is supplemented by the small collection of Chinese-language literature on the history of the Sino-Burmese, and by interviews conducted with Sino-Burmese in Macao and Taiwan. Through these sources, I present the history and lives of the Sino-Burmese as a series of tactics that have fluctuated around four central transhistorical beliefs and practices: 1) place and kinship (real and fictive) as principal overlapping determinants of belonging; 2) success in commerce as a necessary condition to improve the welfare of individual families and sustain the distinctiveness of the Sino-Burmese community; 3) ability to read and speak Chinese languages – Mandarin, Hokkien, and Cantonese – as an essential means to maintaining Chinese culture; 4) celebration of Chinese New Year as a key practice in preserving Chinese tradition.