King Mengrai founded the city of Chiang Mai ("new city") in 1296 on the site of an older city of the Lawa people called Wiang Nopburi.Gordon Young, in his 1962 book The Hill tribes of Northern Thailand, mentions how a Wa chieftain in Burma told him that the Wa, a people who are closely related to the Lawa, once lived in the Chiang Mai valley in "sizeable cities".