The (H)mong, like most tribal societies around the world, have never had any precise
idea of their population number from time immemorial. Wherever they live today, they have
learned about their numbers by others' calculation and until recently never paid much attention to
figures. They certainly had a sense of a number under which they felt their ranks were being
depleted and, wherever they were sent by the vagaries of history, the pioneers among them had
two goals in mind: how to attract fellow tribesmen to join their group and how to reproduce and
expand their small communities to the point they would feel at home in a foreign environment.