The Hmong have stories of a distant, long ago homeland with snow and mountains, which some scholars believe might be the Caucasus Mountains.  The vast majority of Hmong people now live in China, but under pressure from the expanding Chinese empire the group has been migrating into neighboring countries for at least the last thousand years.  

During the “Secret War in Laos” in the early 1970s, the American CIA funded a Hmong army to fight the communist groups that eventually won the war in 1975.  When the communists took power, many of the Hmong people, fearing for their lives, fled to refugee camps in Thailand. 

Today there are about 8.5 million Hmong live in China, about 600,000 in Vietnam, over a quarter of a million in Laos, and about 120,000 in Thailand.  Additionally, roughly 100,000 Hmong refugees from Laos are living in Western countries, especially in California, Wisconsin and Minnesota in the United States.