Kachin State in Myanmar is located in the globally recognized Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot, and is notable for its biological and cultural richness. However, despite this, reports on plant diversity and its cultural applications in Kachin are scarse, and the area is a virtual black spot for plant diversity and resource research. According to the “A Checklist of the Trees, Shrubs, Herbs, and Climbers of Myanmar” (Kress et al., 2003), Kachin State is home to 4220 plant species, covering 1546 genera and 353 families, which is the most of any state and division in Myanmar. Long-term and systematic surveys in Kachin have been lacking until very recently, when joint efforts between the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation (MONREC) of Myanmar initiated botanical surveys, which, together with the intensive research conducted by the New York Botanical Garden in the same area, led to a surge in new findings and publications. Of the new plant species described recently from Myanmar, 79, accounting for 41% of the total, were described from Kachin (Yang et al., 2020).

Kachin State is also the main region of Myanmar inhabited by Kachin ethnic groups, and thus represents a unique environmental and social context for ethnobotanical studies. As with many parts of the world, plant resources and their traditional knowledge relating to them play an important role in health care in Kachin State. Recent botanical studies from the area have mainly focused on plant diversity and alpha taxonomy (Aung et al., 2017, 2018; Aung and Jin, 2018; Ding et al., 2018; Tan et al., 2017).

Myanmar has 135 officially recognized ethnic groups (Department of Population, 2014). There are eight major ethnic groups in Myanmar, one of which is the Kachin Confederation (Jinghpaw Wunpawng). Ethnic groups included within the Kachin Confederation are the Kachin people (Jinghpaw), Lhaovo (Maru), Lachid (Lashi), Zaiwa (Atsi), Lisu (Lasaw) and Rawang (Nung) (Htung, 2022). In the Ethnologue (Simons and Fennig, 2018, https://www.ethnologue.com), the names Kachin, Jinghpaw, Jingpo and Singpho are considered to be interchangable transliterations. In this study, we used the term “Kachin people” to refer to the “Kachin (Jinghpaw)”, part of the Kachin ethnic group confederation.

The Kachin people live primarily in Myanmar and China, as well as in northeastern India, and they are believed to have migrated from Central Asia into Southeast Asia. The Kachin people (Jinghpaw) are known as the Singpho in Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, India, and as Jingpo in Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture, China (Ashwini, 2018). The Kachin speak Jinhpaw, which is a Tibeto-Burman language of the Sal branch, and which is mainly spoken in Kachin State and in Yunnan, China. The majority of the Kachin are Christian, mainly Baptist and Roman Catholic. In Myanmar, the Kachin people are found mainly in Kachin State, Northern Shan State (Muse and Lashio districts) and in the Sagaing region (Htung, 2022).

In Myanmar, Kachin State has been politically unstable for longer than almost any other area, and has been suffering from political conflicts since 1961 (Sadan, 2018). The needs of people living in politically unstable areas are in general very difficult to assess, making public health a concern in Kachin. For example, Debarre (2019) reported that more than 96,000 people lack access to effective healthcare services in Kachin State. Moreover, very limited information is available about the health concerns of the Kachin people e.g., a malaria survey along the Myanmar-China border area in 2014 suggested that the people in this area are suffering from a malarial incidence rate of 8.70 per thousand (Wang et al., 2016), which is almost triple the national average in Myanmar (Mu et al., 2016). Because of these reasons, the people living in these areas rely on traditional knowledge and medicinal plants for healthcare. However, the local knowledge of medicinal plants in Kachin State remains largely unstudied, and little attention has been paid to documenting it. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first comprehensive study to document the Kachin people's valuable knowledge of medicinal plants, and to analyze this knowledge in the study region.

In this study, we focused on documenting the traditional Kachin knowledge of medicinal plants through analysis of the important medicinal plant species, as well as the usage of these plants. We addressed two research questions: 1) what are the medicinal plants used by the Kachin people and how are these plants characterized? and 2) which are the prevalent diseases treated by these medicinal plants?