There are only a few older speakers left for Thao today, and not all of them are good story-tellers. Only a few Thao texts have been published or made available before. More texts with grammatical analysis will help us gain a better understanding of the Thao language. Thao is linguistically unique in many ways. However, not only the language, but also the Thao traditions are not known to the younger people any more.

These texts collected in two different periods (1975 and 1996-2003) from different speakers cover a wide range of topics, including their personal experience, work and life, festivals, myth and traditions. They may have talked about the same or similar topics, yet their content and expressions differ so much that we can hardly find any duplication between their texts. So different versions of the same topics by different speakers are carefully recorded and presented in this monograph. Some narratives are in simple style and straight-forward, while the others are much more elaborate with great details. A shorter text has less than 10 sentences, while a longer text has more than 200 sentences. There are altogether about 2000 sentences.

These 42 Thao texts and 19 songs are divided into three parts: Part One is Puni and RawSian’s texts, Part Two KilaS’s texts, and Part Three Thao folk songs, and all the texts in the chronological order of their collection. Interlinear word glosses and free translation for each sentence are given in both English and Chinese for all these texts and most of the songs.