The Akha are a hill tribe of subsistence farmers known for their artistry. Most of the remaining Akha people are now distributed in small villages among the mountains of China (where they are considered part of the Hani by the government, though this is a subject of some dispute among the Akha themselves), Laos (where they are considered Lao Sung), the Daen Lao Range in Burma, and northern Thailand, where they are one of the six main hill tribes.

The Akha arrived to Thailand, by the demarcation between British India and Thailand in 1905, by the civil war Burma and Laos more have immigrated, with some 80,000 now living in Thailand's northern provinces of Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai at high altitudes. Many of these villages can be visited by tourists on trekking tours from either of these cities. They speak Akha, a language in the Loloish (Yi) branch of the Tibeto-Burman family.

Akha has a very closely related language with the Lisu and Lahu as they once belonged to the Lolo hunter tribe people that once ruled the Paoshan and Teinchung plains before the invasion of Ming Dynasty (A.D 1644) in Yunan, China.^{[citation needed]}