The Emperor Far Away (27 page)

Pagodas were stationed like lighthouses on the Lao bank of the river as we sailed the final few kilometres to Chiang Saen. A giant Golden Buddha on the Thai side announced our arrival at the junction where the borders of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand meet: the official Golden Triangle. The Mekong was now the busiest it had been all voyage, with cargo boats from four countries heading in both directions and numerous smaller craft crossing between Thailand and Laos.

Han-owned casinos operate just inside Laos here, catering for Chinese and Thai gamblers. The twin golden domes of the newest were visible from the river, looming over the basic concrete low-rise buildings typical of provincial Laos. It is overseen by a Han man with close links to the ethnic armies of Shan State. The militias run casinos on their side of the border as well – a convenient way to launder some of the proceeds of the drug trade.

Chiang Saen was another twenty minutes away, its small port dominated by Guanlei boats, and the
Pao Shou Ba
’s crew hailed their friends as they docked. It had taken twenty-four hours to reach Thailand, about the same amount of time it would take me to travel on by land to Kengtung. Banna’s minorities can get there much faster. They can either slip across the land frontier or take a boat down the Mekong, jumping off at one of the isolated little jetties we had passed. But I was confined by borders and they were not.

18

The Dai Diaspora

Eastern Shan State remains isolated even now and the few foreigners who venture there are regarded with distrust by the Burmese authorities. That became apparent at the border post at Tachileik, as I watched the travel permit I needed to get to Kengtung being photocopied no fewer than thirty times. ‘We have to give one copy to each checkpoint we go through,’ explained Kyio, the guide assigned to me. As Kengtung is only 160 kilometres north of Tachileik, I asked if there was a checkpoint every few kilometres. ‘Oh no, there aren’t that many. But you need to do the same coming back.’

He had already relieved me of my passport, now tucked away in a drawer, an effective means of ensuring I wasn’t tempted to abandon him. ‘You’ll get it back when you leave,’ he said. Without Kyio, I could not proceed. Much of Shan State is barred to visitors – the Burmese do not like westerners wandering through the Golden Triangle – and the areas close to the Chinese border are especially sensitive. Just as in Tibet, I had to employ a guide.

Bordering Yunnan in the east and Thailand to the south, Shan State takes up most of eastern Myanmar. I had visited the north of Shan before, travelling to Hsipaw and Lashio from Mandalay. The old Burma Road, one of the routes by which the British and Americans supplied the Chinese nationalists fighting the Japanese in the Second World War, started in Lashio. From there it is a short journey to the border with Yunnan and Dehong Prefecture, the heartland of the Tai Neua, another branch of the Dai family, in China.

Myanmar is gradually opening its land frontiers to westerners. But when I travelled through Tachileik it was no ordinary border crossing, as the removal of my passport indicated. People entering Myanmar here are permitted to visit only Kengtung and Mong La, a town on the border with Yunnan, and a few points in between before either flying to Yangon or returning to Tachileik and exiting the country.

But I failed to get Mong La included on my permit. ‘It’s closed now,’ said the Burmese official. I asked why. ‘It’s closed now,’ he repeated, his very dark skin revealing him as coming from inland Myanmar rather than Shan State. It was a blow. Mong La is one of Shan State’s gambling and crime capitals, a rackety mix of minorities, Burmese and Han, and I wanted to see it. I told the official I would just go to Kengtung, while silently determining to try and reach Mong La anyway.

I suspected I was being kept away from Mong La because of fighting between the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s army, and the ethnic minorities in the area. Like China, Myanmar’s far edges are populated by a medley of peoples. There are 135 officially recognised ethnic groups in the country and many inhabit Shan State and Kachin State further north. In Shan State, the Dai are the dominant minority. The majority are Tai Yai, sometimes called Tai Long, while others are Tai Lue like the Dai in Banna, Tai Khun or Tai Neua. But throughout Myanmar all Dai are known generically as the ‘Shan’.

Also present in Shan State are large numbers of Wa, as well as Akha, Bulang and Lahu. But, unlike their peaceful relatives in Banna, some of the minorities in Shan and Kachin States are restive. They want their own sovereign nations, or at the very least autonomy, and have been agitating for that ever since the then Burma gained its independence from Britain in 1948. A few – the Kachin, Karen, Shan and Wa – have their own armies, funded by their control of drug trafficking in the Golden Triangle, smuggling operations along the Yunnan and Thai borders and the shadowy trade in precious gems and jade.

So powerful are those forces that parts of Shan State are designated as ‘Special Regions’, a euphemism that enables the Myanmar government to avoid admitting that its remit doesn’t extend to the country’s extremities. Mong La lies in Special Region 4. It is controlled by the National Democratic Alliance Army, a militia originally formed by the descendants of the Ming loyalists who fled to the Kokang region of Shan State in the seventeenth century to escape Qing rule.

Beijing funded and armed the ethnic armies for many years, even if it is now more and more concerned by the ever-increasing flow of heroin into China from the Burmese borderlands. The CCP was the biggest supporter of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) in the 1960s and 1970s, as it attempted to overthrow the military junta then ruling Myanmar. The minorities in Shan and Kachin States sided with the CPB and China supplied them with weapons and cash.

They were also allowed to use Yunnan as both a hideout and a training area, a logical step given that the soldiers of the rebel armies shared the same ethnicity – Dai, Wa and Kachin mainly – as the minorities in Banna and Dehong Prefecture. Indeed, some of the leaders of the militias were technically Chinese citizens, or had parents who were. It was a rare, if unstated, acknowledgment by Beijing of the ties that bind the minorities of Yunnan to their cousins across the frontiers.

Adding to what was an already impossibly tangled web of ethnic allegiances and political loyalties, Shan State and the hills just across the border in Thailand were the base for the last remnants of the Kuomintang (KMT) forces, the Chinese nationalists defeated by the CCP after the Second World War. Just as some Han chose to live in Kokang rather than accept a Qing emperor, so elements of the KMT refused to submit to Mao and sought sanctuary in the Golden Triangle after 1949 – one more army in a region of many. Like the Tibetan guerrillas based in Mustang in Nepal, the KMT diehards were backed by the CIA and mounted raids into Yunnan until the late 1970s.

By then, Beijing had cut off its support for Burma’s ethnic armies. But the minorities had already realised they could fund their struggle with the opium growing in the hills around them. The Shan and Wa generals turned the Golden Triangle into the world’s heroin hub, while signing subsequent ceasefire deals, often broken, with the Myanmar government which enabled them to run the special regions of Shan State as effectively separate countries.

Tachileik itself had been the stronghold of Khun Sa, the most notorious of all the Golden Triangle’s warlords cum drug barons. The son of a Chinese father and a Shan mother, Khun Sa’s real name was Zhang Qifu and in the early 1960s he trained with the KMT rebels. Soon afterwards, he set up his own army and began to take control of much of the opium business. For the next two decades, he flooded American cities in particular with the purest heroin around. Despite the best efforts of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, he was still a free, and extremely rich, man when he died peacefully in Yangon, Myanmar’s former capital, in 2007.

Outside Tachileik, in the hills that run along the border with Thailand, are the camps where the 8,000-strong Shan State Army (SSA) is based. Other splinter factions of the SSA operate elsewhere in the region. The checkpoints I would go through on the way to Kengtung and the refusal to let me travel to Mong La were a reminder that one of the longest-running conflicts of recent times is still going on in this part of Shan State.

Once Kyio’s satchel was stuffed full of permits, I was allowed to leave the border post and go in search of a moneychanger. I handed over a small pile of Thai baht and in return got a doorstep-sized wedge of kyat, the Burmese currency, which was far too big for my wallet or pockets. The notes were filthy almost beyond recognition. Chinese money is frequently grubby but compared to Myanmar’s it looks like freshly minted notes from the Bank of England.

Using some of my kyat to pay for water and cigarettes brought a disapproving shake of the head from the shopkeeper. Tachileik is a popular day trip for Thais, who come to gamble and buy the cheap rubies and sapphires mined on the Shan Plateau, and the Thai baht is the preferred local currency. Tachileik’s proximity to Thailand makes it one of Myanmar’s few thriving towns. Its streets are much dustier and shabbier than the neighbouring Thai border town of Mae Sai, but the new cars on the roads and the foreign goods for sale are a measure of a prosperity that is rare in Myanmar.

At the bus station, the crowds of Shan returning to their homes in the country with their latest purchases were another sign of Tachileik’s importance as a regional retail centre. They squatted out of the sun in their
longyi
, chewing betel nut and depositing red spit on to the floor, while guarding boxes of Thai coconuts and pineapples, sacks of rice, TVs and DVD players. ‘Everything in Shan State comes from Thailand,’ said Kyio, ‘apart from the things that come from China.’

Kyio was twenty-one and, I thought, harmless. A lank mop of black hair obscured his forehead and straggled over his dark eyes. He wore skinny jeans, flip-flops and a red-and-white-striped shirt for all the time we were together. Kengtung was his hometown and he was Tai Yai, although one of his grandmothers was a Tai Lue from Banna. A physics student, his fluent English enabled him to work part-time as a tourist guide. But what Kyio really wanted to do was move to Bangkok, where his mother ran a hairdressing salon.

Public transport in Myanmar is rarely reliable. As we waited for the bus to leave, we got to know each other. In Tibet, I had been tight-lipped from the moment I arrived, fearing what would happen if anyone found out I was a journalist. I felt more secure in Myanmar, a country I knew, and some of my questions to Kyio were injudicious, his youth making me more garrulous than I would have been with someone older. But he was far sharper than Tenzin, my guide in Tibet, and soon began punctuating our conversation with outbursts of ‘You know about that?’

Asking about the possibility of getting to Mong La, despite the ban on foreigners going there, was especially foolish. By the time we left Tachileik, I had the uncomfortable feeling that Kyio was already suspicious of my reasons for visiting Kengtung. I said I was a history teacher with an interest in Buddhism, but I noticed him trying to read the notes I occasionally scribbled. I claimed it was a diary and knew he wouldn’t be able to decipher my handwriting, but I wished I had kept my mouth shut. Kyio was less naive than he looked.

On the outskirts of Tachileik, we stopped at the first checkpoint. Kyio told me to stay on the bus and not to take any photos, while he and the rest of the passengers got off to have their identity cards scrutinised. I watched Kyio hand over one of the photocopies of my permit, a sight that would become wearyingly familiar. But before long we were on our way again, the decrepit bus climbing slowly upwards towards the Shan Plateau and Kengtung.

As we travelled higher, the villages grew more primitive: no more than roughly assembled wooden huts perched precariously by the road, with not even the corrugated iron favoured across Myanmar as roofing to protect them. They were Akha homes, their rice terraces cut into the hillsides above them. Most of the farming, though, was going on below us in the valleys and flatlands, where the Shan villages are. Lining the road were bamboo poles supporting electricity lines and I knew that, like elsewhere in rural Myanmar, the power would be on for only a few hours a day, if at all.

Shan music videos played throughout the journey. One of the singers was Sai Mao, the most famous of the Dai musicians whose songs inspired many young Dai imitators in Banna in the 1980s and 1990s, a musical movement that was the heir to Changkhap, the oral poetry and folk music the Dai have always used to transmit their culture through the generations. Sai Mao is Tai Yai and his lyrics stress pan-Dai identity. In the late 1970s, he was imprisoned for two years after writing a song calling for an independent Shan State.

Five hours out of Tachileik, we began a steep descent into a valley where rice paddies shone bright green in the sun. The hills of the Shan Plateau rose all around, their red earth visible from many kilometres away, as the forests that cover them are increasingly chopped down to supply China’s voracious need for timber. It was a spectacular approach to Kengtung, which appeared suddenly like an oasis in the desert, the first settlement of any size in eastern Shan State.

Kengtung, pronounced ‘Chiang Tong’, is the unofficial capital of the Golden Triangle and is proud of that status, despite the region’s dubious reputation elsewhere in the world. You can smoke locally produced Golden Triangle cigarettes – opium-free of course – or play a round at the Golden Triangle Golf Club, mostly patronised by officers from the nearby army base. And there are many substantial houses sprouting satellite dishes and with new land cruisers parked inside their high gates – the homes of those who have prospered from selling the area’s most famous product.