Land of Jade

by Bertil Lintner

  “How are you? Where are you?!” began one letter. “Your work in Bangkok must be keeping you extremely busy since you haven’t written to us for more than a year,” another irate friend wrote. We laughed. Only a handful people had actually known our plans when we left Bangkok in March 1985.

  In the mail were also a number of savings account deposit slips from my bank in Bangkok. To our satisfaction, money had come in from articles we had sent out from India and later from Pa Jau; we would not be entirely broke on our return. Our financial situation meanwhile was hardly acute. We were spending virtually nothing, save for a few hundred Kyats for Hseng Tai’s birthday party here, or the occasional tin of butter or cheese there. Like all the other inhabitants at Pa Jau, we were issued with weekly rations by the KIO; and, despite the rigours of the road, the clothes we had brought with us from Thailand were still serviceable. My walking shoes had reached a sorry pass but still served their purpose.

  During our sojourn at Pa Jau, the Rangoon government had introduced new banknotes. At first these were a source of considerable amusement. In December 1985, when we had been at Kesan Chanlam, the old 100 Kyat banknotes had been demonetized and replaced with odd 75 Kyat ones. That was only the beginning. Now, we learnt from traders from the towns that the central bank in Rangoon had issued 15 and 35 Kyat banknotes. Initially, we thought the traders must be pulling our legs. But soon enough, these oddities began turning up in the market at Pa Jau.

  “I wonder what the World Bank has to say about this?” remarked Brang Seng dryly.

  Brang Seng and Bertil saying goodbye before the Lintners left Pa Jau in October 1986.

  But its farcical elements aside, the demonetisation of the 100 Kyat banknotes turned out to be a tragedy. It was announced that compensation could only be made to people who could prove that they had earned their money “by honest means”. In Burma, where the black market accounts for the greater part of the entire economy, that was virtually impossible. Many traders lost their entire capital; some even committed suicide. At the same time, shortages of domestic goods were reported and it was clear the economy was in a shambles. People we met in Pi Sai Long’s khao soi shop on market days were incensed and cursed the government openly.

  But regardless of economic upheavals elsewhere in the country, Pa Jau itself stood out as an oasis of prosperity.

  New wooden houses were going up almost every month, roads were being built and trade with China was brisk. Jade went to Yunnan and consumer goods came in the opposite direction. The local video hall near the market was packed every night with traders, villagers and soldiers. Now that most of my own research was complete, we would occasionally drop in too. For a remote corner of northern Burma, the fare was somehow improbable. Chinese Kung Fu and Burmese soap operas we had expected. But there were also screenings of Superman, Rambo, Gandhi and The Guns of Navarone. Global culture had arrived with a vengeance.

  Visiting the video hall was also a social event and a good opportunity to meet friends. The only person who never came was the old major N’Chyaw Tang. He spent his evenings painstakingly following world events over his radio, listening to almost every broadcasting station in the region.

  In early October, another group of visitors, conspicuous in uniform grey slacks and white shirts, arrived at Pa Jau. We soon learnt they were CPB officers from Panghsai, a communist-held town where the Burma Road crossed into China. One evening, the youngest of the group called at our house. Well built and in his late thirties, he had been born in China but had joined the CPB as a teenage volunteer in 1968 at the height of the Cultural Revolution. His real name was Zhang Zhiming. But after so many years in Burma, he had learnt to speak Burmese, Kachin and Shan fluently and assumed the Burmese name Kyi Myint. He was a sympathetic character and we took an instant liking to him.

  “I hear you’ve been invited to our general headquarters at Panghsang.” He sat down by the stove. “That’s good news! We need journalists. And you can see the situation in our area for yourselves. There’s so much nonsense being talked and written about us.”

  On that point at least we were in full agreement. It had long been a major gap in the field of Burmese studies that no serious analysis of the CPB had ever been undertaken. For want of reliable information, coverage in the media had tended to fall back on tired and distorted shibboleths that revolved around “Maoists turned opium traders”. Beyond dispute was that a large portion of the opium grown in Burma originated in CPB-held areas. That was not to say, however, that commerce had replaced ideology as the driving force behind the party. I was keenly looking forward to our trip south and the opportunity to gain a first-hand impression of the CPB today.

  The nights were now becoming crisper, a clear sign that the rainy season was coming to an end. I went fishing with Brang Seng a couple of times and noticed that the water level in the streams was sinking. Former torrents now flowed gently through the forest. It was time to be moving on.

  * As chance would have it, of all the rolls of film sent out from Kachin State this was the only one to go astray. I suffered bleeding feet and almost caught pneumonia in vain.

  10

  HSI-HSINWAN

  The day we set off, the mountains enfolding Pa Jau lay lush and green beneath a cloudless sky. It was 16th October 1986—six months to the day since our arrival. Brang Seng, Zawng Hra, Sai Tu, their wives and a group of other friends assembled to bid us farewell. A section of soldiers were to escort us to Na Hpaw where more troops would join us for the journey south to CPB-controlled areas of northern Shan State.

  “We might see each other again soon. Who knows?” Brang Seng said as he shook my hand. There was a mischievous twinkle in his eye that I was not sure what to make of. But I held my peace.

  “Till next time then.”

  For the last time we walked down to the stream by the Gat Yang market and past Pi Sai Long’s little restaurant, the Chinese shops where we had purchased our butter and cheese, the KIO’s cooperative store and the Pa Jau township office with the Kachin flag on the hill overlooking the narrow valley. Perhaps inevitably, our emotions were mixed. We had spent half a year at Pa Jau and felt thoroughly at home there. There were those we would sorely miss: Pui Hpa the Shan radio operator, the humorist Kum Hpa Ka, the children at the kindergarten, Maj. N’Chyaw Tang with his transistor radio, and others besides. But, at the same time, the exhilaration of being back on the road with the promise of new places and experiences was impossible to gainsay.

  A six hour walk across the hills brought us to Na Hpaw in the afternoon. The house we had occupied six months before had again been prepared for us, and the camp was in festive mood. On our arrival in April, it had been thingyan, the Water Festival; now it was thadingyut, the end of the Buddhist Lent. In addition to the celebrations came another surprise that pleased us tremendously. Khun Nawng’s wife had arrived from Mandalay, and the couple had been reunited after eight years apart. Khun Nawng was delighted to see us.

  “Brother! Sister! You must meet my wife! She’s here now.”

  She was typically Burmese, a soft-spoken, moon-faced beauty with long hair tied in a bun. Polished manners overlay a deep faith in Buddhism. Like many Burmese from the central plains, she had long viewed the insurgents in the colours of Rangoon propaganda—as ruthless terrorists and drug traffickers bent on wrecking the nation’s peace and stability. And for many years, she had found it painfully difficult to reconcile herself to the fact that her own husband was one of them. But a week at Na Hpaw had already wrought a remarkable transformation. Her prejudices behind her, she appeared relaxed and happy.

  “When she first came, she could hardly believe her eyes. ‘What? So many big villages with schools, hospitals and churches? The government never told us that in Mandalay’.” Khun Nawng teased her with obvious affection. But on one point her scepticism had not been shaken. She found it hard to believe Khun Nawng had remained faithful to her throughout his eight years with the KIA, especially with so many pretty young girl soldiers ar
ound. I decided to help a good cause.

  “Believe me, Khun Nawng never talked about anybody but you. The girls even called him ‘the monk’ because he never showed any interest in them,” I assured her without needing to take any liberties with the truth.

  “Exactly! The monk! That’s what they called me.”

  “And he always sat alone at night by the campfire in the jungle, looking like a bear with a sore head. He was always thinking of you.”

  “The whole time!” Khun Nawng nodded vigorously, his smile wider than ever.

  But amid the festivities, there was sad news too. Khun Nawng told us that Labwi Htingnan, the Kachin missionary to the Nagas, had died of dysentery on October 4 at Nam Byu. My memories of him were still vivid: a spritely old man with a Kachin longyi wrapped around short, sturdy legs and the bag containing his Bible and hymn books slung over his shoulder. He had taught me much about the Nagas that I could not possibly have learnt from anybody else.

  In October 1986, a year after they crossed into Burma, the Lintners continued their journey, south from Kachin State and down to Shan State. Hseng Tai has grown considerably!

  Thadingyut fell on Saturday, October 18 and, in accordance with Buddhist tradition, the highlight of the celebrations came just before midnight when a gigantic balloon was loosed over Na Hpaw. Made of paper, it was filled with hot air from an attached bucket of glowing charcoal. The hundreds of soldiers and villagers who had gathered for the event cheered and clapped as the fire-balloon drifted gracefully up towards the moonlit mountains.

  Our departure was scheduled for October 20 and for our onward journey, Hseng Noung had managed to borrow a video camera from the KIA. There was one legacy of the years when the Kachins had served with the British we were particularly keen to film. As highlanders, the Kachins developed a special affection for the Scots—and the bagpipe was adopted as one of their musical instruments to accompany traditional bamboo flutes and, latterly, electric guitars. With the video equipment, a Kachin captain who had mastered the mystery of the bagpipe, and a section of soldiers, we climbed the hill to the old British frontier fort which we had decided would provide an appropriate backdrop for the performance.

  Hseng Noung set up the camera on its tripod, whereupon Scotland the Brave skirled out over the mountains and into China, to the beat of drums played by four Kachin soldiers. The overall effect was, I felt, memorable—the more so for the subsequent discovery that, sheep stomachs being in short supply in the Kachin Hills, the bagpipe was made from the inner-tube of a motor tyre covered with locally woven tartan cloth.

  The concert over, we left Na Hpaw escorted by a platoon of soldiers with mules carrying our luggage. The route took us close to the Chinese frontier. The population in the large, prosperous villages we passed was made up of the usual mixture of Kachin tribes—mostly Jinghpaw and Lisu—and ethnic Chinese. The villages of the latter were easily distinguishable by the presence of wide poppy fields on surrounding hillsides. Since it was late October, the fields had been cleared for the upcoming poppy season and the seeds been sown.

  Several days later, we reached the ruins of another old British frontier fort, Alawbum. Only the rock foundations and some smaller stone buildings remained, but the location was still ideal for a camp and now a company of KIA troops were based there. The original water supply system was still intact and the garrison bathed under rusty iron pipes which brought the water from a nearby hilltop down to the camp. The fort’s venerable cast-iron doors, meanwhile, had been converted into ping-pong tables.

  That night the temperature dropped sharply. The wind knifed through the bamboo walls of our hut and I woke before dawn to witness the most memorable sunrise I had ever seen. The sky over China was afire in hues of pink and crimson, and eruptions of towering cloud across the horizon compounded a spectacle awesome in its evocation of an elemental chaos from the dawn of time. The lines from Kipling’s Mandalay sprang instantly to mind:

  On the road to Mandalay,

  Where the flyin’-fishes play,

  And dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the bay.

  The High Priest of British colonialism had permitted himself some license with topography, and to our east was a steep, rocky gorge, no bay. But he had certainly captured something of the immensity and grandeur of the panorama before me.

  To reach the KIA’s 3rd Brigade headquarters near the market town of Loije on the Chinese border took us six days. There we passed a week, mostly in the camp since I was anxious to avoid being seen by government informers who invariably frequented rebel-held market towns. One day, however, curiosity overruled caution and we went into town to see the largest settlement in the KIA’s area. Dressed in green fatigues with a KIA cap pulled down over my head, I clambered onto a trailer drawn by a two-wheeled tractor steered by a handle-bars—a product of Chinese ingenuity called the tolache.

  I wedged myself between some ten Kachin soldiers armed with rifles and we set off along a pot-holed, dusty track. It suddenly occurred to me that this unusual excursion was my first ride in a motor vehicle since we had driven up by jeep from Mon to Longva and the Chinese border more than a year before.

  It took about an hour to reach Loije, chugging past prosperous farming villages, with a largely Shan population. The town, situated on one of the oldest trade routes connecting northern Burma and Yunnan, turned out to be bigger than I had expected. Its main streets were lined with two-storey Chinese merchant houses built of stone with wooden verandas.

  I hunched low among the soldiers around me so as not to draw attention to myself as the driver took us on a sight-seeing tour around town, past well-stocked stores, beauty parlours, video halls and a large open-air market. There were electric wires on concrete poles all over Loije and it was obvious that an upsurge of trade and commerce had brought a measure of prosperity.

  We spent a week at 3rd brigade headquarters preparing for our journey down to the CPB-controlled areas in northeastern Shan State. This was actually as far as we intended to travel in Kachin State. Broadly, we now had two alternative routes open to us. The first involved walking for two weeks down towards the Shweli River, crossing it, and continuing towards the heavily guarded Burma Road that ran from Lashio in northern Shan State to the Chinese border. The last ten kilometres of the road had been controlled by the CPB since the early 1970s, including the town of Panghsai where the road actually crossed into China.

  The alternative—and much easier—route would take us by car through China in a two-hour drive from Loije via the town of Ruili on the Shweli River direct to Panghsai. Given the considerable difference in time and effort involved, it did not take us long to make up our minds.

  Local people could easily obtain border passes from the Chinese authorities for journeys across the border into China. I would need to disguise myself, however, and hide on the back of a truck. So I dyed my hair black again and bought a set of Shan clothes from Loije: a grey shirt and wide, baggy trousers. With my sunglasses and a big Chinese-style straw hat, the disguise was complete. Through some local contacts, we hired a truck from the Chinese side to drive us to Wanting, the Chinese border town opposite Panghsai.

  On 1st November, I entered in my diary:

  “Time to leave Kachin Slate. Packed our bags in the morning and I dressed in my Shan costume. Walked across to China at 1 pm. The lorry was there, waiting for us at a lonely spot on the border road. Hseng Noung carried Hseng Tai and Ma Shwe came along also. Atom returned to Na Hpaw. The driver smiled when he saw me, understanding immediately the importance of evading any checkpoints along the way. But since we had paid him handsomely, no questions were asked. I clambered into the back of the lorry with our packs which we had hidden in ordinary-looking gunny bags. The journey was fast; through a small town called Zhanghong and then over a mountain range into the Shweli River valley. Passed Shweli—or Ruili as the Chinese call it—about an hour later. Nobody stopped us, not even at the suspension bridge over the Shweli River where the Chinese police m
aintain a checkpoint. After months in the hills of northern Burma, the brief journey through China was like travelling through a dream world. The towns. The crowds. Wide asphalt roads and traffic. Not to mention the fumes! Observing all this through my dark sunglasses reinforced the surreal quality of the two-hour lorry ride through Chinese territory.”

  We told the driver to stop near a rubber plantation before Wanting. The luggage was quickly unloaded and we set off at a brisk pace through serried ranks of rubber trees. I cast a glance over my shoulder, but saw no one. We walked for about fifteen minutes, carrying the gunny bags with our packs over our shoulders, and reached a small stream, the Nam Yan. We took off our shoes, rolled up our trousers and forded it—back into Burma again. We had made it. Hseng Noung and I sat down in a clearing in the forest together with Hseng Tai while Ma Shwe went into Panghsai to inform the local CPB authorities of our arrival. We waited for almost an hour before she returned with two junior party officials.

  “Let’s go. They know we’re here now. I met the township officer,” Ma Shwe said as she strapped Hseng Tai to her back. I reached for some plastic bags with vegetables, which we had brought from Loije as part of my disguise, and followed behind. Bent under the load, I did my best to act the part of an old Shan man coming back from market. We walked single-file into Panghsai. It was a big town, even bigger than Loije. Numerous Chinese-made army trucks and tolaches were parked along the streets. The market place was packed with people and merchants from all over northern Burma and for this reason, as in Loije, I needed to maintain my disguise.