The Emperor Far Away

by David Eimer

  Naung Tung, a small lake ringed by open-air restaurants and a few grand residences from the colonial era, dominates the centre of town. Kengtung was one of the places from where the British had governed Burma’s borderlands as the Federated Shan States – recognition of their essential separateness from the rest of the country. But the former palace of the princes who ruled the old Dai kingdom of Kengtung is no more, demolished by the Myanmar government in 1991 as revenge for the Shan’s quest for independence. It was a petty move, akin to the destruction of the Chao Fa’s palace in Jinghong during the Cultural Revolution.

  After arriving at my guesthouse, I told Kyio I didn’t need him for the rest of the day and hired a bike. I knew a guide was required only in Kengtung itself and didn’t want Kyio dogging my footsteps. With the still fierce late-afternoon sun on my back, I pedalled off up the bumpy and potholed streets in search of Naung Tung. Saying its Burmese name brought only puzzled expressions. Then I tried asking a man in Chinese and he immediately pointed the way.

  Subsequently, I discovered that every second or third person in Kengtung spoke or could at least understand basic Mandarin. The trick was not to ask the darker-skinned residents, who were generally migrants from inland Myanmar, but to talk to the lighter-complexioned Shan. With Mong La and the border with Yunnan a mere eighty kilometres north of Kengtung, many of the locals are regular visitors to the villages in Banna their families are originally from, or are involved in nefarious smuggling schemes with relatives and friends in China.

  The Dai diaspora from Banna into Shan State and the north-west of Laos, which borders both Shan and Banna, dates back centuries. Sipsongpanna stretched into what is now Myanmar and Laos, and the Dai have always moved beyond borders to different areas of their old kingdom. But it was the CCP’s takeover of China and the subsequent chaos of the Cultural Revolution especially which prompted the last great mass migration of the Dai and the other ethnic groups of Banna into the Golden Triangle.

  Not even the remote rainforests of Yunnan’s borderlands were spared the Red Guards. As monasteries were raided and wrecked, monks took sanctuary in the temples of Kengtung and Muang Sing in north-west Laos. With schools closed for years in the turmoil, many Dai sent their children to stay with relatives over the borders, or went with them to escape being punished for adhering to their traditional lifestyle.

  Their descendants make up many of the Tai Lue who live in Kengtung. Nang was one of them. She ran a tea shop with her husband, serving up Chinese green tea or the sweet, milky Burmese version in the day and beers and whisky after dark. Nang was short, skinny and serious in glasses. Her husband was darker, heavy-set and tattooed and always dressed in a longyi. Both their families were from Banna.

  ‘My grandparents came to Kengtung in the 1960s, in the early days of the Cultural Revolution. My dad was a small child and they didn’t want him to be in the village then. They didn’t know what would happen in the future,’ Nang told me. They stayed for over twenty years. Nang’s father had met her mother, who was also the child of Tai Lue refugees, in Kengtung and both Nang and her sister were born there. But as conditions in China improved dramatically in the 1980s, while the security situation in Shan State deteriorated, her parents and sister had returned to Banna, which Nang still referred to as Sipsongpanna.

  Nang remained in Kengtung with other relatives. Now she saw her family in Banna a couple of times a year, making sure she celebrated Songkran, the Dai New Year, with them in their home village near Menghai, a couple of hours from Jinghong. As the minorities have always done, Nang didn’t bother with a passport or designated border crossings when she visited. ‘I get the bus to Mong La and then I take a small road to Banna,’ she said. It was a euphemism for slipping across the frontier unofficially. ‘It’s no problem for us. Many Tai Lue living in Kengtung go to Banna and lots of Dai from Banna come here.’

  She had no desire to follow her parents’ and younger sister’s example and live in Banna. ‘This is my home. I was born here and my business is here. I don’t speak very good Chinese, so I wouldn’t get a decent job in Sipsongpanna. It’s easier for me here.’ Her husband’s parents were also migrants from Banna. Along with their daughter, they are now citizens of greater Dailand, speaking the Dai dialect of Banna among themselves and the Tai Khun language spoken in Kengtung to their customers.

  It was Nang who finally dashed my hopes of reaching Mong La. ‘They have been fighting there for the last three months. There are many checkpoints and you’ll get caught if you go.’ I resigned myself to staying in Kengtung for a few more days. It wasn’t a hardship because I was already fond of the place and found its peaceful rhythm soothing, even with a guerrilla war between the Tatmadaw and Shan going on around it.

  Soon I established a simple routine. Every morning, I woke up to find Kyio outside my door waiting to ask me what I planned to do today. I would tell him that I was just going to cycle around Kengtung and so didn’t need him, a reply he found increasingly disturbing and which he clearly didn’t believe. ‘You can’t leave Kengtung on your own,’ he warned me each time we met. I assured him I wouldn’t, a promise I kept.

  Most days I ended up in the main market, a fascinating maze of shops and stalls offering everything from Chinese cosmetics and clothes to Indian chewing tobacco, Lao Beer and out-of-date medicines from Thailand. Early in the morning, Akha women arrived to sell what they grew in the hills. They squatted in long lines according to which village they were from, their produce piled in front of them, dressed in longyi and black tops whose edges were lined with different colours. Some wore sun hats, others their traditional headdress decorated with silver discs and jewellery.

  Every night, I went to Naung Tung. It was Kengtung’s most lively area. The open-air restaurants were always busy with people eating grilled fish or skewers of chicken and horse meat, a popular snack in Kengtung. They drank Myanmar lager and the rotgut local whisky, while watching the English Premier League football games screened most nights. English football is a passion in Myanmar, in part because it was one of the few foreign imports shown on Burmese TV when the military junta ran the country.

  Eating, drinking and talking with the Shan, under the big yellow moon that hung over the pagodas atop Kengtung’s hills, made for pleasant and enlightening evenings. Almost everyone was friendly and frank about their desire for independence and contempt for the Tatmadaw. The longer I stayed in Kengtung, the more I noticed the military presence. Most of the soldiers were from inland Myanmar. They have an unsavoury reputation among the Shan for beating and raping the locals, while coercing bribes from them at every opportunity.

  Yet I was aware that I was probably being closely watched. I reasoned that Kyio must have to report to someone, and I knew that was why he was growing more and more unhappy with my refusal to use his services. Even if I wasn’t actually being tailed, it wouldn’t be hard to find out where I went or who I was speaking to because, as far as I knew, I was the only westerner in Kengtung at the time.

  One morning, I got confirmation of how people were noticing what I did. I opened the door bleary-eyed and with a whisky head to find a stern-faced Kyio pointing an accusing finger at me. ‘You were in the nightclub last night,’ he said. It was true; I had been. The club was by the lake, located in the ground floor of an empty hotel, and was Kengtung’s only such establishment.

  I paid 1,000 kyat to get in, or about 70p – the equivalent of a day’s wages for many people in Shan State. But after some enthusiastic dancing to western techno imported from Thailand, spun by a surprisingly competent DJ, and a few too many drinks, my evening was cut short when a fight kicked off between rivals for a girl. It sucked in their friends and everyone around them. The bouncers reacted by ejecting everyone and shutting the club, leaving me to cycle home unsteadily through the dark streets while dogs growled at me.

  Neither Kyio nor the owner of the guesthouse was impressed. I was told I was staying out too late, although I had been back by midnight, and that they were goi
ng to impose a curfew on me. From now on, the gates to the guesthouse would be locked at nine. Unwilling to be confined like a prisoner in the dark, as the guesthouse generator shut down at 9.30 leaving me unable to read or write, I decided it was time to leave Kengtung.

  Returning to Tachileik, with Kyio silent in the seat next to me, was an anti-climax, made more so by the knowledge that I was running more or less parallel to the Mekong, somewhere out of sight to my left. On the other side of the river was Xieng Kok, a port in north-west Laos that was once a key transit point for the opium grown in the nearby hills. That area was my next destination and I reckoned I was about 150 kilometres away from it. But foreigners cannot take the direct route across the Mekong. I would have to return to Thailand to travel on to Laos.

  With the local border crossings barred to me, it took two frustrating days to reach north-west Laos. I travelled by bus and then in a songthaew, a pick-up truck with benches in the back and a roof, to Chiang Khong where I caught a boat across the Mekong to Huay Xai, the port in Laos where Naw Kham the pirate had been captured. After that, it was another day’s ride on two buses before I reached Muang Sing, a town ten kilometres south of China and less than eighty kilometres from Xieng Kok and the banks of the Mekong.

  Muang Sing has long been synonymous with the poppy trade. When the French were still running Laos, it was the largest opium market in the Golden Triangle. The Akha would bring their sacks of the sticky black resin down from the surrounding hills and sell it, before it was taken west to Xieng Kok and shipped off. Aged Akha women still patrol the main street offering small packets of fresh opium to any foreigner they encounter, but the hill villages around Muang Sing are now mostly free of poppy fields.

  Instead, they can be found further west. Laos remains the world’s fourth-largest supplier of opium, although it produces far less than Afghanistan and Myanmar, and much of the annual crop is grown in the remote villages high in the hills above the small town of Muang Long, close to Xieng Kok. They are all but inaccessible, and reaching them involves hours of bouncing down rutted dirt and stone tracks that become mudbaths in the rainy season and then walking.

  ‘The people who live there have no choice but to grow opium. They either do that or starve,’ said an Akha man named Ber Ko I met in Muang Long. ‘Where they live is so isolated that they can’t grow rubber or bananas because they can’t get to Muang Long to buy the stuff they need to grow those crops. Even if they could, they wouldn’t be able to sell it because they can’t reach town. They can grow enough rice and maize to feed themselves and that’s it.’

  Ber Ko was a loquacious, youthful-looking thirty-five-year-old with a prized pick-up truck. He described himself as a ‘transporter of goods’, without specifying exactly what he carried. One day, I became the cargo and we headed into the hills to a village where opium is grown. Low down, much of the rainforest that once covered the area has gone, replaced by rice paddies and corn fields, or just stripped bare of its precious wood. But the higher we climbed, the more jungle appeared.

  Our destination was a collection of wooden shacks, more desperate even than the Akha villages I’d seen in Shan State. Naked, filthy children played, while women of all ages wandered around bare-chested, a peculiarity of Akha settlements in Laos. I received a cautious welcome, but was soon invited into a house where the celebration of a boy’s coming of age was taking place. We drank lao-lao, the local version of baijiu, and took turns to tie money to the boy’s wrist with coloured threads while offering him a blessing for the future.

  No one admitted to cultivating opium in any quantity. ‘The old people still smoke it, so they grow a personal crop but that’s it,’ one farmer named La Te told me. And I had arrived at the wrong time of year to see any poppy fields. ‘There’s only one crop a year and it’s planted after the maize has been cut down in October. They use the same fields and the opium is ready for harvest in February. Then the people transport it on foot to either the Mekong or the Chinese border where Tai Lue people collect it,’ said Ber Ko.

  Just as they do in Banna, the Tai Lue control both the drug trade and the lowland towns of the area. Muang Sing, Muang Long and Xieng Kok are all Dai strongholds, while the Akha can only gaze down on them from the little-developed hills. ‘The Akha are at the bottom of the chain,’ said Ber Ko with a resigned shrug. ‘It’s the Shan people and the Tai Lue who turn the opium into heroin and sell it on.’

  Centuries ago, this area of north-west Laos had been part of Sipsongpanna with Muang Sing then, as now, its largest town. Later it came under the protection of the Dai kingdom of Kengtung. But when the British and French decided the borders of Burma and Laos at the beginning of the twentieth century, Muang Sing and the surrounding area was allocated neither to China nor to Burma, but to Laos.

  China’s influence looms large here now, though. Much of the land has been sold to the same Chinese companies that run Banna’s rubber farms, while the bananas grown locally are packed into boxes marked ‘Produce of China’ and sent north by foremen from far-off Sichuan Province. And unlike their cousins in Banna, the Tai Lue of north-west Laos are not prospering from the rubber boom. The Chinese trucks kick up clouds of dust as they rumble to and from the border along Muang Sing’s long, barely sealed main street, while the buildings are a mix of decrepit white-stone French colonial structures and hybrid wood and brick houses.

  Despite the pervasive Chinese presence, this corner of north-west Laos continues to preserve aspects of Dai culture no longer present anywhere else in greater Dailand. Two aged ladies at the restaurant in Muang Sing I ate at reminded me of that daily. ‘This is the only place you will find proper Tai Lue food,’ they said, serving up dishes such as a tangy paste of chilli, garlic and cilantro eaten with sticky rice. Muang Sing’s pagodas, too, were pure Tai Lue. Wat Pajay in Jinghong reveals the influence of Thai, Burmese and even Sri Lankan temple architecture. But in Muang Sing strange vertical prayer flags flew above spartan, less decorative monasteries.

  A relic of a long-distant Dailand, Muang Sing’s uniqueness is perhaps due to it having been on the fringes of two Dai kingdoms, Sipsongpanna and Kengtung, rather than at the heart of either of them. Its survival is all the more remarkable given the upheaval and violence Laos has endured since it gained independence in 1953. But Dai identity is as hardy as the opium poppies that grow in the hills around Muang Long and the vagaries of national politics have never been able to diminish it, whether in China, Laos or Myanmar.

  19

  With the Wa

  I was tired of being restricted by borders and rules which the minorities blithely ignored. My failure to reach Mong La and the wasted days spent getting to north-west Laos were unwelcome reminders of how conventional my journeys in the Golden Triangle had been. Being forced to employ Kyio was the final insult. It was annoying enough using a guide in Tibet. Having to do so in a region of fluid frontiers was an affront, a challenge to my abilities as a traveller. To do as the minorities do, moving between countries without the trappings of passports and visas, became an obsession.

  With Myanmar’s army pushing further into eastern Shan State, as well as into Kachin State in the north, there was only one place I could go without being caught by the Burmese authorities and that was the homeland of the Wa people. To Myanmar’s leaders it is Special Region 2. But in the Yunnan and Burmese borderlands it is known simply by its Mandarin name of Wabang, or Wa State. An unofficial country within Shan State, it is sandwiched between Kokang in the north and Mong La to the south with Yunnan to the east.

  Wa State is the most lawless and least visited part of the Golden Triangle. Even among the combative minorities of north and east Myanmar, the Wa have a fearsome reputation. Until fifty years ago, and more recently in the most remote hills, the Wa were headhunters. They took the heads of their enemies, or any unfortunate traveller in their territory, and hung them in their fields so that the decomposing skin and brains fertilised their crops, a brutal, if organic, way of ensuring a bountiful harvest. />
  Avoiding being governed by anyone is the guiding principle behind everything the Wa do. They sided with the British, who called them the ‘Wild Wa’, against the Japanese in the Second World War, but since then have fought with great success to create their own homeland. The Wa in China are not much different. There are 400,000 Wa in Yunnan, spread across two autonomous counties. But there were far more until 1958 when around one-third of them packed up and marched into Shan State, their way of giving a resounding thumbs-down to being part of Mao’s China.

  Like the other hill tribes in Yunnan, the Wa were classified as savages by the Chinese because of their existence beyond the state, their animist beliefs and their lack of any formal writing system. But while the Akha, Bulang, Lahu and others have submitted to Han authority, even if they are inextricably linked to their cousins across the frontiers, the very existence of Wa State ensures that the Wa in China are to a large extent beyond Beijing’s control.

  Across the narrow river that separates Yunnan from Wa State, the United Wa State Army (UWSA) is 20,000 strong and able to call on another 30,000 reserve soldiers in times of war. Even China has to accept that, with a force almost as big as the Australian military, the Wa are not to be tamed. They move at will between Wa State and Yunnan, and Beijing does not try to stop them doing so.

  Having rejected both the Burmese and Chinese states, the Wa are barbarians by choice: the only truly independent, self-governing minority left in the region. They owe their allegiance to a country not formally recognised anywhere in the world, whether they live there or in Yunnan. And if the Wa have given up headhunting, they have taken up another activity that still places them beyond the pale. Washington cites the UWSA as South-east Asia’s biggest drug-trafficking gang, and there are multi-million-dollar rewards on offer for the capture of some of its generals.