A Savage Dreamland

by David Eimer

  Kengtung, sometimes known as Kyaingtong, in the south-east of Shan State is the heartland of the Tai Khun. Just fifty-five miles west of the border with Yunnan and less than a hundred miles from the frontier with Thailand, its remoteness means it is little visited by foreigners, who are barred from travelling there overland from the rest of Shan State. The sole road open to foreigners in this part of the region is the one that meanders towards Kengtung from Tachileik, the border town with Thailand.

  Five years had passed since I last travelled the road to Kengtung from Tachileik, a place best known for black-market trading, and little appeared to have changed along the way. Beyond the town, past an army checkpoint, the road starts to rise to the Shan plateau, leaving the farms of the lowlands behind for tiny villages that are home to the Akha people. Out of sight to the east was the Mekong River, which marks Burma’s boundary with Laos. After four hours of puffing uphill, the bus began the descent to the plain where Kengtung stands amidst rice paddies glowing emerald green.

  During the colonial period Kengtung was the biggest of the Shan kingdoms, larger in size than Belgium. Its namesake town is one of the most striking in all Burma, the steep streets home to pagodas and forty monasteries that draw Buddhist scholars from across the nearby borders. The Tai Khun are the majority, with a smaller number of Tai Lü people. Outside Kengtung, inhabiting the increasingly deforested hills that encircle it, are communities of Akha, Lahu and Wa, who come to town to sell their produce at the large market, many still wearing their traditional dress.

  Dominating the heart of Kengtung is Nyaung Toung Lake, on whose banks the palace of the sawbwa stood until 1991. A few colonial-era mansions overlook the lake still, although they are far outnumbered now by newer, gaudy homes built in the Chinese nouveau riche style – all pillars and pastel colours. Some are owned by those who have prospered in the drug trade, long the biggest business in the area.

  Apart from being a Tai Khun centre, Kengtung is the unofficial capital of the Golden Triangle, thanks to its proximity to the Mekong and the borders with Yunnan, Laos and Thailand, as well as the territory controlled by the Wa people and their army. Until relatively recently the hills north of town were one of the prime places for opium cultivation in Shan State. Kengtung was a marketplace for the poppy grown nearby, the sawbwas overseeing a flourishing concern that saw the opium sold on to buyers in Thailand.

  ‘People used to grow poppy here just to make an income, but not anymore, although some do in the Wa areas,’ said Sai Hong Kham, the former private secretary to the last Sawbwa of Kengtung, as we sat stationary in the late-morning traffic. I was surprised by the gridlock. But Sai Hong Kham, still spry at eighty-eight, was adept at threading his SUV through the cars, trucks and motorbikes that clogged the narrow roads as we made our way to his home.

  Few octogenarians are active in politics, let alone set up their own party in order to run for public office. But Sai Hong Kham did just that before the 2015 election that swept Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD to power, establishing the Eastern Shan State Development Democratic Party (ESSDDP) and standing for one of Kengtung’s seats in the parliament in Naypyidaw.

  Over an early lunch he told me why. ‘We are Tai Khun people here and we get no support from the central government, while the other Shan political parties are for the Tai Yai, Tai Leng and Tai Lü,’ he said, between mouthfuls of pork and rice. ‘This is a party for locals, for everyone in the nine townships in eastern Shan State. If I can get elected, then I can do something for them.’

  He and his party failed to win any seats at the 2015 election. Six of the townships in eastern Shan State voted for the USDP, the other three for the NLD. ‘The USDP have money and they gave a lot to the villages, so they voted for them,’ said Sai Hong Kham. ‘Without money, you can’t do anything in politics in Burma. The local people like the idea of a party that represents them, but they want pocket money too.’

  Most of the eighteen political parties allied to the different ethnic groups in Shan State did poorly in the 2015 election. People voted mainly for the NLD because they saw the poll as an unprecedented opportunity, for all but the oldest of them, to eject the army from power. Others took the USDP’s cash. That sparked recriminations among the parties, with Sai Hong Kham’s ESSDDP accused of both splitting the vote and being a front for the USDP. ‘I wanted to cooperate with the other parties, but they rejected that,’ he insisted. ‘It’s just rumours that we are a proxy for the USDP. Who would give me money to set up a party?’

  Sai Hong Kham has also been frustrated in his plans to form links with the National Democratic Alliance Army (NDAA), who control the town of Mong La on the border with Yunnan. Flush with cash from various illicit activities – drugs, gambling and smuggling – and with close ties to Chinese businessmen and politicians across the frontier, the NDAA has turned Mong La into something of a beacon for development in this backwater of Shan State.

  ‘We need more cooperation with the people who run Mong La, but Naypyidaw doesn’t like that because they want the NDAA to lay down their arms first. For example, we have an electricity problem in Kengtung: not enough of it. But in Mong La they have hydropower, a dam built by technicians from Shanghai. They’d sell us electricity, but we have to get permission from the government. I have asked, but they haven’t replied,’ said Sai Hong Kham.

  ‘It’s the same with doing more trade with China. We’re only a two-hour drive from the border here, but we haven’t received permission from the Shan State parliament in Taunggyi to increase trade. Sometimes they won’t even let us sell our rice surplus to Yunnan because they don’t want the Chinese to have it. The problem is that the Shan don’t trust the Chinese. They are very cunning people and the Shan fear that.’

  I was enjoying Sai Hong Kham’s company. In an expansive mood and refreshingly unguarded throughout our conversation, he was clearly still as a sharp as a knife. He is a witness to much of Burma’s tumultuous recent history, from the 1930s onwards, and a figure of respect, as well as controversy, in Kengtung. I noticed how people addressed him with a wai, the prayer-like greeting and slight bow used in Thailand, but seen less frequently in Shan State.

  Part of that is down to the years he spent as the private secretary to Sao Sai Long, the last Sawbwa of Kengtung. He was one of the youngest of nineteen children fathered by the previous sawbwa and his six wives. The Shan kingdoms did not operate a strict hereditary line, with eldest sons sometimes passed over in favour of younger ones, or even cousins. Sao Sai Long became the sawbwa after the original choice was murdered in front of fifty of his bodyguards. No one was ever convicted of the crime, but Maurice Collis claimed the victim was shot by another of his brothers, angry at not getting the position.

  Assuming his role as sawbwa after the Second World War, Sao Sai Long recruited Sai Hong Kham as his right-hand man. They were distant relatives; Sao Sai Long married Sai Hong Kham’s cousin, and both men attended the Shan Chiefs School in Taunggyi. ‘He went to Adelaide to finish his education. When he came back from Australia, he asked me to be his secretary. I was his best friend and he trusted me. I was twenty and he was twenty-one. It was just as well we were good characters, because we had to look after all the money,’ smiled Sai Hong Kham.

  With the British about to depart, responsibility for running the kingdom and managing the accounts fell on the youthful sky lord and Sai Hong Kham. ‘On an average day, I’d go to the office in the morning and for five or six hours without a break people would come and see us with their problems,’ he remembered. ‘A farmer might come and say, “I’ve got an issue with water supply” and then we would solve it.’

  Even at the height of the colonial period Britain barely concerned itself with Kengtung, one of the most isolated outposts of the Federated Shan States, as long as the tax revenue was handed over. ‘There were only three British based here: the resident official, an engineer and an army officer who commanded a company of Shan levies. So the administration was mostly done by the sawbwa,’ said Sai
Hong Kham. Nor had the British lived in Kengtung, preferring to stay in Loi Mwe, a small hill station twenty miles south-east. ‘The air in Kengtung wasn’t good for them, especially in the monsoon season.’

  Today, Sai Hong Kham wishes that the government still stayed out of Kengtung’s affairs. ‘We want federal rule obviously, like in the British times,’ he said. ‘Eastern Shan State is calm now. The people here don’t want any more fighting. It’s a waste of their lives. But Kengtung is still the headquarters of the Golden Triangle Command, run by a major general, although the army doesn’t interfere in civilian life, not like in the junta days.’ Kengtung remains full of Tatmadaw soldiers, their base close to the Golden Triangle Golf Club, and most locals would like to see them gone.

  There is little nostalgia among younger Shan for the rule of the sky lords, though. ‘The new generation don’t like the sawbwas. They say the sawbwas sold Shan State to the Burmese. But a lot of the sawbwas didn’t want to be close to the Burmese,’ said Sai Hong Kham. Like Mrs Fern, Sai Hong Kham claims the Shan didn’t desire independence alongside the Bamar. He blames Sao Shwe Thaike, the sky lord who became Burma’s first president, for the deal made at Panglong which tied Shan State to becoming part of the Union of Burma.

  ‘Yawnghwe was close to the Burmese and he was influenced by Aung San,’ he said, referring to Sao Shwe Thaike by the name of his kingdom. ‘We would have been better off as part of the British Commonwealth, but Aung San didn’t want that. He persuaded Yawnghwe to accept Panglong and then Yawnghwe persuaded the other sawbwas. They were younger and felt bound to follow him. I met Yawnghwe. He was pleasant, but he didn’t have the mind of a politician. He wasn’t a clever man. He didn’t do much for the Shan while he was president. He was too busy with his four wives and having an easy life.’

  Whether Aung San would have given the Shan and the other ethnic groups autonomy over their regions if he hadn’t been assassinated is a question much debated in the borderlands. Sai Hong Kham thinks not. ‘Aung San was a politician. He wouldn’t have kept to the terms of Panglong.’ Nor does he have much faith in his daughter. ‘I organised a place for Aung San Suu Kyi to speak when she came to Kengtung before the 2015 election,’ he told me. ‘We had a long talk. She is a very intelligent person. But I believe maybe half of what she says about giving more power to the minorities.’

  Sao Shwe Thaike tried to make amends for being outmanoeuvred at Panglong, as Sai Hong Kham and many other Shan see it. He became a vocal advocate for the minorities after his term as president was over, standing up for the Rohingya. Sao Shwe Thaike declared that if they weren’t considered one of Burma’s indigenous races, then neither could the Shan be. In 1960 he formed the Federal Movement, a coalition of the Shan and other ethnic groups who debated the need for constitutional reform.

  Ne Win seized on the Federal Movement as the excuse to launch his coup on 02 March 1962. In a final twist of the sawbwas’ long history, Sao Shwe Thaike and the other sky lords became the scapegoats for Burma’s escalating civil wars, accused of encouraging separatism and tarred as ‘vampires’ who wanted their kingdoms back so they could live off the blood of their subjects. The reality is that Ne Win had probably already decided that a military takeover was the only way to counter the minorities’ demands for self-rule, to say nothing of the need to satisfy his own lust for power.

  Like the Sawbwa of Hsipaw, Sao Shwe Thaike disappeared into army custody never to be seen again. His middle son was killed during his arrest, the only fatality on the day of the coup. Almost all the other sawbwas, including Mrs Fern’s father, were jailed. Sao Sai Long was detained while in his hospital bed in Yangon. ‘He had piles,’ recalled Sai Hong Kham. ‘He was taken to Insein Prison four days after the coup and imprisoned for six years. A condition of his release was that he had to live in Rangoon. He had to ask permission when he wanted to visit Kengtung.’

  After Ne Win snatched power Sai Hong Kham was offered the chance to carry on in the Kengtung government. ‘I said, “No.” I was a loyal subject of the sawbwa. So I became a merchant. I opened a pharmacy and a garage. I didn’t enjoy it much.’ Sao Sai Long’s children left for the United States. ‘I stayed in touch with the sawbwa until he died in Yangon in 1997. I helped look after him in his final days,’ said Sai Hong Kham.

  Before he passed away the generals inflicted one final indignity on Sao Sai Long. In November 1991 the Tatmadaw demolished his palace. It was the most impressive of all the sky lord residences, a domed fairy tale of a royal home with arched gateways and windows. ‘His grandfather had attended the 1903 durbar in Delhi,’ said Sai Hong Kham. ‘He saw the palaces in India and decided he wanted one like them, so he brought an Indian architect back with him and built one. It was a beautiful place.’

  Away visiting his daughter in Australia, Sai Hong Kham received a call from the sawbwa telling him that the palace had been flattened. ‘I didn’t believe him,’ he remembered. ‘Then I came back and saw that it was gone. It took the army three days to pull it down. While they were doing it, the soldiers surrounded the area to prevent people getting close. They were frightened that the locals would be angry. They were right. The people were upset.’

  Why does he think the junta took such a drastic decision? ‘The Burmese are superstitious. They believe in astrology and spirits and numbers. They destroyed the palace because the Tatmadaw officers thought that, by doing so, they would inherit the power of the sawbwa. They destroyed the palaces in Lashio and Hsenwi at the same time. It was deliberate timing. They wanted the spirits of the sawbwas to pass to them with their power,’ said Sai Hong Kham. ‘It’s the story of the country, really.’

  16

  A Tale of Two Border Towns

  A chorus of Chinese ringtones – drifting classical flutes and Cantonese pop – broke the silence and the motorbike men reached for their phones as one. ‘The road is clear. Let’s go,’ said my driver. I gripped the metal bar behind the seat as we roared out in convoy along a concrete path, before turning onto a forest track. It was wet and muddy, the legacy of recent rain, the dirt spraying off the wheels of the bike as we swerved through tightly packed trees.

  Then it was a sudden stop at a concrete shell of a building. A middle-aged Chinese woman in jeans and a shapeless sweater emerged, her children behind her. They went from bike to bike collecting ten yuan (£1.10) from every passenger. I asked the woman what the fee was for. ‘It’s my road,’ she replied. Toll paid, we accelerated away, the driver and I leaning forward as he gunned the throttle and we crested a steep slope, leaving Yunnan Province and China for Shan State.

  Descending down the other side of the hill, we turned a corner and there beneath us was Mong La. This was no scrappy border outpost like Rihkhawdar in Chin State, where the stilted houses and wood-built shops appear temporary, as if they could be blown away in a fierce storm. Hotels as tall as twenty storeys and pink and white apartment blocks looked down on the smaller blue-roofed commercial buildings lining the wide main road that curls through town.

  Flowing slowly to the west, a mud-brown river acts as a natural barrier between Mong La and the thickly forested, bumpy hills that close in on the slender valley the town occupies. Their untamed presence added to the incongruity of seeing such substantial structures in this isolated part of Shan State. I knew that beyond the town there would be the usual villages of wood and bamboo shacks. The only real road in the area was the one I could see below me, running on from Mong La to Kengtung.

  Teenage soldiers in jungle-green uniforms manned a checkpoint at the bottom of the hill. They were from the NDAA, the 4,000-strong militia of Shan and Akha troops that controls Mong La and the surrounding area. None showed any surprise at the presence of a foreigner. ‘Where are you from?’ one asked in thick, Yunnan-accented Mandarin when I handed him my passport. I told him. ‘Fifty-three yuan [£6.10],’ he said, the charge to enter Mong La from China, giving me a receipt after I paid.

  Construction sites and cranes were busy as we drove into the centre of tow
n, more high-rises being readied. The driver told me that a new road was being built south to Tachileik, on the border with Thailand, and the streets were hectic with cars. Many had Yunnan licence plates, but others bore identification that was a roll call of Shan State’s disputed border regions: SR-4 for Mong La, KK for Kokang, WA for the Wa territory and WD for Panghsang, the Wa capital. Some vehicles had no number plates at all.

  Dropping me at the market the driver passed on his phone number, so I could call him to pick me up when I was ready to leave, and raced off back to his own country. I found a room in a Chinese-owned hotel. The staff – Shan and Wa – spoke bad Mandarin rather than Burmese, the clocks were set to Beijing time and I paid my bill in Chinese yuan. Geographically I was in Shan State, but Mong La has its own status within the Sino-Burmese borderlands. It is a town built on the back of crime that has become a playground for the Chinese and a refuge for the minorities escaping the fighting in the hills beyond.

  To the authorities in Naypyidaw, Mong La and the countryside around it is Special Region 4. There are seven special regions across the most contested parts of Shan State – the Ta’ang homeland is Special Region 7. They were established under the junta as a sop to the minorities, places where the army would supposedly step back and allow them to be self-administered by the majority ethnic group inhabiting them. In practice, as I saw during my time with the TNLA, the majority are special in name only with the Tatmadaw maintaining a presence in many of the zones.