by David Eimer
But Special Region 4 is autonomous and Tatmadaw-free, as is Special Region 2, the homeland of the Wa people, and Special Region 1 in the north-east of Shan State, an area known as Kokang that is populated by the descendants of Chinese migrants who arrived in the eighteenth century. Aung San offered self-rule to the minorities at Panglong in 1947, only for successive governments to deny them that. But the peoples in Mong La, Kokang and the Wa territory have established their own version of independence anyway.
Enabled by the staggering profits from the drug trade, as well as gambling operations and the smuggling of all manner of contraband, rich and powerful ethnic armies control these three zones. All have close links to China, which sits just across the frontier from their regions, further boosting their ability to function as mini-countries complete with their own governments, tax systems and police forces. There is no hint of the Burmese state in these areas at all. Unique in Southeast Asia, they are self-governing territories run by minority peoples.
Foreigners are, of course, strictly barred from entering the special regions. Mong La was once open to westerners visiting with a guide, but today it is firmly off-limits. It is just a two-hour drive from Kengtung, but the army checkpoints along the road turn back foreigners. The Tatmadaw does not step inside Special Region 4, but it is based all around it.
China’s border with Burma is impossible to guard, though. Straggling south from the Burmese Himalayas in Kachin State to the south-east of Shan State for 1,370 miles, running through mountains and remote rainforest, it has always been a loosely enforced boundary. In part that is a tacit recognition by Beijing of the transnational status of Yunnan and Kachin and Shan States, where the same ethnic groups live on both sides of the border and have never cared much for formal frontiers.
These days the Chinese side is more closely regulated than it was when I made my first illicit crossing to Panghsang and the Wa region in 2010. There are now police checks on buses travelling near the frontier and occasional roadblocks, but they are searching for dissidents or restless minorities seeking to escape China. For everyone else, moving between Yunnan and Shan State without legally exiting or entering China and Burma remains easy enough if you know where and how to cross.
Dalou in the deep south of Yunnan’s Xishuangbanna region is where the backroads route to Mong La begins. After arriving by bus I found one of the motorbike taxis that make the run to Mong La. My driver was Akha, numerous in Xishuangbanna as well as the hills of Shan State. He sang as he steered the bike. But we came to an abrupt halt on the outskirts of the last village before the border, after he received a call warning that there were police up ahead.
We waited two hours for the officers to depart, more drivers arriving all the time with their Chinese passengers. To them our destination was Xiaomengla, or small Mong La, to distinguish it from Mengla County in Xishuangbanna. There are other routes to Mong La too, including one that is big enough for cars and small trucks to navigate, a vital conduit for the smugglers who move between Xishuangbanna and Shan.
Mong La has a reputation as a sin city in Yunnan. The big draw is gambling, which is illegal in China except in Macau, the Las Vegas of the Orient. As we waited to cross curious locals engaged me in conversation. They all asked if I was going to Mong La ‘to play’. In Mandarin, ‘play’ can have different meanings. There is the innocent literal translation, having fun, as well as a more ribald definition. Admitting you’re going to Mong La to play is code for a night of betting, drinking, karaoke and women.
When I made my way in the early afternoon to the huge market that sits in the centre of Mong La, some Chinese were already playing, sitting in front of computer screens and gambling online. Interspersed with the clothes stalls and food stands are betting shops. Card games were going on, too, while the sharp clack of mahjong tiles being slammed on tables rose up above the babble of accents, mainly Yunnan but others from farther afield in China. I encountered people from Shandong Province on the east coast, as well as from Hunan and Sichuan.
Away on the other side of the market, in the north-east corner, the animal traders were waiting for customers. Their wares were laid out on mats and in baskets in front of them: bear claws, a variety of horns and bones, including elephant tusks, animal skins, fur and dried internal organs. But there were also baby monkeys and bears in cages, fat snakes and lots of turtles. Occasionally, even a clouded leopard or tiger can be found here.
Often described as the wildlife trafficking capital of the world, Mong La is just one of a number of places in Shan State where endangered species can be found for sale. The trade thrives in Tachileik and Panghsang, too, as well as in parts of Kachin State. Even in Yangon it’s possible to obtain items made from ivory and elephant bones. Buying and selling such animal parts is now illegal in Burma and China, but the hunters in the Shan Hills who source the beasts are beyond the law, as are the vendors – mostly Chinese but some Shan – at Mong La’s market.
Despite repeated calls to shut down this unsavoury sector of the local economy, the traders will continue to operate as long as there are animals left to capture and people from China eager to buy them. They are required for the aphrodisiacs, tonics and remedies that many traditional Chinese medicine healers peddle, or just as good-luck charms. Some Chinese come to Mong La solely to dine on exotic species; bears, pangolins, civet cats, barking deer and snakes can be ordered off the menu at restaurants, too.
Wildlife is not all that is trafficked. Mong La is also a people smuggling hub. North Korean defectors have passed through on their way to Bangkok and then Seoul. Economic migrants leaving China for the rest of Southeast Asia sometimes depart from Mong La. Most recently, Uighurs – the Muslim ethnic minority native to China’s far western province of Xinjiang – have started fleeing abroad via the town. The rise in the number of Uighurs absconding is the reason why there are now more bus and vehicle checks in Yunnan’s borderlands.
Deceptive during the day, Mong La can appear innocent, a Shan State imitation of a Yunnan country town. Vendors sit outside their shops waiting for customers. Locals visit the market for food purchases, or wander the shopping mall. In the late afternoon, as the heat of the day subsides, barbecue stalls – grilled meat or fish, corn on the cob, tofu and vegetables – are set up for the evening rush. Families take the air, babies pushed ahead of them in buggies. A small park has swings for children, or they can jump up and down on the bouncy castle operating in the market area.
Yet the top floor of the shopping mall is given over to bars with working girls. Pickup trucks with armed NDAA soldiers in the back travel the streets. Close-up, Mong La is as dusty and dirty as any Shan town, too, the river that flows through the west of town polluted and stinking in the sun. And everywhere is the opportunity to bet. Streets are lined with gambling parlours and arcades with slot and pachinko-like machines, or the Mong La version of craps: giant dice thrown by the pull of a rope, the players tossing down one hundred yuan (£11.70) notes without a care.
Along with the betting shops in the market, these places are for the low rollers. The big money is at the casinos that are a twenty-five-minute drive west of the town. Mong La exists for the Chinese, and it is they who make up almost all of the casino customers. But gambling has become so pervasive that the Shan, Akha and Wa who live in Mong La, or commute to work from their villages, have adopted the gaming habit, too, whether they can afford it or not. Some people in the street joints were placing wagers as low as ten yuan.
Night fell like everywhere in Southeast Asia, a slow descent from bright sun to red sunset and then the sudden switch to darkness. Now Mong La is in its element. The neon signs on the big hotels flick on, flashing out their names in characters and Burmese script, powered by the Chinese-built dam that Sai Hong Kham in Kengtung is jealous of. Suddenly the streets are busier, the families present earlier in the day back in their homes, replaced by a small army of Chinese punters out to play.
Around the market the karaoke bars and shopfront brothels ope
n for business. Outside them the girls – often just teenagers – sit in their tube tops, micro-skirts or denim shorts, feet in high heels or platform flip-flops. They while away the wait for customers with their phones, WeChatting with boys, friends and family in far-off villages and towns. In Mong La, as well as the other areas along the frontier, everyone uses Chinese social media.
Many of the girls are temporary migrants from across the border, mainly Yunnanese but some from Sichuan, working for a few months at a time. Staffing the hotels, shops and gambling dens are the Shan, joined by an increasing number of Wa people. ‘There are more visitors to Mong La than to Panghsang now, so we come here to work,’ one woman told me.
Panghsang, the capital of the Wa region, is a three-hour drive north of Mong La and also right on the border with Yunnan. But it is a rough-edged, less comfortable town for visitors. The Wa have a reputation in both Burma and China for being both ferocious and unwelcoming to outsiders, a consequence of their history as headhunters, a habit they only gave up in the 1970s in the most remote hills. With just one casino, Panghsang isn’t much of a place to play unless you have Wa friends.
Not only does Mong La offer the prospect of better-paid employment than elsewhere in eastern Shan State, it provides sanctuary also. For some people Mong La is a place to escape the Tatmadaw, to get as far away from the Burmese state as is possible. When the Four Cuts campaign was extended to Shan State, the locals started fleeing ahead of the Tatmadaw into the zones controlled by the ethnic armies. They function as places to hide, as well as playgrounds.
While Mong La was still slumbering the next morning, in recovery from the excesses of the night before, I took a trip to the town’s museum, possibly the strangest exhibition hall in Burma, a land of peculiar museums. Its official English title is ‘Museum in Commemoration of Opium-Free in Special Region 4’, but it really stands as a symbol of how the NDAA and its allies in Wa and Kokang have managed to carve out their mini-states on the back of the manufacture and sale of heroin and methamphetamines.
As usual the museum was free of staff and visitors, a musty smell pervading throughout, the glass enclosing the exhibits thick with dust. Senior junta figures and agents from the US’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) witnessed the destruction of poppy fields in faded photos from the 1980s. A six-step guide revealing how to refine heroin from opium is on display, just in case the farmers in this part of Shan State don’t know how to do it. Best of all is the diorama with life-sized dolls of a heroin user’s journey to redemption, from long-haired reprobate in jeans and t-shirt to clean-cut chap in a white shirt and longyi.
Contrary to its current neglected status, the museum was opened to some fanfare. It was all part of a campaign by Lin Mingxian, the seventy-something man who runs Special Region 4, to convince the outside world that his 1,900-square-mile fiefdom was now drug-free. Also known as Sai Lin, or Sai Leun, Lin is of Yunnan and Shan ancestry and was a Red Guard in China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. For the next twenty years, he rose through the ranks of the Communist Party of Burma, which had retreated to the borderlands and recruited the local ethnic groups in its battle with the junta.
In 1989, though, the minorities rebelled, splitting from the communists and swiftly establishing the three armies – NDAA, UWSA and MNDAA – which control Mong La, the Wa region and Kokang. Lin emerged as the head of the NDAA. He and the other leaders of the armies agreed uneasy ceasefires with the generals in return for being left in control of their regions. Lin and his friends in Kokang and Wa were already involved in the Golden Triangle drug trade, but over the next few years they oversaw a rapid expansion of poppy cultivation in their territories, setting up refineries to produce heroin as well.
Soon the US State Department was taking an interest. In 1995 they cited Lin and his cohorts in Wa and Kokang as some of the world’s leading heroin traffickers. Lin’s masterly reaction was to open his drug eradication museum two years later as proof that he had given up the narcotics business. His friends in the junta backed his claim and Washington decided to believe him. In 2000 the State Department declared Special Region 4 to be free of opium fields.
By then Mong La was already being transformed into Shan State’s gambling capital. The town had started its rise to infamy in the late 1970s as a marketplace for Chinese goods. With the Cultural Revolution over, China was opening up again and cross-border commerce, both legal and illicit, took off. Mong La became a key junction in the trade between Shan State and Yunnan.
That wasn’t enough for Lin Mingxian. Using his contacts from his Red Guard days among Yunnan politicians and businessmen to generate support and investment, Lin started opening casinos. And despite occasional crackdowns on the flow of Chinese crossing to gamble, Mong La is prospering today as never before. The new hotels and apartment blocks going up are proof of that, along with the road being constructed that will link the town to Tachileik and Thailand.
Lin Mingxian’s biggest test came in 2005, when Chinese soldiers moved briefly into Mong La to close the casinos, following a succession of scandals involving Chinese officials and their relatives gambling away government money. Lin responded by building a new casino zone in the village of Wang Hsieo, ten miles from Mong La. He expanded into online gaming, too. Today, people bet remotely from as far away as Shanghai.
Casino vans shuttle punters to and from Wang Hsieo along the road that slides through the valley Mong La occupies on its way to Kengtung. Additional buses stop at the villages on the way to pick up the blue and red vested croupiers and the other staff who work in the casinos. The gambling industry is the major employer in the area now, along with the Chinese-owned rubber and banana plantations that have replaced the opium fields.
For the NDAA and the Wa and Kokang armies drugs are said to be less of a money-maker than they once were. Agri-businesses, mining and smuggling, all done in conjunction with Chinese concerns, draw far less attention from the outside world. Like Lin Mingxian the Wa leaders insist their region is now free of poppy farms. But heroin and methamphetamines destined for China and Thailand continue to move through the areas run by the NDAA, UWSA and MNDAA, while they control meth labs and opium fields located in other parts of Shan State.
All three armies remain closely linked, with the Wa dominant thanks to the sheer size of their force. UWSA soldiers are based in Special Region 4 to make sure Lin Mingxian isn’t tempted to cut a deal with the government. Naypyidaw, though, shows no sign of wanting to disturb the status quo in this part of the borderlands. China views the special regions along its frontiers as a way of maintaining leverage with Burma. Shutting them down would be damaging to Sino-Burmese relations, as well as costly for the Tatmadaw, who would have to fight their way in.
Some of Wang Hsieo’s casinos sport famous names like Casino Lisboa, a homage to Macau’s oldest gaming house. But Wang Hsieo is no Macau. There is a glaring absence of glitzy big-name shows, global poker tournaments or wide-eyed tourists. Wang Hsieo is barely even a village; no more than a few shops and restaurants around the mostly low-rise casinos that sit side by side, their names displayed in neon, all dwarfed by the jungle-covered hills that fence in the settlement.
Inside the casinos are uninviting rooms with low ceilings. Little thought has been given to the decor. Alcohol is banned, but many of the customers smoke furiously, wreathing the tables in a thick haze. Computer screens livestream the action for the remote gamblers. Roulette apart, the games – Fan Tan, Dragon Tiger – are a mystery to most foreigners, played only by the Chinese. Westerners are not welcome in any case. My arrival was immediately noticed by the plain-clothes NDAA soldiers who act as security and I was warned against taking photos. I returned to Mong La, called my Akha driver and prepared to leave.
Back in Yunnan, I moved north, tracking the frontier with Shan, out of Xishuangbanna into Dehong Prefecture, the heartland of the Tai Nua people in China. My destination was Ruili, the capital of the region. Xishuangbanna is associated with drug trafficking, but jade is
the king in Ruili. The town sits opposite the point where Shan State meets Kachin State to the north, and Kachin is where the world’s largest deposits of jadeite – green jade – are found.
Jade has a mystical resonance to the Chinese and is the most popular and desirable item of jewellery for most women in the country. They have been buying Burma’s green gold for a thousand years. Ruili is the place where much of it enters China, whether legally or smuggled, via the Shan border town of Muse. The city’s centre is the ever-expanding jade market. It is staffed by Chinese and a growing contingent of Rohingya refugees, easily identifiable by their taqiyah caps, beards and longyi.
I was in Ruili waiting for a ride into Kachin State. North of Ruili, on the other side of the border, is an enclave controlled by the Kachin Independence Army. It is a thin shard of land in the far south-eastern corner of Kachin, bounded to the west by hills where the KIA is involved in frequent and fierce fighting with the Tatmadaw, and running parallel to the frontier with China in the east. Two towns – Mai Ja Yang and Laiza – lie at either end of the KIA’s territory.
My destination was Mai Ja Yang. It was two days before I got the call, telling me to be at the corner of one of Ruili’s main streets in the early afternoon. The border here is more tightly guarded than farther south in Yunnan and I had been expecting to cross at night. But today was a Sunday. ‘The border police don’t work on Sundays, so you can go any time,’ said the man at the end of the phone. He arranged my transport, but we never met.
Standing at the junction for almost an hour, I thought the driver wasn’t going to show up. Then a small minivan stopped and a short, dark-skinned man motioned me in. I got my first hint of the many differences between Mai Ja Yang and Mong La when he explained that he wasn’t late, but that Mai Ja Yang runs on Burmese time rather than following China’s clocks like Mong La does. The driver was a Chinese citizen, born near Ruili, but he was ethnically Kachin. There are around 150,000 Kachin in Yunnan, where they are known as the Jingpo, not including refugees and temporary economic migrants.