Land of Jade

by Bertil Lintner

  The Christian missionaries, and the Kachin rebel leaders after them, had done their best to prohibit a practice they held to be sinful. But it was clear that their efforts had been less than successful. On first arriving at rebel camps in Kachin State, we had been puzzled to see a number of youths and girls with shaven heads chopping firewood. Had they been uncovered as government informers, or tried to defect? No, we were told. This was the punishment for premarital sex resulting in pregnancy.

  When the SSA lads, brought up in a culture of far stricter sexual mores, had first arrived in Kachin State as escorts for the NDF delegation, some had been only too willing to succumb to the temptations around them. These freelance initiatives in the pursuit of racial unity were abruptly terminated following the intervention of Sai Lek and dire threats of disciplinary action and firing squads.

  Sai Lek and the Shans left after a few days and we slipped back into our routine. Some days it rained quite heavily and we spent most of the time in our house playing with Hseng Tai who was growing fast. She had begun to make her first attempts to talk, although the result was nothing more than a rapid sequence of ta-ta-tas which amused everyone. She was also was learning to eat more solid food. Ma Shwe cooked rice for her along with meat or fish. Much to our satisfaction, she seemed to appreciate htoo nao, the kind of Shan soyabean cakes which Hseng Noung had been preparing in Kohima when she went into labour.

  When we were in the mood, we helped the girls in the kitchen and tried to vary our Kachin diet with the few Western dishes we were able to prepare from ingredients available in Pa Jau market. A favourite dish, which unfortunately only we appreciated, was Swedish pytt-i-panna, a hodgepodge made from cubed potatoes, onions and pieces of meat, all fried together with an egg on top. But for the Kachins, a meal without rice did not amount to a meal at all—a viewpoint they shared with most other East Asian peoples.

  If nobody felt like cooking, there was always the small restaurant down at the market, run by Pi Sai Long, a Shan-Chinese who made the most delicious khao soi—yellow noodles in curry sauce—I ever came across in Kachin State. Visiting the market also provided us with an excellent opportunity to meet traders and other visitors from the towns as counterbalance to the interviews I had with the Kachin rebel leaders. Pa Jau was a hive of gossip and a centre for the exchange of news which people were unwilling to discuss openly in government-held towns.

  Every five days the market was thronged with crowds as people from nearby villages as well as merchants from both Burma and China descended on Pa Jau to buy and sell agricultural products, consumer goods and, not least, jade. From the Hpakan jade mines, big boulders were carried by mule, elephant and human being over the hills to Pa Jau where Chinese traders bargained for the best pieces. Jade ornaments had traditionally been held in high esteem in China, but the trade had been suppressed as “bourgeois decadence” from the communist victory in 1949 until Deng Xiaoping initiated his sweeping economic reforms in the late 1970s. Now, buyers from as far as Canton, Shanghai and Beijing came down to the Kachin border to make their purchases. Tax on the trade had made the KIA one of the richest rebel armies in Burma.

  There was also opium, but in very limited quantities. The Lisu tribe and the ethnic Chinese in the Pa Jau-Na Hpaw area grew some. Since in the eastern hills there was no apparent alternative to the poppy—in contrast to the gold in the Triangle, or jade, rubies and sapphires found in the 2nd Brigade area—the KIO tolerated it. But there was no question that cultivation was being discouraged.

  At Pa Jau itself, the Kachin rebel officers and cadres grew cabbages, corn, mustard leaves and other high-altitude vegetables to demonstrate that it was possible to subsist without the opium poppy. But old habits died hard and my own impression was that it would take years of education, infrastructural development and introduction of viable alternative cash crops before the opium poppy passed into history. As a first step in this direction, the KIO had initiated a number of road construction projects in the area.

  One day when the weather was clear, Hseng Noung managed to borrow a video camera from the manager of the public video hall in Pa Jau. This was her first attempt at using a video camera and she went down to the market and around the camp. We watched the result later in Brang Seng’s house. One of the more memorable sequences had been taken in the local kindergarten where the tots, dressed in their school uniforms, piped a spirited rendering of We Shall Overcome in English. The song was in its own way another echo of the militant Christianity which infused Kachin nationalism.

  The kindergarten building also served as church on Sunday mornings. In the afternoon, individual Kachin families frequently held prayer meetings in their homes. The Kachin leaders always made a point of inviting their CPB guests to these gatherings and as it would have been churlish on the part of the communist representatives not to come, they duly put in appearances. Having doffed their red-starred caps, they would sit fidgeting through the prayers looking decidedly vacant. For the Kachins, inviting the CPB to such functions was, of course, not merely a gesture of hospitality; it was also a means of politely emphasising their political independence.

  At the beginning of July, by a stroke of luck, we managed to get hold of ten rolls of Kodachrome transparencies from some jade traders from Kunming. This was a godsend since Hseng Noung had exhausted her own supply several weeks before. We therefore decided to go on a long-planned excursion up to Sima Kawng village, a day’s march from Pa Jau, where the ruins of an old British frontier outpost called Fort Morton were still to be seen. A platoon of KIA troops were assigned to escort us, and Ma Shwe and Atom came too to help carry little Hseng Tai who was excited as we were.

  The weather was fair when we set off from Pa Jau after breakfast. But the sky turned cloudy and after an hour’s walk along a good border road, the downpour began. We had brought ponchos, but the rain lashed down so hard that they soon made little difference. By the time we eventually reached Sima Kawng in the late afternoon we were all drenched to the skin.

  Sodden and weary, we sat down by the fire in one of the bamboo houses in the village. When we felt reasonably dry again, and the weather had cleared up, we went out for a walk. We felt like the first tourists in the area for decades, and in a sense that is exactly what we were, Hseng Noung clutching her camera and an old man from the village acting as our guide. Sima Kawng was large and situated on a high green ridge from where, when the clouds had drifted away from the mountain tops, we could see as far as Myitkyina. The air was clear and a fresh breeze was blowing over the mountains.

  We walked up to the ruins of the old fort. Large, crumbling stone ramparts, a gateway and a few roofless stone mansions were all that remained. But enough of the old buildings were still standing for us to notice the resemblance with the houses we had seen in Sisters’ Bazaar in Mussoorie in India. Treading carefully on the slippery, moss-covered cobbles in the alleyways around the fort, we inspected the remnants of the old barracks, the prison, the outpost’s own post office and, right outside the actual fort, a huge football field-cum-parade ground. The rugged mountains of Yunnan rose a kilometre to the east of the fort which had a commanding view of the Sino-Burmese frontier.

  The fort has been built in 1892 to guard the frontier at a time when the Kachins were still resisting British rule. A local uprising had broken out even before the fort was finished. Kachin warriors, armed with dahs and muskets, laid siege to the fort and killed the British officer leading its defence, Capt. Boyce-Morton. When the rebellion had been quelled, the colonial authorities honoured the fallen captain by naming the fort after him. But appreciating the fighting ability of the Kachins, the British also began recruiting them into the military police and the army—a time-hallowed practice of conquerors.

  No Kachin troops were ever stationed at Fort Morton before Burma’s independence, however. The officers were invariably British and most of the other ranks, Gurkhas. But from our guide’s gestures and miming of a turban and a beard, we also understood that there had been Sikh
doctors attached to the Gurkha units. Fort Morton was not the first in the string of old British forts along the Chinese frontier that we had seen. There had been another ruin on a hillock overlooking Na Hpaw which had been built at about the same time as well as other old forts further down the frontier. But Fort Morton at Sima Kawng was by far the most impressive of them all.

  On the following day, Hseng Noung, Hseng Tai and the girls stayed in the village while I, together with four KIA soldiers, climbed down the mountain to the Dabak Hka River to try my luck fishing, and to have a look at an old British-built suspension bridge on the former mule track from Fort Morton to Myitkyina. It started raining heavily soon after we set out, and the soldiers warned me the forest was full of leeches during the wet season.

  The descent was steep and slippery—and there were indeed thousands of vicious little leeches lurking in ambush at every step along the way. I had to halt every few hundred metres and sprinkle salt on them which caused the leeches promptly to fall off. This was a trick I had learned after the infection I had contracted in the Hukawng Valley. My feet were now bleeding copiously but there would, I prayed, be no more infections.

  Two hours later, we reached the Dabak Hka. It was swollen with the rains and the water roared and foamed between sharp rocks. It was pointless even to think of fishing. I took a few pictures of the suspension bridge which consisted of a sturdy stone gateway on either side of the river connected by steel cables. On coming across any sign of development in Kachin State, I had developed the habit of asking whether it was the work of the British or the Kachin rebels themselves; after months on the march over hundreds of kilometres in northern Burma, it was evident that the accusation of government neglect was not mere insurgent propaganda.

  As the rain continued, we sat down under a big tree by the river. But by midday, it had cleared and I hoped we would be able to make it back to Sima Kawng before the downpour began again. We did not. It started pouring down when we were only halfway up the mountain and it hardly seemed worth the effort of stopping to get the leeches off my feet.

  I was soaking wet when at last I clambered into the bamboo hut where Hseng Noung and Hseng Tai were waiting. I sat down by the fire, pulled off my shoes and socks and cleaned my bloody feet in hot water. Hseng Noung made me a cup of steaming coffee and we went to sleep on the split bamboo floor, covering ourselves with our woollen Naga shawls. It had been an ordeal, but the fort, the river and the old suspension bridge were magnificent sights and well worth the trouble of a visit.*

  The next morning, we returned to Pa Jau. It did not rain but water dripped down from the trees and mist swept through the forest. When we eventually got home again and sat down by the iron stove in our house, we promised each other that we would make no more excursions until the rains were over. Only Hseng Tai seemed totally unaffected. Jungle travel under virtually all conditions was for her a way of life—the only one she knew.

  July and August passed quickly. We were preoccupied with our daily chores; Hseng Noung taking care of Hseng Tai and I interviewing people and writing. Besides, the weather did not permit many outdoor activities. The monsoon was heavy in the hills and Pa Jau became increasingly like Darjeeling and Kohima where we had spent the previous rainy season. The clouds swirled around the green hills and torrential rain fell steadily sometimes for days at a time. We were grateful for a solid house and the iron stove. When Hseng Tai was asleep and I needed a break from my work, we often sat down by the stove to play backgammon with a home-made button and cardboard set we had brought with us from India.

  On other days, we visited the SSA house. Pui Hpa had decided he wanted to learn English when he was not on duty at his radio. Both Hseng Noung and I admired the young peasant boy’s dedication to learning and tried to help him as much as we could. There were many like him in Burma, and not only in the underground. If a political settlement to the civil war could be achieved, these young people’s futures would be infinitely brighter.

  But the prospect for a resolution to the tangled conflict took a sudden turn for the worse in August. The united front between the CPB and the NDF might have been an improbable constellation, but its formation had at least established a clear-cut line of divide between the government and the armed opposition. This point, however, was lost on the second most powerful component of the NDF, the Karens based along the Thai border to the south.

  In August, they abruptly issued a statement denouncing the Panghsang agreement. It was radioed up to Pa Jau and made curious reading. Basically, the Karen rebels refused to honour the pact with the CPB because, as they put it, “their goals and ours are totally different.” Hseng Noung and I looked at each other in bewilderment. No one had ever claimed that the policies of the two groups should be the same; the pact had simply been a step towards resolving the contradictions and overlaps between the various insurgent groups which could help facilitate a political solution to the civil war.

  When I visited him that morning, Brang Seng was visibly worried over this unexpected turn of events.

  “Many of our NDF delegates who were here in December and January urged me to come down to the Thai border and discuss the matter with the people there. ‘The ones who haven’t seen your area and how you co-operate with the CPB may not understand your policies’, they told me. This is a serious thing. The church people and other community leaders here in Kachin State have told me that we must solve this problem during my lifetime. We can’t go on fighting for another twenty or thirty years. That would destroy our country completely.”

  I listened carefully. Although I was an outside observer, it was hard not to agree with his analysis. I was also increasingly sceptical that the “new” NDF would be able to consolidate itself. If there were disunity along the Thai border in the south, any progress in the north would inevitably be adversely affected.

  Hseng Tai’s first birthday party on September 13, 1986.

  In northeastern India, by contrast, the ethnic insurgency was taking a very different turn. Listening to the BBC one night, we learned that an accord had been signed between New Delhi and Laldenga, the leader of the Mizo rebels who had been fighting the central government since the late 1950s. Mizoram, according to the agreement, was to become a state and Laldenga’s underground rebel movement would be legalised and allowed to participate in free elections—provided they gave up previous separatist demands and surrendered their weapons. That was good news for the Mizos and it demonstrated a completely different approach to ethnic insurgency from that consistently pursued by Rangoon.

  Before we knew it, it was already September and we were looking forward to celebrating Hseng Tai’s first birthday—which was on the 13th—with a party at the SSA’s house. An Indo-Shan merchant from Namkham had arrived and given his ethnic background we reckoned he would be able to help us bake a cake. Finding flour from China, eggs and powdered milk in Pa Jau market posed no problem. But neither yeast nor baking powder was available so we had to settle for pancakes stacked up to make a layer-cake. As filling, we used home-made pear jam and sprinkled icing sugar on it. The whole was topped off with a small white candle. We had about a dozen guests to share the cake and everybody agreed that our improvisation had worked well. Before we cut up the cake, Hseng Tai posed proudly with it for a photograph.

  A few weeks after Hseng Tai’s birthday party we got an early Christmas treat. Brang Seng had gone to Kunming and I decided to go up to the liaison post which the KIA maintained at the Chinese border and meet him on his return. Hseng Noung and Hseng Tai stayed at home when I left early in the morning with a section of KIA soldiers as escort. It was my first excursion out of Pa Jau since our rain-soaked July promenade up to Sima Kawng.

  After more than five months at Pa Jau, it was invigorating to be on the move again, and I kept up a brisk pace across the hills towards the Chinese frontier, which we reached in a few hours. The actual liaison post consisted of a cluster of large wooden houses, warmed by iron stoves. Smoke drifted from the chimneys over the g
rassy wind-swept highlands. In the distance, I could discern a wide green valley, Sima-pa in China. In the afternoon, Brang Seng and his men came into view in a long caravan of mounted men. It was quite a sight and I waited expectantly for them to arrive. Brang Seng was, as usual, full of good cheer and had brought a large parcel for us, sent from Bangkok by way of Kunming.

  Back at Pa Jau that evening, Hseng Noung and I opened it together. It was a cornucopia of luxury goods of the sort we had not seen for more than a year. Friends in Thailand mindful of Hseng Tai had sent several tins of baby powder and bars of baby soap, new soft nappies and a pair of slippers with beepers inset in the heels. For Hseng Noung there was a box of film, while I received a new pipe, two packets of fresh pipe tobacco and a supply of white pipe cleaners.

  I stuffed the pipe full and puffed on it while I opened a smaller box which contained more than a year’s mail; letters from friends all over the world who had not heard from us for over a year and were wondering if we were still alive.