Land of Jade

by Bertil Lintner

  We followed the local party officials down a narrow back alley and were finally led into a wooden, two-storey building, apparently the home of some high-ranking CPB officer. We found him sitting at a table, smartly dressed in a dark brown jacket, white shirt and grey slacks. I recognised him as the tall, skinny communist leader of Chinese origin whom we had previously met at Pa Jau. He invited us in and took out a couple of cans of Tsingtao beer from a refrigerator. I also noticed a washing machine in the kitchen.

  We had a letter of introduction for Kyi Myint, the young Chinese officer we had met in Pa Jau; but were told he had left for Mong Paw, a market village about 20 kms southeast of Panghsai.

  “Do you want to go there tonight?” our host said taking a swig at his can of beer.

  It struck me as an improvement on waiting. “I’d prefer not to walk about too much here in Panghsai. The government doesn’t yet know we’ve left Pa Jau. It’s better to keep them in the dark as long as possible.”

  The officer stood up and ordered one of the young men who had accompanied us to go and get a jeep. It arrived shortly after and we were joined by the driver, a short man, dressed in a CPB uniform with a plastic red star in his cap, a Sam Browne belt across his chest and a pistol in a leather holster on his hip. The conversation continued in Chinese, so we were not able to understand much. But it was clear from gestures and place names that arrangements were being made for our journey to Mong Paw.

  The time had now arrived to bid farewell to Ma Shwe who was to return to Loije the following day. When our jeep pulled up, she waited outside and we could hear her sobbing uncontrollably. She had, after all, been with us—and in particular Hseng Tai—for eight months.

  “Hseng Tai will be so confused when she wakes up tomorrow and I’m not there,” she wept. “We’re so used to each other,” Ma Shwe said between her sobs. As we left, we could see her standing outside the house, a lonely figure watching the jeep disappearing down the narrow, bumpy streets of Panghsai.

  Driving out of town, we continued along the Burma Road south to a junction at a small village called Nam Tao. From there, the main road continued towards government-held areas about 10 kms away. We turned left at Nam Tao, towards Mong Paw in the east. Just south of the road, faintly illuminated in the moonlight loomed the bulk of a mountain range called Hsi-Hsinwan.

  “There’s a Burmese outpost on the top of that mountain,” said the driver in Burmese thick with a Chinese accent, pointing through the windscreen. “Up on that peak. They can see the lights from this vehicle. Our forces are positioned right opposite the enemy camp.”

  Not having realised just how close communist and government positions were, I asked if they ever opened fire.

  “Not often. But it happens. Sometimes we flash our headlights at them, too.”

  The driver grinned, gunning the engine for the uphill climb along the eastern flank of Hsi-Hsinwan. The road was rough and badly maintained, much like the Myitkyina-Sumprabum road we had crossed eight months before. We passed a checkpoint manned by CPB soldiers, who flashed torches at jeep. In the beam of the headlights I caught fleeting glimpses of dark faces under caps with red stars. The soldiers were armed with Chinese assault rifles. The driver leant out of the window and shouted something in Chinese. A boom-gate swung up and we drove on.

  We were not going to the village of Mong Paw, we now realised, but to a CPB camp located a few kilometres to the east. The jeep finally drew up outside a large bamboo building encircled by neatly trimmed green hedges. Hseng Noung and I jumped out and went inside.

  “What? Are you here already?”

  It was Kyi Myint, dressed not in western-style clothes as the last time we had met him at Pa Jau, but in a CPB uniform with a communist cap.

  With Hseng Noung interpreting, I told him that we had left Loije that morning and been sent on from Panghsai.

  I looked around the interior of the barracks. It was obviously a meeting hall, dominated by a large wooden table around which another seven CPB officers were sitting. A kerosene lamp hung from a wooden ceiling beam casting dark shadows across the faces of the men. The light glinted dully off the red stars on their caps. They smiled and nodded as Kyi Myint explained who we were and why we had come.

  “Sit down, sit down,” they urged. “Welcome to our liberated area.”

  A walkie-talkie crackled and hummed on the table beside two family-sized bottles of Coca-Cola. Every now and then, Kyi Myint picked it up to receive a message or to convey orders.

  “Our boys on the mountain,” he said in a habitually deep voice. “They must be constantly alert. But not to worry if you hear gunfire tonight. It’s been like this for ten years now.”

  Our arrival was evidently unexpected. Kyi Myint barked orders to his subordinates and we soon had a bamboo hut cleared for us and a meal of khao soi and tinned meatballs prepared. It was almost midnight before I fell asleep, reflecting how strangely fatiguing it had been to travel by motor vehicle all day after months of walking.

  We were also now in an area unlike anything we had seen before. Rather a series of insurgent-controlled zones intersected by government-controlled roads as in Kachin State, the CPB’s territory formed what amounted to a buffer state between Burma and China with well defended borders and administered by officials of various ethnic origins. Our jeep driver, for instance, turned out to be Kachin. Kyi Myint was Chinese and the other officers around the table were mostly Burmans.

  We awoke next morning to find the air cold and damp, and the entire Mong Paw valley submerged in a sea of white mist. But slowly the sun broke through to reveal a valley hemmed in by rugged mountain ranges. On the valley floor, a stream meandered through emerald paddy fields, a sinuous band of silver in the early morning sunshine. The camp, where we had slept, was located in an old Kachin mission compound with fruit trees dotted about and several solid stone houses. Kyi Myint appeared genuinely enthusiastic over our arrival and produced some army maps from his office. He pointed at one of the maps and then towards the mountain range between Mong Paw and Panghsai.

  “Take a look at that mountain over there. Hsi-Hsinwan. It’s actually four separate heights. Our forces are stationed on hill Number One and the Burmese are on the other three. And they have their headquarters on another hilltop just behind. We can even see each other from our respective positions.”

  I looked at the mountain. The lower slopes were forested but from the bare upper flanks rose a series of bald peaks like humps on a camel’s back. Hill One was the peak closest to us; the others rose in file to the west.

  “We plan to attack the enemy positions up there and capture them,” remarked Kyi Myint casually, as if storming mountain ranges were a daily event.

  “On November 11,” he added. “If you want to, you can come along.”

  I said I would indeed like to come—as did Hseng Noung. But Kyi Myint was clearly not enthusiastic over the idea of a woman on the battlefield.

  “If the fighting gets heavy, there might be air strikes. And then we’ll have problems with the baby. It’s better if Bertil comes alone and you and the baby stay somewhere safe.”

  While we were studying the maps together with Kyi Myint, a message came in. Lieut.-Col. Seng Hpung, the commander of the KIA’s 4th Brigade—operating in the Kachin-inhabited hills of northeastern Shan State—had heard of our arrival and wanted to meet us. He had come down from his jungle camp to Mong Paw and was waiting for us there. We got into Kyi Myint’s jeep and he drove us through the valley into Mong Paw. The village was much larger than I had expected; it consisted of more than 100 houses made from bamboo and wood—but there were also a few two-storey concrete buildings.

  Horses and mules were tethered around the covered market where Chinese, Kachins, Shans, Palaungs, Was, Indians and Burmese milled around haggling over the prices of Chinese textiles and canned drinks, and local agricultural produce. The convoluted ironies of the situation were delicious: wedged between China and Burma, a Marxist-Leninist Ruritania was sustaining, b
y means of thriving private enterprise, the bankrupt socialism of a regime in Rangoon that it was sworn to overthrow—in order to establish a Maoist order that its erstwhile-Maoist patrons in Beijing were striving to bury as fast as possible.

  The attack on Hsi-Hsinwan, we gathered, was to be launched, partly because government troops from their mountaintop positions had been disrupting this lucrative trade route by lobbing mortar bombs down onto caravans of traders. If the government could be forced out, both Mong Paw and Panghsai would be much safer, the CPB reasoned. So too, presumably, did the Chinese authorities across the border.

  I also suspected another motive to be at work: as the Kachins increasingly made the political running in the struggle, the communists were becoming conscious of their own loss of momentum. This offensive was to serve as a demonstration for the smaller rebel groups in Burma that the CPB still fielded the strongest force and the only one capable of launching a fully-fledged conventional assault on major Burmese positions.

  Kyi Myint drove his jeep up to a pharmacy just by the market. A short, squarely-framed man in a KIA uniform was waiting outside. He was in his late forties and squinted through half-closed eyes, his mouth creasing into a smile.

  “Lieut.-Col. Seng Hpung, I presume.” I shook his hand.

  “Yes, that’s right. That’s me,” he replied in flawless English. He invited us upstairs in the pharmacy building where a table had been laid with canned soft drinks, sweets and enamel plates piled high with biscuits.

  “We’re delighted you could come,” Seng Hpung continued, still smiling. “I’d like you to visit our brigade headquarters, too.”

  This put us in a slight dilemma since we had left the KIA’s area and were now guests of the CPB. After some discussion, we settled on a compromise. We would go to Panghsai and stay there for a few days, after which we would return to Mong Paw and thence move on to Seng Hpung’s camp in the hills, some 15 kms to the south. Hseng Noung and Hseng Tai would stay there while I later returned to cover the attack on Hsi-Hsinwan. In this way, we would also avoid Panghsai and Mong Paw markets during the week before the attack, a precaution we all agreed was essential.

  After the battle, I would have to walk 400 kms down to the CPB’s general headquarters at Panghsang through some of the wildest countryside in Burma: Chinese-dominated Kokang district, Southeast Asia’s foremost opium producing area, and the Wa Hills where, until the arrival of the CPB in the mid-1970s, the people had been headhunters. Hseng Noung and Hseng Tai had a somewhat easier option.

  Since local people could obtain travel permits to pass through Chinese territory, there was no reason why Hseng Noung could not be be a Shan villager from the Mong Paw valley, going to visit relatives in Panghsang. The Chinese authorities issued the travel permits solely on the basis of verbal statements. Who would suspect a young woman travelling with her baby daughter? It would thus take them only three days by bus from Wanting opposite Panghsai to the Chinese village of Meng A opposite Panghsang.

  We decided that we had exposed Hseng Tai to enough dangers already and we had already discovered that she was more difficult to take care of in the jungle. She was over a year old now, heavier and more troublesome to carry. She was also far more mobile than the days when she had merely slept and suckled.

  After settling our travel plans, I asked Seng Hpung where he had learnt such good English. Like so many other Kachins, he had attended the Shweli River Valley High School which was run by Gordon Seagrave, an American missionary better known as “the Burma Surgeon”. His school and hospital in Namkham, a small town on the Shweli, had become legends across Burma.

  With his staff of mainly Karen and Kachin nurses, Seagrave had operated around the clock during the siege of Myitkyina in 1944, when the Allies launched their most decisive assaults on the Japanese in northern Burma.

  After the war, Seagrave had continued his practice in Namkham, and through his close connections with the local ethnic minorities, had been involved with Naw Seng, the first Kachin rebel who fled to China in 1950. Seagrave then spent some time in jail before being released and dying in Burma in 1965.

  A great deal of regional history came together over the soft drink table in Mong Paw. The house owner, a cherubic man in his early thirties who also ran the pharmacy downstairs, had sat smiling throughout, without saying anything himself. He spoke only Kachin and Chinese but evidently understood some English and was able to catch the drift of our conversation.

  “And this gentleman here,” Seng Hpung said gesturing towards our host, “is called Zau Naw and he’s Naw Seng’s second son. He was born during Naw Seng’s exile in China and returned with his father in 1968.”

  I gaped in disbelief while the round-faced young man only smiled more broadly than before. It now struck me how closely he resembled his celebrated father, of whom I had seen several pictures taken during the World War Two.

  “Your father’s very famous even outside Burma,” I said. Seng Hpung translated and Zau Naw replied in Kachin.

  “He says the next time you come to Mong Paw, you must stay with him. He’s an excellent cook. He learnt that in China.”

  In the afternoon a jeep returned to pick us up and we drove back to Panghsai. Our driver took us to a long, concrete two-storey building near the local CPB police station. Four iron doors with large padlocks attested to the ground floor housing the municipal treasury. Two uniformed guards with automatic rifles were posted outside. Judging from their dark complexions and stocky builds, they were Wa tribesmen from the Chinese border mountains.

  The upper storey of the building served as an official guesthouse and we were accommodated in a large room with a wooden bed. There was a Chinese thermos flask with hot water on the table, a plastic bag of Chinese tea and a couple of enamel mugs. We were left alone in the guarded house all afternoon and it was not until the evening that we heard visitors coming. It was Kyaw Nyunt, the young CPB intellectual we had previously met at Pa Jau, and a friend of his.

  “So you got here safely!” Kyaw Nyunt greeted us with his habitual nervous giggle. “I’m a policeman here now. But since nobody else can speak English, they’ve ordered me to take care of you.” Wandering about the town alone was, he made it plain, not a good idea. But a sight-seeing tour had been arranged for the next day.

  By our standards—which had become Spartan—the room was comfortable and we slept soundly. Since Ma Shwe had returned to Loije, there were only the three of us. And the Kachin girl had been right: Hseng Tai was obviously bewildered next morning.

  “She’s looking for Ma Shwe,” Hseng Noung said sadly. “She can’t understand where Ma Shwe’s gone.”

  But all was forgotten when later that morning Kyaw Nyunt arrived with a jeep and two armed soldiers. We clambered in and went out for a drive around town. On most maps Panghsai is referred to as “Kyuhkok”. In fact Kyuhkok was the old town that had sprung up on the border crossing-point during the War when the Allied convoys resupplied the Kuomintang Nationalist Chinese in their fight against the Japanese invader.

  Later, after its defeat at the hands of Mao Zedong’s communists, Chiang Kai-shek’s main Kuomintang force withdrew to Taiwan. But several divisions in Yunnan province were cut off from the coast and forced to retreat across the border to northeastern Burma. A string of bases was then established along the Sino-Burmese frontier from which the Kuomintang tried for years to infiltrate the Chinese mainland. Old Kyuhkok had been burnt down by one of the retreating Kuomintang units and the once thriving border settlement remained deserted for many years.

  Subsequently, a new village called Panghsai had been built a kilometre to the west of the original Kyuhkok and a Burmese Army garrison established there to control the border crossing. But in 1970, Panghsai fell to the CPB and had since grown steadily. Today, with 6-7,000 inhabitants, it ranked as the largest rebel-held town in Burma and the most important transfer point for contraband entering the country from China. Following the reduction in Chinese aid to the CPB in the late 1970s, tax on
this trade had assumed a growing importance in filling CPB coffers.

  We drove down the main road and found a town pulsating with commercial activity. Nor was there much evidence of any socialist element in the local economy. A popular fixture appeared to be beauty parlours with brightly painted signs outside. We also drove past Chinese restaurants, stores of all kinds, schools, a Chinese temple, a Shan Buddhist pagoda and official buildings housing the local party administration.

  Chinese-made trucks and tolaches were parked in a square at the town centre. Some of the trucks served as “buses” carrying passengers between the town and Mong Paw. All motor vehicles, I noticed, had CPB-issued number plates. From a hill overlooking Panghsai, the town of Wanting was easily visible across the Nam Yan border stream. A large clock tower surmounted by a Chinese flag rose above the corrugated rooftops and the old Bailey bridge that crossed the stream in a single span. Since the border trade had picked up over the previous decade, Wanting was evidently cashing in too.

  Map 4: Kokang and the Wa Hills

  That night, a dinner party to welcome us was arranged at the guesthouse. Kyi Myint had come down from Mong Paw along with some CPB officials. Most, like Kyi Myint himself, were ethnic Chinese: only one was a Burman, a stocky, round-faced man in his sixties with a dark complexion. His name was Ohn Kyi and he had been a dedicated Marxist-Leninist since his teens. As the Chinese repast on the table was demolished—and the levels in the liquor bottles rapidly sank—Ohn Kyi waxed loquacious over the merits of communist ideology and the invincibility of the party.

  Kyi Myint did his best to deflect him by remarking that I did not have my notebooks with me. But Ohn Kyi was not to be gainsaid, and brushing Kyi Myint’s objections aside, launched into further flights of loud and increasingly rambling political rhetoric. The party broke up at 11 pm by which time Ohn Kyi’s comrades were obliged to support him as he lurched down the stairs still holding forth fortissimo on the imminent victory of the Burmese proletariat.