By 1980, the wheel had turned full circle, however. Lo was pardoned in a general amnesty that year and moved back to Lashio where he benefited from government assistance in building a new counter-insurgency force. The next year, with renewed backing from the military regime in Rangoon, Lo moved back into the opium market in northeastern Shan State. At the same time I was visiting Kokang, his agents were busy making deals with their erstwhile enemies of the CPB.
The next morning was a North European autumn. The air was cool and crisp and the ground carpeted with dry leaves stirring in sudden gusts of wind. Sam Law and the soldiers stuffed our belongings into saddlebags and after a quick breakfast of khao soi and Ma Ling luncheon meat we set out. The word had spread that an unusual visitor was in town and crowds of people were out to catch a glimpse of the freak. We left Tashwehtang trailing dozens of gawking spectators. After an hour, the novelty had paled and the last stragglers turned back towards the town.
Before long the mountains widened out and a broad plain lay spread out far below us bounded by precipitous limestone rockfaces. Green and fertile, it was dotted with small knolls and large villages of which we could only see the roofs of the houses, tiny as matchboxes. The track downhill wound through meadows of wild sunflowers. After nearly a week in the inhospitable mountain fastnesses of Kokang, this lush landscape had about it an almost visionary quality.
It took us an hour to reach the valley floor and the first village we came to, Gong Sha, was to my surprise Shan rather than Chinese. With fruit trees, irrigated paddy fields and vegetable gardens outside every house, it was clearly prosperous. In the middle of the village was a large Buddhist pagoda made of wood. In its sun-lit compound, I glimpsed some monks in saffron robes seated in tranquil silence.
An elderly villager in a bright turban gave us some juicy pomelos and we marched on, following a wide road eastwards across the plain, towards the Chinese border where the local CPB district office was located. The climate was far warmer than in the mountains and as the sun rose in the sky the heat rose and our backs were soon drenched in perspiration. It was harvest time and people were thrashing paddy everywhere. Along the road, bullock carts rumbled past, occasionally overtaken by Japanese motorbikes zooming through the valley, the whine of their engines echoing from the cliff-faces.
It was a world apart from the hill country that lay behind us. The neatness of my new surroundings made me acutely aware of my own scruffiness; I felt like an unkempt hillbilly and I longed for a bath.
Two hours march brought us to the eastern rim of the valley, close to the frontier. The district headquarters turned out to be a collection of solid, Chinese-style brick buildings, obviously built after the CPB had taken over Kokang in 1968-69. On a nearby hillock was a large rectangular stone plinth with inscriptions in both Burmese and Chinese beneath a red star in relief. The monument had been erected in memory of local martyrs who had fallen in the struggle for a communist Burma.
On arrival, there was the usual confusion. Nobody had been informed of our coming. The local party officials—all sturdy Kokang Chinese in green fatigues, army caps and polished Sam Browne belts with holstered pistols—showed us into a guest house near the main office. Through Sam Law as the interpreter, Sam Mai told them I was a foreign journalist who had been invited by party headquarters in Panghsang. They nodded in open-mouthed amazement at the sight of a Westerner in Kokang.
We remained at Kokang headquarters for a few days and I came to know the local cadres quite well. Most of them were followers of Pheung Kya-shin, a former officer in Olive and Jimmy Yang’s private army. The CPB had contacted Pheung already in 1967, six months before the New Year thrust into Mong Ko. At that time, the Kokang army was badly splintered. Olive languished in jail in Rangoon; Jimmy had left for the Thai border, and Lo Hsing-han was cultivating contacts with Burmese Army commanders in Lashio.
Pheung Kya-shin and his younger brother Pheung Kya-fu were won over by the CPB with promises of arms and ammunition, part of a more general communist strategy. The CPB’s rapid penetration of minority areas along the Sino-Burmese border mountains in the late 1960s and early 1970s owed much to its acting through local warlords. And these chieftains cared little about where the munitions came from as long as they were delivered.
On January 5, 1968, five days after Naw Seng had captured Mong Ko, the Pheung brothers and their men moved into Kokang from the Yunnan side, supported by Chinese “volunteers”. The whole of Kokang—save for the town of Kunlong by the Salween River and surrounding hills—was in the hands of the CPB before the end of the year.
Smart communist uniforms notwithstanding, I had my doubts as to the depth of the Kokang commanders’ ideological commitment. Most were almost wholly occupied with running their local business. Precious little seemed to have changed since the days of Olive and Jimmy. For security reasons, I was never permitted to visit the nearby market at Long Khai village in the Kokang valley. But one of the local officers went there one day to buy provisions for our onward journey. The goods he brought back provided a clear picture of what Chinese entrepreneurship can accomplish even in the remotest backwaters of Southeast Asia. In addition to the inevitable Chinese brandy, biscuits and Ma Ling luncheon meat, he carried a large tin of Nescafe packaged in India, a cigarette lighter from Austria and jars of marmalade made in Thailand.
I left the guesthouse only for meals—and at night when the Wa soldiers usually lit a camp fire in the compound outside the district office. Sam Law was often there and I chatted to him in my broken Shan. His story was moving yet far from remarkable in the context of the battlefields of northern Burma. Orphaned as a small child, he had been “adopted” by the CPB who saw to his education and taught him Burmese. He was now 24 and had served with the CPB’s forces since the age of twelve.
“Are you married,” I asked him across the campfire.
“I was,” he replied his face clouding with sorrow. “My wife died when she was five months pregnant. There was some complication that couldn’t be treated.”
He told me of his wedding; of how he had invited all his friends and slaughtered a pig and some chickens for the occasion. I told him of my own wedding to Hseng Noung in 1983 in a Shan guerrilla camp near the Thai border. A comradeship had grown between us and I was touched by his addressing me as pi kwe, Shan for brother-in-law.
Sam Law and the Wa section from the Northern Bureau at Mong Ko left on the third day of my stay at Kokang headquarters. He had tears in his eyes when he came to say goodbye.
“I’m going back now, pi kwe. This is to make sure you won’t forget me.” He pressed a small black and white photograph in my hand and turned around, heading back into the Kokang valley. The Wa boys waved farewell and trotted off along the dusty village road, their rifles bumping on their shoulders.
Later that day, a message reached the local party leaders that Brang Seng was on his way with an escort of more than a hundred Kachin and Shan troops. He had begun his long journey and chosen the route via Panghsang in order to meet the CPB leaders before continuing down to the Thai border. Too many outsiders at Kokang at once would inevitably attract attention so arrangements were made for my quick departure.
Preparing for the next leg of the journey required some care, however. The CPB’s border buffer state was generally 20-80 kms wide. But at one point—the Chinsweho, or Jinshuihe, Valley connecting Kokang and the northern Wa Hills—it narrowed to a corridor only one kilometre wide and a few kilometres in length. And this would have to be covered in one day; if news of our departure from Kokang were to leak, the Chinsweho corridor could easily be mortared from the Burmese Army’s hilltop positions only a few hundred metres above. But once through the valley and across the Namting River, we would enter the Wa Hills and be back in safe territory again.
A green Chinese army truck picked me up the next morning. An escort of half a dozen Kokang CPB troops clambered onto the back while Sam Mai, a local officer and I myself sat in the cab. Xiao Yang had already left with one
mule well before sunrise to ensure the luggage would reach the next halt safely. We set off trailing a cloud of dust behind us.
The truck bypassed the main villages, Long Khai and Ching Khai, driving on to a smaller market village further down the valley. There we halted to gather news of the road ahead and pick up an interpreter; Sam Law had now gone and none of the Chinese officers from district headquarters spoke a word of Burmese.
“There’s one Chinese cadre from Mandalay,” said Sam Mai. “He speaks Burmese and he’ll come with us to the Wa Hills.”
The sweet aroma of burning opium wafted from one bamboo house outside which we had pulled up. There was a long wait. Eventually, a tall, emaciated Chinese in his fifties emerged from the doorway wearing a blissful smile. This was to be our new interpreter.
No unusual movements had been reported ahead and we drove on for another hour to a pass which marked the end of the safe area inside Kokang. There, we left the truck and began a brisk march over the pass and down into the Chinsweho Valley. It was so narrow we could even see the Burmese Army outpost on the hilltop to the west. The path we followed at a half-run was only a few metres inside Burmese territory with the Chinese border on our left.
In case a sentry might be scanning the path through binoculars, I draped a hand-towel over my head concealing the side of my face. Two small villages of ramshackle, thatched bamboo huts straddled the valley and we walked swiftly though them. I glanced constantly up to our right at the Army positions on the hill, on the lookout for any sign of activity.
“If they open fire, throw yourself into the bushes on the left,” Sam Mai muttered over his shoulder, doing nothing to allay my nervousness.
A fast two hours’ walk later, the path veered to the left over a rise beyond which the Burmese post on the mountain was finally out of sight. We continued down a track now bordered by shoulder-high grass and by mid-afternoon arrived at a small CPB camp. It consisted of only four bamboo huts, manned by an officer in his thirties and a couple of boys hardly in their teens.
For reasons which escaped me, Sam Mai and the Kokang officers decided we should stay there overnight rather than continue to Chinsweho village and into safety across the Namting. I asked why they intended to bivouac at this virtually undefended front-line position.
“There are no ferrymen who can take us across the river at this time of the day,” came the reply.
The situation worried me. To judge by the officer in charge of the camp, government forces in the area had already got wind of something. Patrolling had increased and, the day before, a mortar bomb had been lobbed in the direction of the camp where we were now halted. Spotter planes had also been flying over the area. Could it be because of us? Or, even worse, had they heard Brang Seng was coming? I tried to discuss it with Sam Mai but he just grinned and shrugged:
“I don’t know. But let’s sleep here and continue early tomorrow morning.”
I kept my bags packed and slept fully clothed. We were up well before sunrise, on the assumption that, had we been spotted the previous afternoon, a dawn attack would be the most likely response. I had a hurried mug of coffee and prepared to leave. The CPB officer who had come along from Kokang and our interpreter left first to make arrangements for crossing the Namting. Xiao Yang, the mules and most of the troops followed shortly after. Only Sam Mai and I remained behind, waiting for news from our escorts—or gunshots from the Burmese Army outpost.
But we heard nothing—either from the outpost or from the people who had gone ahead. Hours dragged by and I found myself becoming increasingly tense.
“Where are they? We can’t wait here all day; the two of us hanging around without guards at a place like this. Let’s go!” I nagged at Sam Mai. He grinned, unflappable:
“We must be patient. And I’m not sure about the way.”
“There are only two ways. One down to the river and the other up to the Burmese Army camp. Not even an imbecile could go wrong!”
We argued for almost an hour, and still no message had come from the river. Finally, at 9.45, Sam Mai gave in and agreed we should leave. I draped the towel over my face again and we set off. It took only fifteen minutes to reach the Namting, but on the way we passed several locals who glanced curiously at me while I stared fixedly at the ground.
Chinsweho, a big market village on the northern bank of the river, was crowded that morning with people from Kokang as well as government-held areas. The last thing I wanted was to be spotted by some informer and later caught in a firefight between government troops and my unruly CPB escort.
We found the Kokang officers and an old ferryman on the riverbank, still haggling over the price of the crossing. Seeing us hurrying towards the river, the urgency of the situation finally dawned on the officers. A price was soon agreed and we clambered aboard the dugout canoe. But just as the ferryman pushed off from the bank, a CPB officer, clearly the worse for liquor, squeezed in beside us. He was a Burman from Panghsang and began chatting with Sam Mai whom he clearly knew. He turned to speak to me, also in Burmese. My face was still swathed in the towel. Sam Mai intervened:
“He’s not Burmese, you know. He’s a rather special visitor.”
The man from Panghsang stared at me in confusion. I uncovered my face to smile at him whereupon, startled, he jerked backwards, nearly turning the boat turtle and tipping us all into the river. When he had recovered from the shock, he told me he had actually heard in Panghsang a foreign visitor was on his way and assured me preparations were being made for my arrival at CPB general headquarters.
He left us at the far side of the river, while we waited for the rest of our party to cross. The mules were reluctant to swim and had to be towed across one by one.
Then we set off eastwards, along a rutted dirt road which on my travel map of Southeast Asia had been elevated to the status of a highway. It might have been an important route decades before; now, it was scarcely passable for even the few tolaches we met along the way. To the west, the road led to the town of Hopang—actually visible in the distance—where the Burmese Army maintained a major garrison.
We moved in the opposite direction, towards the Chinese border. Exactly where the dividing line between government and CPB territory ran was difficult to gauge. But here and there, beside the road, were bunkers and trenches facing Hopang, to guard against any Army thrust eastwards.
We left the dirt track after a few kilometres and continued up into the hills, south of the Namting. The rice paddies of the river valley gave place to poppy fields, through which we toiled for several hours before reaching the township centre of Ywin Chin in the late afternoon. It would hardly have been classified as such anywhere else in the world. But a large covered market and a few mud-brick party offices lent it a faintly municipal flavour altogether lacking in the other small villages we had passed since the river crossing.
Two CPB officers awaited us. They were both Wa, dark and short with squarish features. One of them had false gold teeth which gleamed as he smiled and shook my hand. He introduced himself as a battalion commander and returned the following day with a platoon of well-armed troops to escort us to the next CPB township centre, Kyinshan.
The track led further into the Chinese border mountains above the Hopang-Namting valley. The communists, it became clear, controlled the range along the border, while the government held Hopang, the town of Panglong just south of it, and the Salween bridge at Kunlong, site of the bitter battles of 1971-72. Since then, a stalemate had prevailed around the government’s Kunlong-Hopang-Panglong foothold east of the Salween. Each of the towns was defended by an army battalion in a valley surrounded by CPB forces.
Probably because of its proximity to the front, the border range we followed was sparsely populated. But from remarks let drop by Sam Mai and the Wa officer over what was obviously a sensitive topic, I also gathered that, since the CPB had taken over, many people from the hills had moved down to the valley; some had even migrated to safer areas west of the Salween—Lashio, Hsenwi
and Tang-yan.
Our column, now almost thirty strong, marched into Kyinshan in the afternoon. The village, inhabited mostly by Chinese, was located on a high, wind-swept plateau. Almost every house had been built with a large forecourt where mules could be tethered under thatch-roofed bamboo mangers. Surly guard-dogs were once more back in vogue.
Our host was a Chinese in his early thirties who contrived to stand out conspicuously against the rough backdrop of the border mountains. He dressed in a smart grey jacket, black slacks and polished winkle-pickers, and was a man of exaggerated mannerisms—flicking the ash from the end of 555 cigarettes with a bored snap of his fingers, throwing back sleek shoulder-length locks with a sudden toss of the head. The overall impression was of some soap opera idol of the Hong Kong screen. As it turned out, he had just returned to his home village after a seven-year jaunt around Burma, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and China.
“I lived for a while in Luang Prabang,” he said exhaling a thin stream of 555 smoke. “I was working with friends. We used to make trading trips all over. Sometimes up to China; other times down to Thailand to buy consumer goods. We’d sell them in Luang Prabang or Vientiane. But it was much more profitable to truck the stuff over to Hanoi, or down to the Burmese border.”
“Was it easy to get visas for those countries?” I asked, guessing he probably did not even have a Burmese identity card.
“I used this kind of visa.” He grinned, and with the flourish of a conjuror extracted a fat wad of Chinese banknotes from his pocket.
I felt a twinge of envy. This accomplished smuggler was able to move blithely back and forth between five countries without either passport or bureaucratic entanglements.
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