“Did you carry opium?” I asked him.
“Of course not.” He gave a brief snigger as if closing the matter while hinting at things best left unspoken. I laughed uneasily with him and steered the conversation to Lao girls. With a twitch of his head, he tossed his long hair back over his shoulders again and then sat beaming dreamily into the fire.
But this, for better or for worse, was the village of his ancestors. Family responsibilities had called him back, and now he played out the role of Man of Substance in an uncouth, unlettered village in the farthest reaches of these benighted mountains. Maintaining standards was to dress like a B-grade film star, to smoke foreign cigarettes—and to dream of the girls he’d left behind in Luang Prabang.
We set off early next morning, frost crunching under our feet. The Wa commander had stayed behind at Kyinshan and in charge now were the officer from Kokang and our opium-smoking interpreter. I began to dawn on me that the officer was also probably an addict; whenever we passed a market village, the two would disappear into a house together to emerge later wearing expressions of blissful contentment.
The critical point of the day’s journey was the descent to the Panglong valley—only a few kilometres from the government garrison—where we would have to cross the Htahtein River before moving up into the safety of the Wa Hills. Fortunately, the lower we came, the denser grew the tree-cover. Our two leaders had borrowed horses in Kyinshan and, as they rode along at the head of the column through the forest, they kept shouting orders back to the soldiers. These commands were resolutely ignored and we trudged along in total disarray down to the Htahtein.
A suspension bridge made from rough planks and rusty wire cables spanned the river. As we teetered across one by one it swayed and wobbled alarmingly. The horses meanwhile had to ford the river. No sooner had we crossed than to my astonishment, in a glade on the southern bank, our two intrepid cavaliers called a halt. At first, I imagined this was to allow the stragglers to catch up. But an hour later, the two men were still stretched out across the grass, gazing up at the wide sweep of the heavens. I asked Sam Mai what the matter was.
“They’re tired, they say. They want to have some biscuits and a rest.”
“Here? Why don’t we at least march on up into the hills, to the next village? Panglong is very close.”
Sam Mai translated my suggestion. It apparently upset the duo. They both began shouting at me simultaneously. Since they were screaming different things, the sound was garbled, but the message clear.
“They’re tired, they say,” Sam Mai translated diplomatically with a sheepish smile.
“They’ve got horses. I’m on foot. What are they complaining about? Do they need another pipe of opium before they can get up?”
For another hour, our leaders’ wonder in the majesty of the firmament showed no signs of diminishing. Then, finally, the two hauled themselves to their feet and climbed laboriously back into their saddles. I grabbed my shoulderbag and walking stick and set off, up into the hills south of the Htahtein, setting the pace of the column with a brisk stride which soon had the two opium addicts complaining loudly. Sam Mai was too embarrassed to say anything. And the soldiers, rifles across their shoulders, trotted behind happily oblivious of the rest of us.
The mountains south of the Htahtein were wilder than those of Kokang and Kyinshan. Towering limestone pillars soared up out of dense forest, the rockface of their flanks almost obscured by the trees that grew in profusion from every ledge and crack. We had entered Wa country.
An hour’s strenuous climb along a zig-zag path brought us to the first Wa village. It was called Htahtein, like the river below us, and consisted of about fifty small huts with tall, conically-shaped thatched roofs. High bamboo stockades surrounded each building. A bare-breasted old crone, bent and dressed only in a coarse longyi peeped through the gate outside her hut—and at the sight of us, promptly slammed it shut.
We continued for another few hours uphill, past several similar Wa settlements. The villages in Kokang had been dirt-poor too, but the local merchants, mules, oxen and Chinese characters on the doorposts of the houses at least indicated a degree of civilisation. In contrast, the Wa settlements were strongly reminiscent of the primitive environment of the Naga Hills.
A dark, stocky race, the Was spoke a language with a sharp, guttural ring to it. The Shans liken the Wa dialects to the croaking of a frog: krek-kroak-krek. While not without justification, a linguistically more correct classification of spoken Wa places it together with Palaung, Mon and Khmer in the Mon-Khmer family of languages.
The Was are generally held to be the original inhabitants of parts of Shan State and even northern Thailand, where they are known as Lawa. Politically unsophisticated, they never established states of their own—let alone empires as did their more sophisticated cousins, the Mons of Burma and the Khmers of Cambodia. But well into the twentieth century, the local rulers of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand paid yearly tribute to the Lawa tribe as the original owners of the land.
There is in Thailand today a school of thought that claims the Thais have always been living where they are now, and any traces of similar civilisations among the Shans in Burma and China—and a long time ago in Assam—must be the result of migration from Thailand to these areas.
If indeed the Thais, or the Shan peoples (who call themselves Tai) originated in Thailand, the question immediately arises as to why they made the strenuous migration over the mountains to the north, since, according to this theory, the original birthplace was the most fertile plain of the Southeast Asian peninsula. And why would the rulers of Chiang Mai then pay tribute to the Lawas?
A far more plausible explanation is that the various Thai and Shan (Tai) peoples originated in southern China and due to pressure from the numerically and politically stronger Han Chinese to the north were forced to migrate south, spreading out fan-wise over Assam, northern Burma, Yunnan in China, Laos, parts of northern Vietnam and, eventually, the Mae Nam Chao Phraya Valley in today’s Thailand.
When the Thais and the Shans arrived in their new river valleys, they found some hill peoples such as the Was and Lawas already in the region. Other hill tribes, notably the Kachins, Lahus and Akhas, emigrated from southern China much later to settle in the hills around the already inhabited valleys and plains. Later, when some tribes such as the Kachins began pushing down from their hills to the lowlands, friction with the Shans arose immediately.
The Burmans, on the other hand, migrated south from Tibet towards the Irrawaddy plain where they defeated the Mons and established their own empires, which gradually imposed a feudatory or tributary status on many of the non-Burman frontier areas. The final outcome is one of the most diverse and complex patterns of ethnic settlement anywhere in the world—as well as one of the most intractable insurgencies in modern history.
The lot of the Was was to be squeezed between the Shans and the Chinese and subject to cultural influences from both their more sophisticated neighbours. This went to divide them into two main groups. The first, usually referred to as the “Tame Was” were those exposed to Shan or Chinese influence—and later even Christianity, introduced a few decades ago by American Baptist missionaries.
Their more traditional cousins were the “Wild Was”, dwelling in the higher mountains. And it was they who remained headhunters until the CPB conquered their territory in the early 1970s. The area which we were now entering was “Tame Wa” country. But further south along the route to Panghsang, we were to pass through the land of the “Wild Was”, which only very few Westerners had visited before.
The “tameness” of the Was in the area through which we now marched was manifested by the presence of Buddhist pagodas and monasteries in every village. But it was an unusual brand of Buddhism mixed with traditional spirit worship. In one village, I saw a gigantic wooden phallus, with a red-painted head, imposingly erect under a thatched cover to protect it from the elements. This stood right next to a Buddhist shrine. Neither the s
affron-robed monks nor the villagers seemed to find this at all incongruous.
Over the following days, we passed through settlements with “croaking” names such as Moipalak, Nget Bruk, Ngai Brak, Yawng Hpre and Yawng Rieng. Some of these villages were Baptist, Christian calendars adorning hut walls and faded prints of Jesus or crude crucifixes hanging above bamboo altars.
On entering a hut in one village, shuffling off my shoes by the doorway and putting down my bush hat on the split-bamboo floor, I was confronted with a entire family staring at me in wide-eyed disbelief. Once he was sure he could credit what his eyes were seeing, the father went into the sleeping area to fetch a large black book, its binding almost falling apart.
The old man, dressed in Chinese farmers’ garb and a communist army cap, approached me humbly. The book was in the Wa language, written in Roman script. At the bottom of the title page was printed, in English: “Wa Hymn Book. Translated and compiled by Rev. M. Vincent Young. Published by Rev. J. Zol Khaw Swan, Rangoon.” The year of its printing was illegible. Sam Mai, who had been watching the scene unfold, cut in:
“He thinks you must be a missionary. The only white men he could have seen were the American Baptists. They were here until about twenty years ago. Now the old man thinks they have come back. That’s why he’s so excited. He wants to show you they haven’t forgotten the gospel.”
Sam Mai who evidently found the incident amusing laughed uproariously. Although not a Christian myself, I was deeply touched. I flicked through the hymn book and was able to find both “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Born in a Manger” in Wa translation.
The old man took the book back but remained seated beside us while we finished our lunch of coarse local rice and luncheon meat. We had run out of khao soi. In the background, around the fireplace, the rest of the family watched us intently as we ate. All of them, both young and old, smoked tobacco in long bamboo pipes. The youngest children had theirs tied around their necks with string, presumably so they would not lose them.
Village life was basic in the extreme and the main pastime seemed to be sitting around the fireplace in their huts smoking rough, homegrown tobacco. Clumps of Virginia leaves were grown in the plots outside and the Christian villages in the northern Wa Hills were notably free of opium poppies. Selling tobacco to opium growing areas appeared to provide the local population with enough to subsist on. It was an encouraging sign and I found myself speculating on a future for the entire Wa nation as tobacco cultivators rather than opium farmers.
The southward march took us into open country of sweeping meadows and rolling, deforested hills. One large mountain, which the Wa soldiers told me was Loi Mau, or Kungming Shan in Chinese, did not have a single tree on it. But, to my surprise, a dirt road, wide enough for motor vehicles, wound around its grassy slopes, eastwards in the direction of the Chinese border. We marched along the smooth road, Xiao Yang herding our mules in front of him with a cane, the rest of us trudging behind in the heat of the afternoon.
Mong Paw market, northern Shan State.
The road led around a small knoll and we spotted a large village on the lower flanks of Loi Mau. Two long lines of wooden and mudbrick houses, some with corrugated iron roofs and others with tiles, formed a central market place, which was surrounded by clusters of bamboo huts beside irrigated paddy fields. After the tiny Wa villages of the hills, this was a veritable metropolis. Called Mong Mau or “New Land” in Shan, the market was known as Chintefang in Chinese, while the Burmese corruption of the Shan name was “Maing Maw”. But in anybody’s language, it was the CPB’s administrative headquarters for the Northern Wa District.
We marched through the crowded main market, past the rows of thatched stalls. I noticed several merchants were selling heaps of “Liverpool 33” T-shirts, a large consignment of these enigmatically inscribed garment presumably having arrived from China. In the CPB territory they had rapidly achieved a considerable sartorial standing, being worn not only by soldiers by also by many civilians we had passed on the road.
Old Wa man in a village near the Yunnan frontier.
Despite this evidence of some contact with the wider world, my arrival in Mong Mau caused immediate consternation, villagers pushing and stumbling as they fled in panic from my advance. I felt half-inclined to climb up on a stall and announce to the populace at large that Liverpool was full of creatures such as myself. But I was led on to the local CPB office, where the reception was not much less chaotic. Nobody had been informed of our arrival, but a duty orderly hastily produced a couple of bottles of lukewarm Chinese beer to occupy us while he roused his superiors.
After a while, a tall middle-aged Burman in a CPB uniform appeared. He was a nervous, highly-strung individual with a stiff smile. Sam Mai introduced him as Mya Thaung, party secretary of the district. I asked him if he had heard any news from Hsi-Hsinwan, but there was none. To my relief, however, the two opium smoking Kokang officers set off on their journey back home almost immediately. Exhausted after the long march over the hills, I was shown to a room in the district office and promptly fell asleep.
The following evening, a dance performance was put on in my honour on a soccer pitch near the district office. Hundreds of Was turned up to sing a monotonous but mesmerising dirge to the beat of drums. The dancers shuffled and swayed in a circle around a campfire, eerie shadows springing and leaping across the pitch around them.
It was freezing cold and in addition to my field jacket, I wore a blanket draped over my shoulders. Around me at the table sat local party officers in thick Chinese army greatcoats and communist caps. In this primitive land of tribal headhunters, now ruled by Burman Marxist-Leninists, the bizarre mixture of cultures never ceased to amaze me. It was clear party secretary Mya Thaung thoroughly enjoyed his position as “King of the Was”. Lest it should escape my notice, he pointed out repeatedly how much the local people respected him.
I interviewed him subsequently and gathered that the way in which the CPB had taken over the Wa Hills followed essentially the same pattern elsewhere. Local warlords had ruled their private fiefdoms, traded in opium and shared their profits with both Burmese Army commanders as well as with the more powerful Kuomintang, which had also maintained bases in the Wa Hills since the early 1950s.
Into this cockpit of anarchy the communists descended in 1971 from Kokang. The Kuomintang was easily defeated and fled south towards the Thai border leaving the CPB to play one local chieftain off against another. On May 1, 1971, several thousand communist troops encircled Mong Mau and overran the Burmese garrison after a fierce battle. The survivors retreated down to Panglong and Hopang, which the CPB never managed to capture.
“The Chinese authorities were grateful to us,” Mya Thaung smiled, puffing at a cigarette. “After we’d captured the area, they could sleep soundly at night. There were no more cross-border raids or sabotage on their side of the border.”
But it was several years before the locals were finally convinced the new rulers had come to stay. Villagers, armed with ancient muskets and World War Two vintage rifles, sniped and ambushed wherever the party tried to establish permanent camps and offices in the Wa Hills. It was in many respects a remarkably similar history to that of the primitive eastern Nagas resisting the “civilising mission” of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland. And the Marxist CPB was no less ruthless than the Christian NSCN in imposing the new dispensation.
“In the Khun Ma area, an entire village, including women and children, put up a last stand, barricading themselves inside a longhouse,” recalled Mya Thaung. “We fired a B-40 rocket through the door at the end of the longhouse. That finished them all off.” He laughed shortly.
Within a few years, however, local resistance had subsided and the Was came to accept the CPB’s peace through the superior firepower. But indirect rule through tribal leaders had continued, and Mya Thaung’s main instrument in the exercise of local power was a Wa chieftain called Chao Ngi Lai. Tall, lean and fair complexioned, he had more
the look of a Chinese than a Wa. His blue jacket and grey slacks only reinforced that impression.
In the 1960s, Chao Ngi Lai had headed his own band of armed warriors, sometimes fighting against the Burmese Army and sometimes against the Kuomintang, or rival warlords. In 1968, the CPB contacted him with generous offers of arms and ammunition. Not surprisingly, he agreed to throw in his lot with the communists. Thus with the help of Chao Ngi Lai and other tribal leaders, by 1974 the CPB had asserted their mastery of the hills. For the local people, this meant an end to headhunting. But as a topic of conversation, at least, this venerable Wa tradition still enjoyed some popularity and during our meetings in the Mong Mau district office, Chao Ngi Lai brought it up often.
“Before, people could hardly leave their villages alone since their heads were always in danger. They had to work their fields in groups.” He laughed, and then continued.
“The heads were considered necessary as protection for our communities from evil spirits and to promote the well-being of our villages. It was all feudal superstition.”
In almost every statement he made, there was a curious mixture of native belief and new Marxist rhetoric, picked up from the CPB. He told me the headhunting season reached its peak in March and continued until the water festival—the Buddhist New Year—in April. To the Buddhist converts among the Was, this was naturally a religious festival while the spirit-worshipping majority simply saw it as the beginning of the rice-planting season. Fresh heads, stuck on bamboo posts on either side of the approach to a Wa village, were believed to ensure good rice crops.
Land of Jade Page 38