Land of Jade

by Bertil Lintner

  I had wanted to see the old outback presbytery of this dedicated Italian man of God, but there was no time: the day’s march began at dawn. We walked in single file, our long string of men and mules snaking across the valley and up into the mountains beyond. Once higher, we reached ridges covered with pine forest where the wind sighed through the treetops. But for the paddy fields below, it might have been the central Sweden of my boyhood.

  By mid-morning the heat was searing and thirst a constant companion. As we laboured uphill and down in an agonisingly slow rollercoaster my face was bathed in perspiration and my mouth as parched as sandpaper. Our destination for the march was the market centre of Wan Ho-tao near the Chinese border. Several roads, built by the CPB but never properly maintained, led into the village. It was located amidst a desolate, highland landscape of tall grass, denuded hills and mountain streams. A big market place with rows of thatched bamboo stalls dominated the centre of the village and was surrounded by clusters of wooden and mud-brick buildings.

  As we approached the market, I spotted a group of men on horseback coming towards us. Some carried old muskets across their backs. I looked again, and to my astonishment, I saw they were dressed in yellow robes. They were Buddhist monks! I gaped since neither horse riding nor the possession of firearms are normally accepted practices for the Buddhist clergy. But then I recalled having once read of the Shwe Kyaung Pongyi, a unique order of monks along the Shan-Chinese borderlands who smoke opium, sleep with women and live in monasteries fortified with loop-holed brick walls. Theirs was a Buddhism deeply influenced by Chinese and Tibetan tantric ritual.

  The book had been written around the turn of the century and I had assumed the famed Shwe Kyaung Pongyi had since faded into history. But here they were, riding past us, proud in the last rays of the setting sun. As I was later to learn, the Shwe Kyaung Pongyi have disappeared from along most of the Chinese border and today survive only in small pockets in the hills north of Kengtung.

  In the old days, the Shan area of Burma had consisted of a plethora of petty principalities, most amounting to little more than a valley with a pagoda, a few villages with surrounding paddy fields, and a local ruler housed in a modest manor that hardly merited the term ‘palace’.

  Kengtung state, however, was as big as Belgium. It was sparsely populated and made up largely of remote, undeveloped hill areas with dozens of tribes and ethnic groups and a variety of outside influences. To the west it bordered the other Shan states; to the north, east and south, lay China, Laos and Thailand respectively.

  Even today under communist rule, the trade routes and influences they brought with them appeared to follow the same pattern. The monks, armed and mounted, were indicative of a traditional remoteness. But, at the same time, Wan Ho-tao on the northernmost marches of the ancient principality maintained its role as an important entrepot on the timeworn contraband trails between Burma, China, Thailand and Indochina.

  As we walked past the market, I glimpsed a variety of goods piled up inside the stalls: Burmese cheroots, Chinese textiles, glossily-packaged Thai instant noodles; “Liverpool 33” T-shirts had also arrogated for themselves a place on display. Women on heavy, black Chinese bicycles swished past us on the road which led up to the local CPB office—and beyond to China and the market town of Meng Lien.

  The party office compound, which we reached at dusk, was lit up by electricity brought in by cable from China—a facility not uncommon in the border areas. We dined outside that night, in a garden surrounded by neatly trimmed hedges. Aye Tan was quiet as usual and I watched local traders who passed the CPB office with their mules, carrying Chinese consumer goods down to the government-held towns of Mong Yang and Kengtung. Its old revolutionary ardour now dulled, the CPB appeared content merely to levy taxes on the prosperous foot soldiers of a thriving capitalist endeavour.

  We had heard from the Wa soldiers at Panghsang that there was even a refining facility at Wan Ho-tao, where locally grown opium was converted into Huang pi, the black-pinkish heroin base. The presence of a large number of Kokang Chinese suggested there might well be substance to these rumours. But lodged as I was in the CPB’s offices, it seemed imprudent to pursue the matter with my hosts. I confined myself to a glass of brandy and the BBC news, and turned in when the electricity went off at 10 o’clock.

  The area east of Wan Ho-tao, through which we marched the following day, was as racially mixed as only the rugged countryside north of Kengtung can be: Shans in the narrow green valleys, Chinese near the main market-places and at least one house in every opium-growing hill-village populated by Palaungs, Lahus, Akhas or Was.

  But even the Shan villages were poorer and more backwards than elsewhere: for the most, little more than wretched straggles of tumbledown bamboo huts. Ancient buffalo carts with huge, solid wooden wheels creaked and swayed along dusty village paths. Had it not been for the ubiquitous Buddhist pagodas and monasteries, and the irrigated paddy fields, it would have been hard to imagine that the inhabitants of these poverty-stricken settlements were really Shans.

  The heat and the smoke of numerous fires on the hillsides cast a pall across the land and the sharp, hard outline of mountains against the horizon grew soft and blurred, receding into a distant heat-haze. Beneath our feet, dry poppy pods, husks tapped of their precious sap, crunched as we marched. There was also another clear sign that the hot season was upon us: some hillsides were bathed in the snow-white lustre of wild cherry blossom.

  Walking too was becoming increasingly difficult due to the tightness of my running shoes after the repeated repairs they had undergone. Finally it reached the point at which I could no longer wear them without developing painful blisters on my heels. I was left with no other choice than to fall back on my flip-flops. These were not as bad to walk in as may be imagined—provided the going was not wet. When it was, dust turned instantly to slippery mud and steep ascents and descents became treacherous and fraught with the danger of a twisted ankle.

  Preoccupied with the scenery and the ethnography around me I had scarcely troubled to look closely at my escorts. On setting off from Panghsang, I had been told that one platoon of guards would accompany me. Finally, during a halt on a deforested ridge I counted the soldiers and apart from Aye Tan, the Man Called Horse, and a few kitchen boys helping with the cooking, I could see no more than fifteen.

  My first thought was that the discrepancy was the result of guerrilla organisation in which a section is referred to as a platoon, a platoon as a company; and a company as a battalion. But gradually I began to wonder. The soldiers were of many different nationalities—Shan, Wa, Akha and Lahu—so the lingua franca was Shan, which I fortunately could understand.

  There was one lad in particular who had attracted my attention. He looked perpetually downcast and whenever we halted usually sat alone apart from the others. He could hardly have been more than fifteen years old and his Chinese uniform hung loose over his still childlike body. His trousers had been rolled up several times and the belt which pulled his baggy uniform around his waist had been made for someone much taller and sturdier.

  Probably in an attempt to cheer the loner up, one of the kitchen hands from Panghsang approached him and asked a natural enough question:

  “Su gaw luk Pangyang ma ha?” Have you come back from Pangyang like all the others?

  The boy nodded with a sheepish smile without uttering a word.

  “And what was it like there? A lot of fighting?” The expression on his face changed abruptly. He looked as if he was going to burst into tears.

  “Dai sipsong gaw.”

  Twelve of us died. So that was why the platoon consisted of only fifteen men! Nearly half of it had been wiped out. And the boy, though uneducated, was certainly sufficiently intelligent to realise he would also be mentioned in the casualty statistics within a year or two. Maybe not in the CPB’s reports, but at least in the government’s victory bulletins.

  The CPB leaders at Panghsang had conceded 37 dead on their side
during the entire confrontation in Pangyang. Here were fifteen rag-tag survivors of a single platoon on their way home to the poverty-stricken hills in the easternmost corner of Burma.

  The realisation of this fragment of a far greater tragedy shocked me profoundly. Up to that moment I had been uncertain how blunt and critical I should be in my writings about the CPB who, after all, had been our hosts and generously provided us with food and accommodation for several months. But what I had just overheard tipped the balance. I remembered one of the party officials’ sceptical remarks when he had asked me about my work at Panghsang:

  “I’ve heard you’re going to report on the war from the side of the people. Is that so?”

  I had assured him I was going to do exactly that. Now, I was more convinced than ever. I was going to report the war from the side of the people who fight it, not from that of the officers on both sides who release grossly distorted battle reports to please their superiors and win promotion.

  The contradictions within the CPB were driven home to me again later that day as we rested on a ridge overlooking a wide valley. In the distance below, we could see the tiny rooftops of the town of Mong Yang and the nearby Burmese Army garrison. The government controls the town and the connecting road to Kengtung—while the CPB’s area stretches over the surrounding hills as well as half the valley. Only some ten kilometres east of Mong Yang we could see an almost equally large number of rooftops at Hsaleü, which serves as a transfer point for contraband from China as well as family quarters for the local CPB unit, the 768 Brigade.

  While I was sitting on a rock, watching the partitioned valley below and reflecting on the bizarre realities of the civil war in Burma, an obviously nervous young soldier made an urgent remark that spoke volumes for the real motivation of the foot soldiers in the Communists’ war:

  “Don’t sit here too long! The Burmans can see us and will open fire!”

  I turned to Aye Tan, who had overheard the warning:

  “How do you feel when your soldiers talk like that? You’re Burman, too, aren’t you?”

  He shrugged and stared at me through his thick glasses.

  “That’s just the way they think. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

  In any case, the soldier had a point. We rose and the sorely depleted platoon trudged on into the hills east of the Mong Yang-Hsaleü valley. Half an hour later, I spotted a fortress-like building on a hilltop. It was made from mud bricks and commanded a sweeping view of the valley below. On the high watchtowers at the four corners of the walled fort I could make out armed sentries.

  Further down the trail a reception party awaited us. The soldiers spoke Shan and were well-armed; some even carried spare magazines—an unusual sight in the CPB’s area. I was also surprised to notice that their average age seemed to be more than twenty, considerably older than the boy soldiers in most other CPB units I had so far encountered.

  Aye Tan and their officer had great difficulty in communicating with each other. I understood even less of the conversation which was carried out in a mixture of Aye Tan’s heavily Burmese-accented Shan and the officer’s broken Burmese. But I did gather that Aye Tan was asking the whereabouts of Sao Khun Myint, Sai Noom Pan and Sao Khun Sa, the three leaders of the 768 Brigade.

  These were names I knew: Shan rebel leaders from the Kengtung hills who had fielded their own resistance force, the Shan National Army (SNA), until the arrival of the CPB in the mid 1970s. Enticed by promises of arms and ammunition, they had turned their armed band into a CPB brigade in August 1976—whence its designation ‘768’.

  The commanders, it transpired, were now at Nam Leüp, the brigade’s rear headquarters in the hills between Hsaleü and the Chinese border. Having secured directions from the Shan officer, we moved on, following a fairly good CPB-built road which took us through small tribal villages of Palaungs and Akhas. The settlements consisted of a few dozen bamboo and straw-thatched huts each. But the Palaung villages were all Buddhist and had striking monasteries with large stupas, whitewashed walls and slate-tiled roofs.

  Monks in saffron and crimson robes paused to stare at us as we walked past, the focus of their curiosity clearly the tall Caucasian. This was remote territory which no government of independent Burma had ever fully controlled. Taken over by the Kuomintang after their retreat from Yunnan in 1950, these hills had served as bases for their cross-border raids into China well into the 1960s.

  Although he has never acknowledged it, U Nu, Burma’s prime minister until the 1962 coup, is alleged to have made a deal with Beijing permitting regular Chinese army units to cross into Burma in order to drive the Kuomintang out. Thousands of Chinese troops launched what was designated the Mekong River Operation and in 1961 succeeded in dislodging the Kuomintang from a number of its strongholds along the border.

  But it was not until the CPB took over the area in the mid-1970s that the Kuomintang was finally broken and the remnants straggled south to Thailand. As we marched over the forested border mountains, a local officer of the 768 Brigade pointed out several hilltops where the Kuomintang had once had bases.

  It was afternoon by the time we reached the Nam Leüp camp. A long row of mud-brick houses lined the road that led down to a river with the same name as the rebel base. A big gate flanked by sentry boxes guarded the entrance to the camp. Above the gate fluttered both a red CPB flag adorned with hammer and sickle and a nationalist Shan flag—a green, red and yellow tricolour with a white moon in the centre.

  I was led to Sao Khun Myint’s house, a two-storey, white-washed mud-brick building fronted by a long veranda with green-painted wooden railings. The leader himself was standing at the foot of the steps waiting for us: a tall, lean man in his late fifties, dressed in a grey suit and a smart hat with a narrow brim. Beside him stood a shorter, slightly younger, sturdier soldier in a CPB cap and a camouflage jacket. He extended his hand and addressed me in perfect English:

  “Bertil! I’m so glad to meet you. I’m Sai Noom Pan and this is my boss, Sao Khun Myint. I’m sorry Sao Khun Sa isn’t here today. He’s on duty elsewhere.”

  Sao Khun Myint, who spoke no English, smiled warmly. The men of the 768 Brigade apparently knew of my marriage to Hseng Noung and, as they soon made clear, regarded me as an honorary Shan.

  We climbed the steps up to the veranda and sat down at a wooden table. Inside the house, I noticed an altar with a Buddha image and fresh flowers on the wall. Below, on a bookshelf, was a communist icon: a white plaster bust of Mao Zedong. The house was full of people, obviously Khun Myint’s relatives: girls pounding chillies in mortars, older women busy making clothes on Chinese sewing machines; and young boys polishing their hunting rifles. This was the type of Shan family scene with which I was so familiar.

  But there was also another element which added to the traditional Shan rebel flavour of Khun Myint’s small clan headquarters: on the veranda were half a dozen rusty old Browning light machine-guns.

  “Can you still use these?” I asked Sai Noom Pan.

  “No. We can’t get that calibre ammunition anymore,” he grinned. “These are old guns from the days we had connections with Laos.”

  Khun Myint was a man cast in the traditional mould of the Shan warlord. Born in a small Shan village near the Chinese border, and educated in a monastery, he had rallied to the Shan rebellion as it gained momentum in the early 1960s. In those days, the leader of the Kengtung rebels had been U Gondara, better known as Sao Ngar Kham, an ex-monk who rose to become an ambitious but ruthless commander. He had the charisma of a Rasputin and met a similar end. Having taken to having followers summarily executed on the flimsiest of suspicions, he was himself eventually cut down by an assassin’s bullet.

  Before he was killed, Sao Ngar Kham had established a base at Huai Nam Khun in northern Thailand, to which the SNA sent down mule convoys of opium for the Kuomintang drug barons ensconced along the Thai-Burmese border. It was through this connection that many SNA insurgents were recruited by the CIA as mercenaries t
o fight the communists in Laos.

  Thus, the opium convoys also found their way across the Mekong, into that country, where the biggest and most influential dealer in narcotics was commander-in-chief of the Royal Laotian Army, Gen Ouane Rattikone. Not unnaturally, he was not short of arms and ammunition—including US-supplied Browning machine-guns—to barter for the opium from Kengtung.

  After Sao Ngan Kham’s assassination, Khun Myint remained for some time in Thailand, without ever becoming involved in the Lao sideshow. By contrast, Sai Noom Pan spent two years in Laos, fighting with the CIA-run secret army. But when in 1968 his stint as a mercenary on the other side of the Mekong was over, he returned to join his SNA comrades in the Kengtung hills. Sai Noom Pan startled me by revealing that, unlike the vast majority of his Shan compatriots who are Buddhists, he was a practising Roman Catholic.

  I was sorry not to be able to meet his deputy, Sao Khun Sa. There are, actually, two “Khun Sas” in Shan State. One is the notorious Shan-Chinese opium warlord, otherwise known as Chang Chifu, offspring of a Shan father and Chinese mother who today commands a private army of several thousand based along the Thai border.

  The other Khun Sa—of the CPB’s 768 Brigade—is also half-Shan, with the difference that his father is Welsh. Like his namesake, this Khun Sa also has another, if somewhat more improbable name: Michael Davies. His father, Arthur Davies, once worked for the British administration in Kengtung, married a Shan woman and stayed on after independence. But like most expatriates, Davies was forced to leave after the 1962 coup, the beginning of Burma’s retreat down a path of xenophobic socialism.