Land of Jade

by Bertil Lintner

  After the reception at Khun Myint’s house, I was shown to a nearby mud-brick building where I was lodged during my stay at Nam Leüp. I broke the journey there for three days and in the evenings, Sai Noom Pan and I usually sat on the veranda sipping Shan rice liquor and talking of the old days. I could not but be struck by how little the politics of these local resistance leaders had changed over the years, despite the twists and turns of circumstances and the unlikely alliances into which events had forced them.

  For the SNA the mid-1970s had evidently been a testing period. On the one hand, the Indochina war was winding down; on the other, the CPB was closing in around their old strongholds in the mountains north of Kengtung. With the old CIA connection now severed, merger with the communists became, in effect, the only alternative to surrender.

  “I was a student in Rangoon before the coup in 1962,” he said Sai Noom Pan gazing out over the moonlit mountain ranges across the narrow Nam Leüp valley. “In those days, I thought I was going to become a priest. There were many Italian Fathers in Kengtung and they planned to send me to a seminary in Venice.” He paused, seemingly lost in memories.

  “So what happened? Why didn’t you go?”

  “Ne Win’s coup. The students who were massacred at Rangoon University on July 7, 1962. I was there, you see, and I was also wounded when the army fired into the crowds of students. I thought I had to fight for my people.”

  I wondered what a man like him might have become had there had been no military rule or civil war in Burma. He was intelligent and talented with an interest in poetry and astronomy and presented me with a list of books he wondered if I could obtain for him in Bangkok. Under different circumstances, Sai Noom Pan could have been a Catholic priest, a university lecturer or a government official.

  It was still dark the following morning when Sai Noom Pan woke me with a gentle tap on my shoulder.

  “It’s time to leave if you want to reach Mong La before sunset.”

  To avoid delays, our belongings had been stowed in the saddle-packs the previous night. But it was only with the dawn that I noticed the bow-legged Man Called Horse had already departed on his return journey to Panghsang; we now had new mules, a somewhat less singular muleteer and a few more soldiers of the 768 Brigade to guide us as far as Mong La, the next big market village. Sai Noom Pan came along with me as far as the Nam Leüp stream just below the camp where the path crossed into the hill country.

  “Come again, if you can. May God bless you.”

  Despite only a short stay at Nam Leüp, I had come to feel particularly close to Sai Noom Pan. We had many Shan friends in common and his apparent sincerity—a virtue for the most rare in CPB ranks—had impressed me deeply. It was with a pang of sorrow that I watched him turn back towards the camp, and then turned myself to face the steep slope across the Nam Leüp stream and the day’s march.

  The heat of the day was upon us as soon as the sun had risen from the eastern horizon over China. But before the sun reached its zenith we reached Wan Kang, a large Palaung village. Dominating the settlement and commanding a wide view of the surrounding poppy fields was a fortress-like Buddhist monastery.

  In the confusion of dwellings below, villagers in rags squatted outside the mean hovels that were their homes, and eyed us incuriously. Wood-smoke drifted up through bamboo roofs, while, from the poppy-fields being burned off in readiness for the planting of corn, thicker pillars of smoke hung in the sky, smudging the sun behind a dirty grey haze.

  Beyond the village the rapids in the torrent of the Nam Lam floated up from the deep gorge the river had carved out. On the further side was China—again, an endless vista of terraced rubber plantations.

  It was March 28, actually the 39th anniversary of the CPB’s uprising. But I doubted whether the local villagers were even aware of it, much less cared. Kommyunit was an authority as alien as Kuomintang before them; to say nothing of the government Lanzin, or Ma Sa La, party. For the poverty-wracked hill-farmers of these far-flung marches, the government was nothing more than the occasional rumble of artillery from Mong Yang beyond the mountains.

  Increasingly clear to me was that any outside power wishing to control these mountains was bound to act through the traditional rulers of the land. If that power were a self-seeking one it would attempt to manipulate them as puppets. Should it be more liberally inclined—and politically astute—it would grant them a measure of local autonomy. Both the Kuomintang and the CPB have ruled in the first way; to date, no one has tried the second possibility.

  And, regrettably, the Rangoon regime remains an improbable candidate. The present Burmese government is forever hobbled by the fatally flawed certitude that it stands as the sole representative of the country’s multitude of ethnic groups; and, by extension, the only legitimate political force. To this extent, it can never hope to win the struggle for the loyalty of these people.

  We passed a small group of soldiers on the way down to the Nam Lam River. They were all CPB men. But I could not help but smile when I noticed that, instead of a red star in his cap, one of the soldiers wore a shining, red badge of the Holy Madonna. The proselytising of the Italian Fathers was evidently still bearing fruit.

  The plain around Mong La came into sight in the early afternoon. We halted at small cluster of mud houses which Aye Tan announced was a CPB village tract office. It was staffed by cripples in their early thirties who hobbled around with the help of crutches. One, both his legs missing, was confined to a chair. The walls were decorated with tattered Chinese character posters bearing propaganda slogans and faded prints of revolutionary scenes that might have adorned European left-wing bookshops at the time of the student uprising in Paris in 1968.

  The ablest of the war-wounded served us tea and even managed to produce a juicy pineapple from the office’s garden. Administrative activity of any description was conspicuously lacking and I had the impression that the office served more as a retirement home for disabled veterans than as any hub of communist rural mobilisation. We drank our tea in silence.

  I was wearing a towel around my neck with which I frequently wiped sweat off my forehead. On approaching Mong La, I wrapped it around my mouth and nose.

  “There’ll be lots of traders there, both from China and Kengtung,” Aye Tan had warned me well in advance. The market village lay on the Burmese side of a major black market route which linked Chiang Mai in northern Thailand with Kengtung in Shan State and Jinghong in Sipsongpanna across the border in China. We hurried through the village, bypassing the busy market place, and continued over an open field to a Buddhist monastery. A room in a nearby house had been prepared for my arrival. It was neat and clean with curtains in the windows and a large bed with quilts and a mosquito net.

  The owner of the house turned out to be a Shan from Mong Kut. Due to its rich deposits of rubies, the principality had been separated from the Shan States by the British in the last century and attached to Mandalay Division. Subsequently, “Mong Kut” had been Burmanised to “Mogok”, a name my host pointedly refused to use unless speaking in Burmese to Aye Tan.

  The man was short and totally bald, though whether as a result of natural hair-loss or shaving I could not make out. No sooner had I emerged from my room after washing my feet, than he engaged me in animated conversation:

  “Fantastic to have you here! I’ve heard your wife is Shan. I’m Shan, too. You can call me uncle. I’m so sorry we don’t have enough to offer you in this remote place.”

  The table in front of us was laden with foodstuffs of mostly Thai origin: packets of Mama instant noodles, tinned fish and bags of sweets. His plump wife served us Nescafe in china cups and added a large plate of cream wafers and chocolate biscuits to the array on the table.

  “I’m a party veteran, you see. I fought in the Mong Kut area for many years. That was one of our old strongholds, before we got our base area here. Now I’m in charge of the local administration in Mong La. The Shans are not like the Shans you and I know. They are Khün or
Lüe and quite backwards. Their women even bathe naked in the streams.”

  He laughed uproariously, exposing a set of gold teeth. I made a few conventional remarks about the hospitality of the local people and their obvious sincerity. He continued with his own cheerful diatribe as if I had not spoken:

  “They’re a dirty lot, too. Almost like hill tribes. But much development has taken place since our party liberated the area. Now many people have their own bicycles and sewing machines. It’s quite different from before.”

  Wholly lost on him was the irony of the situation: the relative prosperity of the Mong La valley was a spin-off from the expanding black market trade between China, Burma and Thailand. That, in turn, was the result of the bankruptcy of the Rangoon government “socialist” economic polices, the communist occupation of the border areas, and the modernisation drive in China. Thus three systems all styling themselves socialist or communist were all, to greater or lesser degree, reliant on capitalist entrepreneurialism for their continued existence.

  Our meal that night was served in the garden outside the Mong Kut Shan’s house. One dish after another was placed in front of us, along with a bottle of Chinese brandy, shaped like a bowling skittle. From over the nearby monastery wall drifted the monotonous chanting of monks and the throb of gongs, adding a strain of Buddhist piety to an already bizarre admixture of crumbling Maoist orthodoxy upheld by burgeoning capitalist enterprise.

  My host’s hospitality extended also to the road ahead. When, several days later, we left Mong La an extra mule had been attached to our column—loaded with Chinese brandy, biscuits, sweets and a crate of beer from Canton. We forded the cold Mong La stream before sunrise. Through the stillness of the dawn, floated downstream the creak of a wooden waterwheel revolving slowly as it had done for centuries, feeding water to the irrigation ditches.

  The valley soon gave way to the hill country and we were back among a typical patchwork of tribal villages. The Palaung settlements were invariably poor and dirty, but lent a certain dignity by the presence of a large, solidly built Buddhist monastery. By contrast, the approaches to the Akha villages were lined with crudely carved wooden figures that advertised spirit worship at its most primitive.

  There were female images with rough, enlarged vaginas and males with enormous penises, thrust out erect to greet the visitor to the village. One might have assumed these to be votaries to the power of fertility. In fact, the images’ real purpose was to demonstrate to the spirits of the forest that the settlement was human and that they should not enter.

  In any event, they certainly reflected the earthiness of the Akha world-view and I could not help but smile at the spectacle of twelve year old girls with baskets of firewood on their backs trudging past these explicit village totems without batting an eyelid.

  The Akha women, though, stood out amongst the other tribals with their colourful costumes and elaborate headwear decorated with rows of dangling silver coins—old Indian silver rupees bearing the portrait of the British King. The Palaung women generally wore nothing more than a torn longyi, their bare breasts sagging wrinkled from the nursing of many children. The younger ones carried their toddlers on their hips or in cloth-slings across their shoulders.

  As elsewhere in the communist area, there was a striking absence of young men in the villages and it seemed that the spirit-worshipping Akhas were the worst affected by the CPB draft. The Buddhist Palaungs could always ordain a fair number of their sons with the knowledge that not even the atheistic CPB would dare to defrock and recruit them. The comparatively lax monastic discipline among the Palaung Buddhists probably saved many families from total poverty. We frequently passed monks and novices carrying bags of rice, working in the fields and sitting giggling on temple walls, flirting with young village girls.

  There were almost no CPB camps in the area, which was called Hsamtao and had been in communist hands since 1973. It was hard to say whether the CPB actually maintained a string of defence posts along the unofficial border between its base area and the government-controlled territory, as Aye Tan claimed, or if Rangoon was really that concerned about the loss of these poor hills. The answer was probably a combination of both. But clear was that the government, already on the verge of bankruptcy, would hardly risk casualties to conquer an area which would only be a financial burden.

  Two days after leaving Mong La, we descended into a valley once more. But to my surprise there were no paddy fields; the locals were Khün Shans and made a living from fishing in the river and selling the catch to Mong La and even across the border to China. Daily necessities were brought back to the small settlement in the narrow valley on horseback.

  A village, called Suploi, was situated at the confluence of the Nam Loi and the Nam Lam. Steep, jungle-clad mountains rose on either side of the two rivers, giving the valley an air of well-sheltered serenity. Women, both young and old, bathed naked in the river and the arrival of a platoon of CPB troops seemed to cause no stir. In the village itself, the women kept on pounding their rice while their men folk worked at splitting bamboo with knives. A clear indication of the relative prosperity of the village was that it too boasted a fair sprinkling of Liverpool 33 T-shirts.

  Government soldiers had not shown their faces in Suploi for more than a decade so there was no need to post sentries at night even though we were on the southern fringes of the CPB’s base area. Aye Tan and I shared some canned Chinese beer that night and tried to offer some to our hosts, a Shan family in the village. But they were only interested in the empty cans and preferred to drink their own rice liquor from shallow china bowls. Discarded cans and bottles were always valued gifts in remote villages. The bottles were useful in themselves and the cans could be turned into dustpans, vases and even kerosene lamps.

  We set off before sunrise. Dugout canoes took us to the northern bank of the Nam Loi and we followed a wide path carved out of the hillside above the river. Unexpectedly for the time of the year, there had been heavy rain and thunder all night, leaving the track wet and slippery. Even finding dry wood for our fires when we halted for breakfast was a problem.

  It was April 1, and we were approaching the peak of the hot season. The path dried up after a few hours of sunshine and was getting even hotter as we marched downriver. By noon, we reached a plain, the Mong Wa valley. Had I not been so dirty and dripping with sweat, it would have been like walking into a paradise. The jungle opened up and the river gorge broadened out into a wide, green country. It was a large Shan mong dotted with small, pleasant villages, each one huddled around a Buddhist monastery and surrounded by wide irrigated paddy fields and bamboo groves.

  The wooden houses had neat cactus hedges around them and coconut trees lined the wide track we followed through the valley. Red and white bougainvillea trees were in flower everywhere and swarms of butterflies flittered in the air. Young couples on bicycles rode slowly past us, giggling in the sunshine. I have always been surprised that people want to live in inhospitable mountains when life can be so pleasant in a fertile valley.

  We were headed for Keng Khan, the biggest village in the Mong Wa valley and we reached it after two hours’ easy walk. But this relaxed feeling was instantly erased by the confused reception that awaited us in Keng Khan. Although dressed in CPB uniforms, the local administrators seemed intimidated by the arrival of both Aye Tan, a Burman officer from Panghsang, and by me, the extremely unusual guest.

  Awkward courtesies were exchanged at length on the wooden veranda of one of the houses. But our hosts left soon afterwards to make arrangements for our onward journey up to the local party headquarters at Man Hpai, close to the Chinese border. Or so they said.

  The soldiers, who had reached their final destination, dropped out in groups of twos and threes without any order for dispersal having been given. Soon, only Aye Tan and I were left on the veranda. The local officials had simply vanished without a trace. Before long, I began to run out of patience:

  “Let’s go! It’s a nice place but
it’s full of merchants from both China and the government-held towns! At least a dozen of them have seen me already.”

  “We’d better stay here tonight,” Aye Tan said in his usual terse way.

  “No, we’d better not. Anywhere but here. Not with all these outsiders around.”

  “No outsiders come here.”

  “What? Just have a look around! Do you think these people come from Keng Khan or Suploi?” I pointed at a group of smartly dressed traders who were resting by the roadside, leaning on piles of sacks with Chinese characters and Thai lettering.

  I struggled hard to contain my annoyance. It was maybe because I would soon be out of CPB territory that I finally lost control of my temper:

  “You CPB people think you can lead and guide the other rebel groups in Burma and you can’t even get your own act together! This complete lack of discipline would have been unthinkable in the KIA.”

  “We can’t proceed without a guide. I don’t even know the way to Man Hpai.” Aye Tan snapped back, angered with my cutting comments.

  “Let’s get one then. If you can round up thousands of young boys and send them to die in the battlefield, why can’t you get a guide to Man Hpai?”

  Aye Tan stood up, fuming with anger at my insults. He left without a word. I stayed behind on the veranda, lit a cheroot and blew the smoke in front of me in a feeble attempt to hide from the view of the crowd that had gathered in front of the house to gape at the stranger who had just arrived. Aye Tan came back after half an hour. The muleteer was still there and my bags on the mule’s back.