by David Eimer
Zhang Wei got me in for free. A mutual friend had arranged for us to meet. He turned up in a new Honda, shaven-headed and incongruous in his robes behind the steering wheel. ‘We need the car so we can visit all the villages,’ he said. ‘Every village has its own temple now.’ Out in rural Dailand, well away from Chinese eyes, there has been a quiet revival in Buddhism over the last thirty years. Fewer than 150 temples in Banna survived the Cultural Revolution. Now, there are close to 600, all administered from Wat Pajay.
We drove up a side road until we reached the four-storey building that houses the monks of Da Fosi. There was a small covered terrace outside, where we sat alongside a couple of novices flirting gently in Dai with two teenage girls. ‘We all speak Dai here. A lot of the young monks are from the countryside and their Chinese is not very good,’ said Zhang Wei. Small and slight, he looked no older than twenty himself, fingering his iPhone like any fidgety teenager enduring an unwelcome chat with a boring adult.
With his latest-model phone, a computer in his room, a car to get him around and, as I learned from subsequent meetings, a taste for coffee and western food, Zhang Wei was considerably more sophisticated than the monks I met in Tibet. But like most of his Tibetan and Dai contemporaries, he was a country boy. The son of farmers from Damenlong, a village on the border with Myanmar, Zhang Wei had joined his local temple aged nine before graduating to Wat Pajay at sixteen.
Now he was twenty-five and a veteran monk. He was more assertive than he appeared to be at first and didn’t pull his punches as he described the dispute between the monks and the company who built and run Da Fosi. ‘We don’t like them and we’re always arguing with them. But they don’t listen to us and they are very close to the local government,’ he explained. ‘We’d all rather be at Wat Pajay instead. We’re trying to expand it so we can move back.’ Banna’s Buddhist resurgence has left Wat Pajay unable to accommodate the growing number of monks, and Zhang Wei was bitter at the way he and others had been duped into moving to Da Fosi.
‘Originally, the company told us they were going to build a new temple and would we like to come and live there. Wat Pajay was already too small for us so we said yes. Then we moved in and they started to charge 120 yuan [£12] for tourists to come here and it became clear it was just about making money for them. We don’t agree with such a high price, or all the stalls that cheat people by over-charging. That’s not the Buddhist way.’
The move to Da Fosi provoked a schism in Jinghong’s monastic community. Around twenty-five of the oldest and most senior monks flatly refused to leave Wat Pajay and still live there, including the Abbot. Zhang Wei showed me the house built for him at Da Fosi, which the Chinese call the ‘Grandmaster Residence’ as if he was a chess superstar. It has never been occupied. But around 100 monks are resident at Da Fosi, including the novices whom Zhang Wei taught Dai to.
‘Many young Dai can’t read our language and don’t really understand our culture or Buddhism. A lot of Dai people can speak Dai, but they don’t teach it in normal school any more so you have to become a monk to learn how to read and write it,’ said Zhang Wei. As in Tibet, the monasteries have become the only place in Banna where locals can get an education in their native language. But unlike Tibet, and in another sign of the Dai’s success in convincing the CCP of their essential affability, novices in Banna are allowed to participate in the regular school system as well.
‘You can study Dai here in the morning and go to normal school in the afternoon,’ said Zhang Wei. He believed that was behind the recent rise in the number of monks. ‘A lot of young Dai were put off becoming monks because they thought it was a hard life and what they learned wasn’t useful in the outside world,’ he told me. ‘Now it’s not as strict a life as before. When I was a young novice, the teachers would beat you if you disobeyed them. But we’re not allowed to do that any more.’
Less welcome has been the diminishing of Banna’s role as a key centre of Buddhist learning for Dai people across South-east Asia, a result of the devastation wrought on Banna’s monasteries during the Cultural Revolution. Large numbers of monks fled across the frontiers, while villagers buried scriptures and icons in the jungle so the Red Guards couldn’t destroy them. Many of the temples have since been restored, but Wat Pajay’s status as a spiritual university has been superseded by monasteries outside Banna.
‘Before the Cultural Revolution, Thai and Burmese and Lao monks came to Wat Pajay to study. Now, we go to Thailand and other places. It’s a complete change,’ said Zhang Wei. Fluid borders mean Banna’s monks can visit monasteries in Myanmar and Laos unofficially. But the Dai’s position as a model minority makes getting permission to go abroad far easier than it is for Tibetans or Uighurs. Zhang Wei had already spent a year in Yangon, as well as three in Singapore.
Wat Pajay’s links with overseas monasteries are a crucial element of the cultural and religious networks that tie the Dai of different countries to each other. Da Fosi is an irrelevance in that scheme; its imposition on Jinghong just another instance of Dai culture being appropriated by the Han for the purposes of tourism. And, inevitably, pretty Dai women act as the guides there. But out in greater Dailand, in Banna’s villages and across the borders, the Dai are quietly getting on with worshipping their way, while keeping their language and traditions alive.
17
Down the Mekong
South of Jinghong, Banna’s hills grow steeper as they roll towards Laos and Myanmar. Although the rubber plantations are increasingly infiltrating here, much of the area is still thick jungle. A highway runs to the frontier with Laos, but otherwise just a few roads cut through the rainforest. Parts of it bear the telltale signs of the slash-and-burn agriculture practised by the hill tribes – blackened land where the trees and vegetation have been burned off so the ash will fertilise the soil. Hidden tracks known only to the locals lead across the borders.
Beijing has grandiose plans to link Banna with the rest of South-east Asia via high-speed trains which will depart Kunming, reach Jinghong in an hour and then speed on to Singapore via Vientiane, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. Other branches will reach into Myanmar, Vietnam and Cambodia. It is not a new notion; both the British and French proposed a Kunming–Singapore line as far back as 1900. Yet only Laos’s leaders, the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party – an organisation even more opaque than the CCP and less tolerant of dissent – have truly embraced the idea.
Rather than roads or railways, the Mekong remains South-east Asia’s main transport artery for now. Rising in Tibet, the Mekong runs south for 4,300 kilometres, first through Yunnan and then acting as the border between Myanmar’s Shan State and Laos, before it arrives at a junction where the frontiers of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet. From there, it changes course, veering east and then south again to flow through Laos and into Cambodia and Vietnam, where it empties into the South China Sea.
Long before there were roads in Banna, the Mekong was the means by which its peoples moved around; travelling by water was easier than hacking your way through the jungle. The Mekong was the lifeblood for the minorities. It was both a source of food and the means by which they traded with the rest of South-east Asia, exchanging cotton, tea, salt and opium for betel nut, silver and pepper. Above all, it was the Mekong which facilitated the cross-border ties that link Banna’s ethnic groups to the rest of the region.
Even now, the Mekong remains vital to trade between Yunnan and the neighbouring countries. Around 300,000 tonnes of cargo moves to and from China along the Mekong each year, and that is just the legal shipments. Utilising the river was the logical way for me to explore greater Dailand. I wanted to travel south down the Mekong to Thailand and then venture north to Kengtung in Shan State, before crossing the Mekong to Laos and returning to Banna by land.
It would be a journey through the heart of the Golden Triangle, one of the world’s most lawless zones and the last great gathering place for the minorities of South-east Asia who still resist the concept of statehood. Technically, the Golden Tr
iangle refers to the junction on the Mekong where the borders of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand converge. In reality, it spreads much further. Greater Dailand stretches deep into the Golden Triangle and it has always been a place of refuge for those who have rejected Chinese rule.
To travel the Mekong, I needed to find a ride on a cargo boat. In the past, Jinghong was the starting point for the maritime traders going south. The city is divided by the river and it took only a walk to its banks to find transport. Now the river has been dammed upstream. The Mekong’s muddy waters still run wide and slow through Jinghong, but much of the time it is far too shallow for anything more than a small craft to navigate it.
Instead, I arranged to join a boat which made regular runs from Guanlei, a town a few hours south-east of Jinghong, to Chiang Saen, a port in northern Thailand just south of where Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet. But after arriving in Guanlei at midday, blinking in the blinding sunlight, I wondered if I was in the right place because I could see no river or anything resembling a port.
A phone call prompted the arrival of one of the boat’s crew on a motorbike. We raced through Guanlei’s streets, before the road started curving downhill and the Mekong appeared below, glistening green in the sun, the palm trees on its far bank leaning out over the water like natural derricks. At the port, cargo boats were moored three deep and I was directed to the vessel that would be taking me to Thailand.
Like the boats around it, the Pao Shou Ba would never win any prizes for its graceful lines. It was essentially a long, flat-bottomed barge, most of it taken up by an open hold, of the type that still haul garbage down the Thames in London. Attached at its stern was a rickety, two-deck superstructure, which housed the engine room, bridge, galley and cabins for the crew. A large Chinese flag fluttered above the bridge. In a pleasing nod to the trans-national nature of the Mekong, the flags of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand flew either side of it.
Our cargo was sunflower seeds, 500 sacks of them, and for the next couple of hours, wiry, dark-skinned Dai men hauled the bags off a truck on their backs before tipping them into the hold. ‘We normally carry food, fuel, cement and other building supplies, tyres, construction machinery – anything made in China they need in Thailand really,’ said Cao Mei, the boat’s owner.
Cao Mei was pudgy and cheerful, a thirtysomething Han woman originally from Kunming. All the boats that ply the Mekong from Banna are Chinese owned. Their crews, though, are mostly minorities and live on board full time. The Pao Shou Ba’s captain was Yi, one of the largest of China’s ethnic groups with over eight million people spread across the south-west but originally from central Yunnan. Two friendly Dai men, their arms covered in Dai-script tattoos, assisted him, while a grumpy Hani man looked after the engines. A taciturn Han woman was responsible for cooking and washing.
I was assigned a bunk in the engineer’s disgusting cabin, which was possibly why he was so bad tempered. Or it could have been the infernal noise of the engine, which was located next door and made the whole boat vibrate. I spent most of the journey on the cramped bridge, where the skipper steered with an old-fashioned wooden wheel, or perched on the bow of the boat watching the Mekong glide by beneath me.
Later, I trooped up to passport control to get stamped out of China. The actual frontier is three hours south and unmarked, making Guanlei the last place where there is an official Chinese presence. It was the sleepiest border post I’d been to in China. Empty when I got there, I hung around until a flustered female Wu Jing officer appeared and swiftly scanned my passport.
Just before we left, a couple of Wu Jing boarded the boat but only to check we weren’t carrying anyone they didn’t know about. Even in laidback Banna, the lax security surprised me. We were going to be sailing through the Golden Triangle, infamous for once being the capital of the global heroin trade. The region still accounts for around 10 per cent of all the opium grown in the world, as well as being home to jungle labs that manufacture huge quantities of yaba, an amphetamine pill popular across Asia, and ice, an even more potent stimulant. We could have been carrying the precursor chemicals needed to make them, yet no one bothered to inspect our cargo.
My trip down the Mekong came before thirteen Chinese sailors were found murdered on two vessels sailing out of Guanlei. They had been blindfolded, handcuffed and shot in the head. According to the subsequent investigation by the Chinese, Burmese and Thai authorities, their boats had been hijacked by pirates based in Shan State and used to transport almost one million yaba pills.
Few people who know the Golden Triangle believed the official story. Infuriated by the killings, Beijing had demanded a swift response from its far less powerful neighbours. The leader of the pirates, a Shan man named Naw Kham, was subsequently caught in Laos and immediately sent north to Yunnan without anything as formal as an extradition request, despite technically being a citizen of Myanmar, to be executed in Kunming.
Naw Kham was certainly a pirate, and familiar to all who sail this stretch of the Mekong regularly. ‘I never encountered him but I know people who did,’ one Lao boat skipper subsequently told me. ‘They were an extended gang really. There were Chinese, Lao and Thai people in it too. They would come from the Shan State side of the river in fast longtail boats and pull up alongside with guns. Then they’d jump on board and raid the cargo, or demand money.’
Whether he was responsible for the murder of the Chinese sailors is less certain. Some locals regarded him as a convenient scapegoat. Others said he had become too greedy and wasn’t sharing enough of the profits from his stand-and-deliver trade and so had been given up to the Chinese as punishment. What is definite is that Naw Kham could not have operated independently of the ethnic minority armies who control much of Shan State, while overseeing the heroin and methamphetamine business in the Golden Triangle in close co-operation with their Wa and Dai cousins in Banna.
River traffic from Yunnan was temporarily halted after the murders and Guanlei’s somnolent Wu Jing garrison was reinforced. Some soldiers took to boats to patrol the Mekong beyond China’s borders, another display of Beijing’s might in a region where Chinese companies are increasingly active in their search for new economic opportunities. The militias in Shan State responded by starting to take pot shots at passing vessels. I was lucky to have travelled when I did; the days of foreigners hitching rides down the Mekong from China are gone for now.
At four in the afternoon, the boats hemming us in moved away and the skipper backed the Pao Shou Ba away from the dock. Mid-river, he spun the wheel and we swung slowly around until the bow was pointing south. A long string of firecrackers was set off, to mark the fact that this was the boat’s first voyage after Chinese New Year, and then we were pulling away from Guanlei, accelerating surprisingly quickly as we headed downriver.
Almost immediately, it became apparent how treacherous this stretch of the Mekong is. Far narrower than in Jinghong – less than twenty metres wide in places – the water eddied around partially submerged rocks, while sand banks waited to wreck the unwary. We progressed not in a straight line but by weaving in wide arcs from side to side. The water level, too, was low even here thanks to the dams upstream.
Occasional strips of white sand made sections of the river banks look like untouched beaches. Odd areas had been cleared for farming and we passed a few tiny hamlets of wooden huts. Mostly, though, there was no sign of life. The jungle started where the water stopped, rising up the hills beyond the banks, and it was impossible to see anything through the green barricade of tall, tangled trees. Only glimpses of smoke curling up above them revealed that people were living close by.
After a few hours, my phone lost its signal. ‘We’ve left China,’ the skipper said. Now we were floating stateless between countries. The Mekong here divides Laos on the left-hand bank from Myanmar on the right. Thailand was due south and Banna behind us, but out on the river we were nowhere except greater Dailand. In the time before South-east Asia’s frontiers were fixed, this stretch of water was part o
f Sipsongpanna, the old Dai kingdom which reached from Banna into the far east of Myanmar and north-west Laos, its twelve rice-growing districts divided on either side of the Mekong.
Sipsongpanna was already a thriving state by the time the Han started to show a real interest in Yunnan. In common with all Chinese versions of the history of the borderlands, which aim to prove Beijing’s incontestable right to rule the furthest-flung parts of its empire, official accounts emphasise the sheer antiquity of the Chinese presence in Yunnan. They date it back to the second century BC and the Han dynasty. But at that time the Han were confined only to the area around what is now Kunming, while the rest of the region was divided into mini-states governed by Yunnan’s different minorities.
Not until the late fourteenth century did the then ruling Ming dynasty start formally to incorporate those statelets into China. They showed scant respect for the different ethnic groups living in them, categorising the minorities as ‘wily and deceitful, barbarous, rebellious and perverse’. The Ming emperor Jiajing thought Yunnan’s peoples no better ‘than the birds and the beasts’ and ‘without human morality’. Jiajing was not exactly the humane type himself. He had all his concubines sliced to death in 1542 after they conspired to strangle him in his sleep – their reaction to his ill-treatment of them.
During this period, the Dai, far from being a model minority, were regarded as uncooked savages like the hill tribes. By resisting incorporation into the Chinese empire, they revealed their atavistic tendencies. But ultimately Banna’s remoteness ensured it could not be conquered by the Ming, who settled instead for a fragile alliance with Sipsongpanna while leaving it largely alone. Banna had similar slippery treaties with neighbouring Dai kingdoms, such as Kengtung in present-day Shan State, sometimes fighting on their side, sometimes against them.
Centuries of cutting deals with both the Chinese and rival Dai states, playing one side off against the other, perhaps explains why the Dai are still so skilled at keeping the Han at arm’s length. But the hill tribes, then as now, were less lucky. As the Chinese moved inexorably south, the Akha, Lahu, Miao, Wa and others fled ahead of them, marking the beginning of their dispersal across the Golden Triangle. In a neat irony, they were joined in the mid-seventeenth century by Han refugees, Ming loyalists who refused to accept the authority of the Qing dynasty and chose exile in what is now the Kokang region of Shan State.