Under the Dragon

by Rory Maclean

  Phahte was a thug. Like the Rangoon generals, he bullied to mould behaviour and to dominate. But it was not brutality alone that had given him power. Vulgarity had not provided his arms or his eleven vehicles. At one checkpoint, a palm-thatch hut atop a barren hill as bare as a monk’s head, Phahte peeled off banknotes for the ragged Tatmadaw guards. The gun boy handed over the Kalashnikov and a dozen rounds of ammunition. The soldiers dipped and bowed with obsequious, fearful loyalty. The shuck-shuck of hoes and shovels tumbled down the slope behind them. One square metre of teak sold for $200 in Burma; less if it was cut illegally. Over the border in China or Thailand it fetched $600. A complete, mature tree could be worth over $30,000 on the open market. In place of the ancient forests eucalyptus was planted, for firewood and oil, but the fast-growing trees drained the soil, and in a handful of years the land became exhausted.

  As wealthy as the teak trade could have made Phahte, it alone could not have bought the friendship of both the SLORC and ethnic rebel groups like the PSLA. There had to be another reason for his influence.

  Two-thirds of the world’s heroin comes from the Shan State. The poppy fields are the only insurance against starvation for many families. Armed convoys of up to seven hundred mules carry the opium crop across the Golden Triangle to Thailand, unmolested by the Tatmadaw or the insurgent armies. Over the last decade, $80 million of US aid has failed to capture or stop a single convoy. Why?

  Since the end of the Second World War, ethnic liberation factions had waged war against Rangoon. As late as 1992 as many as thirty-five rebel groups were fighting the Burmese army, as well as one another. Their battle for independence needed to be financed, and to buy arms the Shan armies – like those of the Wa, Pa-O and Kokang – levied a 10 per cent tax on their farmers. In most cases the only crop farmed in the northern hills was opium, and so, from the start, the pursuit of autonomy was dependent on drug trafficking. It was only after the opening of trade with China that the Tatmadaw, equipped with new, imported weapons, gained the upper hand. Military truces, though not political settlements, were negotiated, and in most parts of the country hostilities ceased. But despite the truces, and the surrender of the Shan drugs baron Khun Sa, the trade in opium blossomed. This was because the Burmese army had no wish to eliminate it. The Tatmadaw chose instead to cooperate with its former adversaries and to share in the spectacular profits. It is difficult to appreciate that the flow of heroin onto the streets of New York, Los Angeles and London could be stopped on the orders of Rangoon’s generals.

  Not that anyone could prove it. We passed no teak-laden lorries, saw no fields of Yunnan poppies. We spotted no farmers scoring the bobbing heads, collecting white sap, refining it into opium and loading sacks onto mule trains. Nevertheless, fortunes were being made in this impoverished wilderness. Phahte was not without money. To me he appeared to be an opportunist, a warlord, an insurgent fighter without any insurgents left to fight.

  * * *

  It was late afternoon by the time we reached Phahte’s fiefdom, the old Palaung capital of Namhsan. The road snaked along the spine of the hills, 5,532 feet above sea level, as if along the back of a sleeping serpent. Tea plantations fell away down their steep flanks. Twisting donkey paths wound towards the surrounding ring of hill villages. Our convoy rocked into the single-street town of dark teak buildings. On broad verandahs and in small yards the day’s gathering of tea leaves spread on woven mats caught the last rays of the setting sun. Our arrival flushed a handful of children out of the unlit interiors of the unpainted houses. Well-wishers waved from behind the ornately carved doors and beneath the overhanging eaves. The attentions of the town’s few inhabitants distracted Phahte; there were courtiers and self-important messages awaiting him, and he grew bored with our company. When the convoy paused by the town water-pump he indicated that we should get out. ‘We go back tomorrow,’ he announced. ‘Car here 8 a.m.’

  ‘But we have to find the basket, Phahte,’ I said. Our backs were blue with bruises. Our limbs ached. We hadn’t travelled all this way only to turn around and go back home.

  ‘I buy you basket. No worry.’ The driver snapped the Willys into gear. ‘Sharp 8 a.m,’ repeated Phahte, and was suddenly gone, leaving us with the knowledge that he represented our only way back to Hsipaw.

  We stood alone on the cobbled hilltop street, caked in dry, tawny dust, racked from the torturous journey. Two or three curious faces peered at us from over balconies. A pair of white-bloused girls blinked at us from their bamboo sleeping platform. A hobbling man stared as he drew an empty wooden-wheeled cart past us. There were no signs or posters, no written words, anywhere to be seen along the sunburnt road. We took a step forward, no longer certain of our destination. We had reached the end of our journey without having yet arrived.

  Before the war Namhsan had been a busy British tea station. The Bombay Burma Trade Corporation had operated the drying factory here. But in 1941 the town had been destroyed by the Japanese. It had been rebuilt, but we were among the first foreigners to reach the town in over thirty years.

  On a stool outside his stall an elderly Indian tailor stopped paring his toenails. His shop sign was a few remnants of patterned cloth hanging from the teak lintel above his head. ‘You are His Majesty’s subjects, I believe,’ he hazarded, the words rusty on his tongue. ‘I was educated by an English gentleman at St John’s School.’

  Katrin pulled the tattered photograph of Scott’s basket from the knapsack, our vital marker in a place without signs. The sight of it took me back to that morning in the British Museum storeroom, to the remembered smell of jasmine and caraway, to the sound of the cold London rain beating on grimy windows. We had carried the photograph halfway around the world, watched it pass through a hundred hands, let its image guide us north from Rangoon, to Pagan, Mandalay and into the Shan State. The heat and handling had cracked its emulsion and it looked almost as worn as Scott’s basket itself, but as a pointer it still served us well.

  ‘We are looking for this,’ Katrin said. ‘We were told that we might find it here in Namhsan.’

  The tailor handled the photograph with care, then spoke to a boy, who ran off up the street. ‘I know a Mrs who will be of assistance to you. Please would you be so kind as to idle here a moment until her arrival.’

  We had nowhere else to go, hardly knew where we were, so we waited. A few minutes later a stout matron came panting down the lane towards us. I had hoped that the ‘Mrs’ would be Palaung, that she would be wearing the traditional scarlet hood and ankle-length velvet coat, that her hips would be wrapped in silver bands. But instead of the blues and purples of the hills, Nancy – as she introduced herself – brought with her the colour of the tropics. Her blouse was a riot of yellow and pink flowers, her longyi was printed hibiscus-red and her cardigan dyed deep rainforest green. As she caught her breath she apologised for not meeting us sooner. ‘It was most inconsiderate of me. I am sorry.’ Her candid concern touched us. ‘Ali’s son has told me that you are looking for a basket,’ she puffed, not intending to make our search sound frivolous. The tailor nodded on our behalf, and gave her the photograph. ‘I will be pleased to help, but before, I am sorry, I must ask you first, how have you come to Namhsan?’

  ‘A man called Phahte drove us here.’

  ‘Phahte?’ She hesitated, my poor pronunciation confusing her. ‘You mean the man with the gun?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ said Katrin.

  ‘He is here?’ she asked, then turned to the tailor for confirmation. ‘But he’s not due back for another week.’

  ‘You know him then?’ asked Katrin.

  ‘I do, yes. He is my son.’

  With the photograph in her hand, Nancy – her real name was Nan Si Si – led us up between the dark houses. Her presence made us less threatening, and we began to attract cautious spectators. A rake-thin spinster walked with us, craning her neck to see the photograph. Children held our hands, glancing to one another for reassurance as we walked. Ali the tailor follo
wed on behind, still carrying his scissors. But we paid little attention to our companions. We were too startled by Nancy’s revelation. A parent and child could not appear more different.

  ‘You are certain that this basket is Palaung?’ she asked.

  ‘Our friends in Lashio and Hsipaw said that it is.’

  ‘Maybe it is an antique from the British time?’ I explained about the British Museum. ‘Then it is possible. A lot of our old customs have been forgotten.’

  ‘You are Palaung?’ asked Katrin, looking at her gaudy outfit.

  Nancy nodded, hearing the surprise in Katrin’s voice. ‘I’m sorry, but no one wears the folk costumes any more, except maybe on market day. A longyi is more practical than those old coats and caps. Listen to me, I’m talking too much already. I always talk too much.’

  ‘But your son – Phahte – told us that he was Karen.’

  ‘My husband was Karen. He fought against the Japanese during the war.’

  ‘And Phahte takes after him?’

  ‘Except that my son fights against everyone.’

  Behind a pair of folding teak doors, in a sort of wardrobe that opened back from the street, we found the basket shop. Our arrival, which filled the wardrobe with a large proportion of the town’s residents, startled its dozing owner awake. Nancy passed him the photograph while we inspected the fine pock chard working baskets, palm-leaf whisks and unworked rolls of inner-palm bark. There was nothing in the shop which resembled Scott’s basket. The owner yawned, and Nancy translated.

  ‘He says that your basket is made from sooted bamboo. It is peeled into strips, soaked for two weeks then sooted in the chimney. He calls it tin-ma, which means very hard.’

  ‘We were told that all Palaung women have these baskets,’ sighed Katrin, wearied by the search.

  Again Nancy translated. ‘He says they might have been made like this when he was small. But today we don’t see them. Maybe your friends have not been to Namhsan in a long time?’

  ‘Maybe they just didn’t want to say no to us,’ I suggested, knowing that Burmese kindness meant not wishing to disappoint expectations.

  ‘That is possible,’ acknowledged Nancy. The owner considered the photograph again and, through Nancy, informed us that sooted bamboo was insect-proof.

  ‘That is useful to know,’ said Katrin.

  ‘He tells me too that the old styles take so long to make. There just isn’t enough time these days.’ I couldn’t imagine anywhere less pressured by the rush of time than his wardrobe shop.

  ‘Are there any older basket-makers in Namhsan?’

  Nancy and the owner discussed the possibilities, becoming excited in the process. ‘There is one elderly man who we think still knows this work. He might even be able to make you a copy.’

  ‘That would be great,’ I said.

  ‘His house is a half hour’s walk away. Can we go tomorrow?’

  ‘I wish we could, but Phahte wants to go back to Hsipaw in the morning.’

  It seemed that no one could disagree with Phahte, not even his mother, so Nancy suggested that we should hurry. Like the Pied Piper, she led us and our followers up towards the town’s Patamya Pagoda. The day had begun to dissolve into the rosy embrace of evening. Cooking fires burnt inside dim rooms and candles flickered beside household shrines. Through the gaps between the houses, over the corrugated roofs, we watched the encircling lines of hills fall into deep shadow beneath a ruby sky.

  ‘Are you Christian too?’ I asked Nancy as we climbed.

  ‘No, I am a Buddhist, though not very devout,’ she smiled. ‘I am too much of a free thinker, I’m afraid. Or at least, I try to be.’ The lane curved beneath the edge of the pagoda. Novice monks played football in the dusk and a pig rootled in its sty. ‘It is not much further,’ Nancy puffed. We skirted the edge of a large, open square, when the snap of whiplash laughter halted us.

  ‘My friend, you are welcome,’ shouted Phahte, both happy and drunk again. There was a can of Foster’s in his hand. ‘You will eat with me.’

  We hesitated as he wheeled towards us, pausing to accept the gift of a bottle of Thai Mekong whisky. I calculated that if we carried on walking, if we hurried, he might remain distracted long enough to forget us again. We were within minutes of meeting the old basket-maker and maybe completing the search. But unlike our other escorts, who vanished into darkened doorways and lanes, Nancy would not walk away. The moment passed. Phahte turned left then right, saw us again and stumbled forward. ‘You will eat with me,’ he repeated.

  ‘Thank you, Phahte, but this woman’ – I gestured to Nancy – ‘is helping us to find a basket-maker.’

  ‘Come,’ he insisted, indicating that we should climb the outside staircase to his office, where the meal awaited. ‘Basket later. Never mind.’ He said nothing to his mother.

  ‘We don’t have time,’ said Katrin, ‘if you want us to leave with you tomorrow morning.’

  Nancy began to speak softly, kindly, in Palaung to her son. At first he didn’t seem to hear. But then he spat a sting of words at her, and although we didn’t understand them, we were struck by their venom.

  ‘I am Chief,’ he told us, emphasising the point by flourishing his beer can. He wielded power with a cocksure, medieval brutality. ‘You will have dinner with me.’

  We followed his wiry form up the steps, opportunity slipping through our fingers. The long, sullen room was divided into sections by hip-height partitions. There were military maps and naked Pirelli pin-ups on the wall, crates of lager and a sweaty tousle of mats on the floor. The drivers and the gun boy stood silhouetted against the window. In the dark Nancy whispered to me, ‘We’re like that, Phahte and me. We always have to bite a little.’

  ‘This is my haw,’ Phahte announced. Haw is the Palaung word for a palace. ‘It is your home. You are welcome here.’ As he led us past his armoury, which included a well-worn grenade launcher and a dozen cherished AK-47s, Nancy told us that once insurgents had blown up the building, but Phahte had survived and earned the love of the people.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said, defiant, confident.

  I again mentioned the basket, and Phahte, taking the photograph from his mother, instructed one of his drivers to find the town’s Education Officer.

  ‘But I want to see the basket-maker’s workshop,’ said Katrin.

  ‘You my friends,’ insisted Phahte. ‘You stay in palace. Education Officer come. Don’t worry.’ But we never met the Officer, or saw the photograph again. ‘Now you eat with me.’

  The gun boy called down the stairs and a cook appeared, bearing a burnished aluminium cauldron. It steamed and spat as he set it on the table. Phahte ordered us to sit down, and we took our places. He pulled open his khaki shirt and raised the lid of the hotpot. A thick, soupy ring of meatballs and bobbing islands of fat stewed around a cooking coal core. Phahte wielded his chopsticks to stir in green chilli and keng-khe leaves, then dished out four generous servings. The skull of a small bird floated in my bowl. He spooned rice onto our side plates and poured us great glass goblets of beer, attending to our needs like a solicitous Home Counties hostess dispensing tea for a visiting vicar. His baby finger stuck out in a manner which would have pleased the most pedantic stickler for etiquette.

  ‘Good?’ he asked, irritated that we had not volunteered our praise. The dish was, in fact, delicious, though we had little appetite. I could only think of the basket-maker sitting down to his own meal a few minutes’ walk away. ‘Do you like Burma?’ Phahte asked Katrin suddenly.

  ‘I like the Burmese people,’ she replied.

  ‘We are a welcoming people,’ he declared, overlooking for a moment the pistol holstered on his hip. ‘And Burmese papayas,’ he continued with intemperate sincerity, ‘are they not better than Thai papayas?’

  ‘They both taste pretty similar,’ said Katrin.

  ‘In Thailand they use chemicals, but not in Burma.’

  ‘Maybe the farmers can’t afford chemicals here.’

  �
��No chemicals is good.’

  ‘Yes, it is good.’

  ‘So they are better,’ Phahte concluded with childish simplicity, translating for the cook, driver and gun boy. ‘She prefers Burmese papayas,’ he crowed, then raised his glass towards us. ‘My friends!’ The others applauded.

  For the next hour Phahte talked, and we listened. Conversation was not a social skill that he had developed. Our occasional questions failed to engage him, and it became apparent that he had not brought us to Namhsan out of kindness, but rather as means of elevating his own status. In Rangoon we had been told that the Burmese considered tourists to be ‘like the stars in the night sky’. Phahte also hoped a little of that light would shine on him, so his subjects might see him as reflecting the promise of liberty. To serve this end, our obedient, obsequious presence alone was required. He would have preferred it if we did not talk at all. We were stuffed mascots of hope, and he ignored us for the most part.

  ‘Phahte,’ I managed to interrupt when he paused in his praise of Burmese tomatoes, ‘isn’t it possible for us to delay our return to Hsipaw? Just for a few hours.’

  ‘Maybe you go back by “cha-la-la-la”?’ he roared, imagining us rattling south on a sixteen-horsepower motorised wheelbarrow. Even at full throttle it would take a week to cover the distance.

  ‘Is there no other way back?’

  ‘Or maybe by feet?’ he suggested, finishing his glass. He pushed his heart-shaped face towards us. ‘But then you get shot dead.’

  ‘You have come to a country that is very isolated,’ explained Nancy.

  ‘There are bad men living here. It is better that you go together tomorrow.’ It would also be an insult to Phahte if we travelled by any other manner.