The Emperor Far Away (26 page)

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 of 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.

Of all China’s dynasties, the Qing were the most fervent colonisers and in their early pomp they pushed the boundaries of China further than ever before. By the eighteenth century, Chinese merchants were trading in Pu’er tea from Simao, just north of Banna. That, though, was as far as they went. The Qing officials nominally in charge of Banna were based in Simao and ventured south just once a year. Only in 1899 was Sipsongpanna formally annexed by Beijing, although by then the French and British empires had already absorbed its southern and western fringes into Laos and what was then Burma.

Banna was granted autonomous status within the Chinese realm and its Dai king continued to rule until 1953. But if the kingdom of Sipsongpanna disappeared when he was forced to abdicate by the CCP, the Dai still remember the state they had for at least eight centuries and how far it spread. ‘There are many Dai people here,’ said Hai Yan, one of the Dai crewmen, pointing to both the left- and right-hand side of the Mekong’s banks. He was envious I was travelling to Kengtung. ‘It’s an important place for us – there are many monks there.’

We anchored for the night close to the Lao side of the river. Apart from our lights, the moon and stars provided the only illumination amid the pitch black of the jungle. Hai Yan and the rest of the crew went fishing after supper, standing up to their waists in the water, armed with nets and torches strapped to their heads. They returned with a bucket full of small fish, which they tipped on to the deck and immediately began gutting. Once they were finished, it was time for bed. There was a prolonged round of coughing and spitting and then the boat fell silent, waiting like the jungle around us for daylight to bring it to life again.

The roar of the engine starting woke me up. It was seven in the morning, cold and damp. A dense fog hung low over the boat, partially masking the trees on the banks and turning them a sinister grey-green. The captain wouldn’t move in such bad visibility, so we waited for the fog to lift over a breakfast of
miantiao
: thin noodles sprinkled with
suancai
, the pickled vegetables that accompany many Yunnan dishes, chopped spring onion and chilli.

Less than an hour later we were under way, moving slowly at first and then gathering speed as the morning sun emerged to burn off the mist. As we drew closer to Thailand, more settlements started to appear on the Lao side. Women in sarongs washed clothes by the bank, while men prepared to go fishing. Wooden, longtail speedboats flying the Laos flag zipped past to the left, scudding over the wake of our boat and travelling at up to 40 knots careless of the dangers of the river.

There was little activity on the Myanmar side. But wooden jetties jutted out from the banks at a few points, and at one a Guanlei vessel was unloading three brand-new Japanese pick-up trucks. It was a bizarre sight – the latest model Toyotas arriving by boat in the middle of the jungle. I wondered who in Shan State could afford vehicles like that and why they were being imported at such an obscure location, rather than being driven across the land border.

More and more Chinese boats began to pass us, heading upriver to Guanlei, and the Mekong grew wider and wider until the banks were over a hundred metres apart. The jungle became less impenetrable, with ever-bigger gaps in it where trees had been felled for farmland. There was one more stop, after lunch, to wait for another boat travelling behind us. We were about to go through a particularly dangerous, shallow stretch of water and the skipper didn’t want to do it alone. When we did move forward Hai Yan stood at the bow with a bamboo pole, using it to check the depth of the water every few metres.