The Emperor Far Away (29 page)

China’s influence looms large here now, though. Much of the land has been sold to the same Chinese companies that run Banna’s rubber farms, while the bananas grown locally are packed into boxes marked ‘Produce of China’ and sent north by foremen from far-off Sichuan Province. And unlike their cousins in Banna, the Tai Lue of north-west Laos are not prospering from the rubber boom. The Chinese trucks kick up clouds of dust as they rumble to and from the border along Muang Sing’s long, barely sealed main street, while the buildings are a mix of decrepit white-stone French colonial structures and hybrid wood and brick houses.

Despite the pervasive Chinese presence, this corner of north-west Laos continues to preserve aspects of Dai culture no longer present anywhere else in greater Dailand. Two aged ladies at the restaurant in Muang Sing I ate at reminded me of that daily. ‘This is the only place you will find proper Tai Lue food,’ they said, serving up dishes such as a tangy paste of chilli, garlic and cilantro eaten with sticky rice. Muang Sing’s pagodas, too, were pure Tai Lue. Wat Pajay in Jinghong reveals the influence of Thai, Burmese and even Sri Lankan temple architecture. But in Muang Sing strange vertical prayer flags flew above spartan, less decorative monasteries.

A relic of a long-distant Dailand, Muang Sing’s uniqueness is perhaps due to it having been on the fringes of two Dai kingdoms, Sipsongpanna and Kengtung, rather than at the heart of either of them. Its survival is all the more remarkable given the upheaval and violence Laos has endured since it gained independence in 1953. But Dai identity is as hardy as the opium poppies that grow in the hills around Muang Long and the vagaries of national politics have never been able to diminish it, whether in China, Laos or Myanmar.

19

With the Wa

I was tired of being restricted by borders and rules which the minorities blithely ignored. My failure to reach Mong La and the wasted days spent getting to north-west Laos were unwelcome reminders of how conventional my journeys in the Golden Triangle had been. Being forced to employ Kyio was the final insult. It was annoying enough using a guide in Tibet. Having to do so in a region of fluid frontiers was an affront, a challenge to my abilities as a traveller. To do as the minorities do, moving between countries without the trappings of passports and visas, became an obsession.

With Myanmar’s army pushing further into eastern Shan State, as well as into Kachin State in the north, there was only one place I could go without being caught by the Burmese authorities and that was the homeland of the Wa people. To Myanmar’s leaders it is Special Region 2. But in the Yunnan and Burmese borderlands it is known simply by its Mandarin name of Wabang, or Wa State. An unofficial country within Shan State, it is sandwiched between Kokang in the north and Mong La to the south with Yunnan to the east.

Wa State is the most lawless and least visited part of the Golden Triangle. Even among the combative minorities of north and east Myanmar, the Wa have a fearsome reputation. Until fifty years ago, and more recently in the most remote hills, the Wa were headhunters. They took the heads of their enemies, or any unfortunate traveller in their territory, and hung them in their fields so that the decomposing skin and brains fertilised their crops, a brutal, if organic, way of ensuring a bountiful harvest.

Avoiding being governed by anyone is the guiding principle behind everything the Wa do. They sided with the British, who called them the ‘Wild Wa’, against the Japanese in the Second World War, but since then have fought with great success to create their own homeland. The Wa in China are not much different. There are 400,000 Wa in Yunnan, spread across two autonomous counties. But there were far more until 1958 when around one-third of them packed up and marched into Shan State, their way of giving a resounding thumbs-down to being part of Mao’s China.

Like the other hill tribes in Yunnan, the Wa were classified as savages by the Chinese because of their existence beyond the state, their animist beliefs and their lack of any formal writing system. But while the Akha, Bulang, Lahu and others have submitted to Han authority, even if they are inextricably linked to their cousins across the frontiers, the very existence of Wa State ensures that the Wa in China are to a large extent beyond Beijing’s control.

Across the narrow river that separates Yunnan from Wa State, the United Wa State Army (UWSA) is 20,000 strong and able to call on another 30,000 reserve soldiers in times of war. Even China has to accept that, with a force almost as big as the Australian military, the Wa are not to be tamed. They move at will between Wa State and Yunnan, and Beijing does not try to stop them doing so.

Having rejected both the Burmese and Chinese states, the Wa are barbarians by choice: the only truly independent, self-governing minority left in the region. They owe their allegiance to a country not formally recognised anywhere in the world, whether they live there or in Yunnan. And if the Wa have given up headhunting, they have taken up another activity that still places them beyond the pale. Washington cites the UWSA as South-east Asia’s biggest drug-trafficking gang, and there are multi-million-dollar rewards on offer for the capture of some of its generals.

Much of the narcotics business in the Golden Triangle is controlled by the UWSA. Myanmar supplies 10 per cent of the world’s opium annually and most of it is grown in Wa State, as well as in nearby parts of southern Shan State that are under Wa supervision. It is refined into heroin there too, as well as increasingly in Yunnan. The UWSA is also believed to be behind the manufacture of
yaba
, the amphetamine pills that have become an epidemic across Asia. It is the profits from the drug trade that have enabled the Wa to carve out a country for themselves, one complete with its own flag, government, banks and tax system.

Few outsiders penetrate into Wabang. Myanmar bars all foreigners from travelling there. But alone out of the special regions, Wa State is the sole place in the country where the government has no official presence. There are no Tatmadaw checkpoints to pass through, no police to arrest a stray westerner. That made Wa State the place for me, if only I could establish the contacts to get across the border. I had no wish to arouse the ire of the Wa by turning up uninvited.

Fate was kind. A friend introduced me to Justin, a lanky New Yorker in his early thirties who, in one of his many previous jobs, had taught English to the daughter of a UWSA general. He had stayed with her family in Pangshang, the capital of Wa State, and had an open invitation to return. We met late one afternoon in Kunming and bonded over a few beers, drawn together by our similar histories. Our fathers were both Jewish and engineers, we were the children of divorced parents and had spent much of our lives outside our home countries.

Justin promised to find out if we could visit. A couple of weeks later, he called to say the trip was on. We arranged a rendezvous in Lancang, the nondescript capital of Yunnan’s Lahu Autonomous County in the south-west of Banna. I arrived to find him slurping noodles with Piero, a Venetian photographer whose lugubrious demeanour concealed a warm heart and utterly sound personality.

They made a fine double act, with Piero the gloomy straight man and Justin the wisecracking, outgoing one. Justin has a knack of winning people over. He speaks fast and fluent Mandarin, his enthusiasm overriding its lack of grammatical accuracy, and combined with his broad smile it makes the locals warm to him in a way they do with few foreigners. Justin was always the centre of attention, while Piero and I lurked on the fringes, surfing the waves of goodwill he generated.

From Lancang, we moved south-west into Chinese Wa territory: first by bus to Menglian and from there by taxi through a landscape of banana and rubber plantations to Monga, a tiny village on the border. The driver knew our ultimate destination and called ahead so that three motorbikes were waiting to take us to the Nam Ka River, which divides Yunnan here from Myanmar and Wa State.

Then it was a scramble down the banks and a swift ride on a shaky raft made of six bamboo poles lashed together, squatting on our haunches as the boatman punted us across the river, and we were in Wabang. After waiting so long to take advantage of Banna’s wide-open frontiers, the ease of the journey was something of a letdown. I had imagined a march through thick jungle to reach an isolated point of the Nam Ka, but we crossed into Wa State by what seemed like a very public route.

Groups of Wa were waiting for a ride to Yunnan as we disembarked. Climbing up the banks, we were greeted with amusement by a dark-skinned woman selling cold drinks and a group of young lads whose motorbikes acted as transport into Pangshang. There was no linguistic divide here. Mandarin is the local language, along with the various Wa dialects, just as Chinese money is the currency.

A-sui, one of the general’s three daughters, picked us up in a land cruiser covered in the sticky yellow dust that envelops all of Wa State and bearing licence plates that said ‘Wa’ in capital letters. Slim and pretty, she knew Justin from his previous visit. A teenage girl sat in the front clutching a baby, the youngest of A-sui’s three children. A-sui had been married at sixteen and was still only twenty-three.

We accelerated up a track to a checkpoint where two boys and a girl, none older than sixteen, were lolling in chairs in the shade, an AK47 rifle near to hand. They wore olive-green uniforms, those of the boys bearing the patch of the UWSA and its distinctive logo: a shining red star surrounded by yellow shafts of light above green hills and set against a blue background representing the sky. The design dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, when the UWSA was allied with the Communist Party of Burma in its fight against the generals who then ran the country.

Checking our passports was the girl’s responsibility. She wore a badge identifying her as police, but she also sported a furry hairgrip that only reinforced how young she was. She was clearly nonplussed by the sight of three foreigners. I was equally startled at seeing teenage soldiers. But the Wa recruit children as young as ten into the UWSA. In Pangshang especially, it is commonplace to see boys and girls who are scarcely in their teens armed and in uniform. The adult soldiers are needed to guard the ‘borders’ with Myanmar further west, north and south, to repel any possible invasion by government troops.

No record was made of our names or nationalities; A-sui’s presence vouched for us. It was another few kilometres to Pangshang itself, a route which took us on to sealed roads and past the official border crossing, a bridge over the Nam Ka River. Wa State may not be a formal country but China still maintains a frontier and customs post manned by the Wu Jing, like it does with all the other states it borders.

Pangshang, sometimes spelled Panghsang, is a jungle town, set in a shallow depression beneath hills covered in thick green foliage which look down on the other side of the Nam Ka and Yunnan. Home to around 50,000 people, it is rather more impressive than most Chinese cities of an equivalent size and some thought has gone into its design. When I climbed up to the vast all-metal memorial to the Wa war dead atop the hills, I found it surrounded by neatly landscaped flowerbeds.

Soldiers were everywhere, mostly male teenagers but some girls, in forage caps with their AK47s slung over their backs and holstered pistols dangling from leather belts. They gazed at us curiously, sometimes offering a smile, but no one ever asked what we were doing in Pangshang. That we were here at all meant we were guests; we would never have made it past the checkpoint otherwise.

Gaudy, newly built three- and four-storey houses line the more salubrious streets leading up the hillsides. They are a mix of Burmese and Chinese contemporary styles: all white and blue tiles with balconies supported by grandiose columns. High walls topped with coiled barbed wire and metal gates guard them. They were the first sign of how the profits from the heroin and
yaba
trade have turned Pangshang into one of the most unlikely, and least known, boomtowns in Asia. It is the jungle equivalent of an offshore tax haven, where no questions are asked providing you have cash and connections.

Equally incongruous in this remote enclave was the parade of new cars roaring up and down the streets, sending up huge clouds of dust that hung in the air, interspersed by the elongated golf carts that act as buses in Pangshang. ‘There are more cars than people in Pangshang,’ A-sui told me. I remembered the Toyota pick-up trucks I saw being unloaded at a remote jetty in Shan State when I sailed down the Mekong. Now I knew where they had been headed.

More evidence of how vehicles outnumber people in Pangshang was on show at the general’s home. It was really two houses, the smaller of which was for the family’s servants and bodyguards, behind the inevitable gates which opened to reveal a concrete forecourt the size of a car park. Seven land cruisers and pick-up trucks were lined up, all Japanese and American brands. Such vehicles sell for £40,000 each in Pangshang, a result of them having to be imported illegally from China or Thailand.

Jutting into the forecourt was a covered terrace as big as a small apartment leading to the entrance to the family home. The floor was polished marble, with a star etched in it, and the tables and chairs strewn across it were all fine teak. Two Chinese-style vases, as big as grandfather clocks, sat either side of the double doors leading into the house. A table-tennis table was an unlikely addition. Above it was an ornate chandelier which wouldn’t have looked out of place in a nineteenth-century ballroom.

Waiting on the terrace was Yilan, the general’s daughter Justin had taught English to. A plain, smart and lively twenty-four-year-old, Yilan was quick to joke with Justin but rather more reserved with Piero and myself. Plying us with delicious cherries, she relayed the news that she was to be married at the end of the year and that we would get to meet her fiancé the next day. She wanted Justin to come to the wedding and he promised to attend.