12

The Kings of the Sunset

We walked downhill, coughing the dust kicked up by Khun Sa’s departed convoy.

“The General is a very busy man,” Sengjoe explained. “He is preparing to fight with the Burmese. And everyone comes to him with their problems. Tomorrow, we will speak with him.”

Twelve thousand miles, I thought, an eighteen-month chase, and a ten-second sighting. And now K.S. had left the building. The time, location, and duration of our upcoming meeting would be revealed in the fullness of time and would be subject, of course, to “border problems” and the superstitions of the Burmese Army, rumored to be massing for an assault on the national holiday of March 27, Tatmadaw Day, which celebrated the army’s about-face against their Japanese allies in 1945. We walked through the empty banquet pavilion to a wooden, two-story building that held the Shan Human Rights Center and Museum. Our guide warmly greeted the manager of the three-year-old facility, his younger brother, Sarm Tip, who was also a leader in the House of Representatives formed three months earlier by the Shan resistance.

In the Asian manner, we removed our shoes and followed Sarm Tip into the ground floor of the building occupied by a propaganda print shop. Trays of cold type filled rough-hewn wood tables. Piles of the same English-language biographies of Khun Sa that I had seen for sale in Chiang Mai stood in neat stacks on the floor, alongside booklets of Shan State history and pamphlets charging the Burmese with the aerial spraying of toxic herbicides. The center also produced Chinese-, Burmese-, and Shan-language material, said Sarm Tip, including magazines and a newspaper.

“Good,” said Flynn. “I can send my letters complaining about Khernsai to the press.”

The entire second floor was devoted to Shan history, especially the prewar Golden Age when the hereditary saopha princes ruled their feudal empires with little interference from the British. Sarm Tip had organized display cases with a priceless collection of silver betel-nut jars, ivory-handled dah swords, and ancient bronze opium weights shaped like lions, birds, and elephants. Black-and-white photographs of the maharajah-like chieftains decorated the walls. The word saopha literally means “prince of the sky” and the finery worn by the ancient sovereigns buttressed their celestial origins: storms of swirling turban; velvet-trimmed costumes drizzling sequins and stitching; bejeweled, Persian slippers with upturned toes cresting into heads of the Garuda, the legendary bird-mount of Vishnu.

It was a proud, ancient heritage, one that SLORC had literally sought to erase. Just last year, Sarm Tip related, the Burmese had razed the grand teak palace of the former saopha of Keng Tung. The stated reason was to erect a hotel catering to travelers who took the dreary, overpriced package tours from Mae Sai whenever rebel activity ceased along Highway 4. The unspoken need was to repress the Shan, who regarded the saophas as potent symbols of nationalism, and to convince foreign visitors that the Shan were bumpkins, nearly an uncivilized hilltribe, whose lot in life had been mightily improved under Burmese leadership.

“These people, they dismantle the Shan palace because it’s of historical significance,” Sengjoe said, agitated. He had grown up in Keng Tung, had known firsthand the splendor of the saopha residence. “They are scared the Shan have their own administration, their own country. So they try to eliminate everything of cultural and historical significance. They want to eliminate us, assimilate us, have a Burmanization of the whole country. That is their real intention.

“Bad people,” he added. “They try to convince the world they are the rightful leaders of all the ethnic groups, but it’s not true.”

Sengjoe did not stand alone in his enmity toward the Burmese. The Shan and the Burmese are both Buddhist and, to the Western eye, seem physically similar, but they are markedly different people who just happen to live adjacent to one another. Antipathy between the two has existed for centuries. (The Tai-speaking Shan, who are related to the Lao and the Thai—the word Shan is a Burmese corruption of Siam—even trace different ethnolinguistic roots than do the Burmese.) The feuding began during the twelfth century, when the Shan, who were being pressed from their kingdom of Nanchao by Chinese settlers, began migrating from the Yunnan region southward to an area ruled by Burmese kings of the Pagan dynasty. When Pagan fell in 1287 to Kublai Khan’s Mongol hordes, the Shan settled much of the depopulated countryside. East of the Irrawaddy River, they occupied the myelat, the plateau-like “middle land” extending to the Salween River; beyond the great river they kept to narrow upland valleys nestled between mountain ridges.

By the early fourteenth century, the Tai-speaking realm stretched from Assam in northeast India to upper Tonkin in present-day Vietnam, and south as far as the Andaman Sea. Far from being unified, this ethnic empire that dominated the region for nearly three centuries was a patchwork of disjointed petty kingdoms and feudatories. The Tai era ended in the mid-sixteenth century when the Burmese king Bayinnaung conquered much of Southeast Asia. Bayinnaung and his successors treated the Shan as vassals, demanding tribute of ponies, gold, velvet, and silk, but allowing the hill people to retain their language and their saopha princes. Within their fiefdoms, the saophas wielded absolute power over their subjects. They granted land to chieftains, who then paid tribute, and reaped further revenues from bazaar licenses and monopolies on betel leaf and liquor. The money helped to underwrite the ahmudan, the palace retinue of umbrella carriers, timekeepers, and betel-box bearers.

The Burmese referred to these Shan rulers as Ne Win Bayin—Sunset Lords—and considered them second-tier royalty to their own Ne Twet Bayin, or Sunrise Lords. The saophas sent their brothers and sons to the Burmese royal capital to be inculcated in the fineries of court life—and to serve as hostages. To further control the Shan princes, the Burmese adopted a divide-and-rule policy, demanding each saopha’s obeisance, yet forbidding them from consulting one another. The isolation only furthered suspicion and antagonism between the saophas. The Burmese also encouraged subordinate chieftains to revolt, a practice that quadrupled the ranks of principalities—from nine original city-states to forty-one feudatories—by the 1870s.

There was no unity in the hills, no sense of community with the plains. There was only chronic instability and mounting resentment against the distant Burmese rulers. Relations with the Sunrise Kings reached their nadir during the brief, cruel reign of Thibaw, the last monarch of Burma, who ascended the throne in 1878 and killed seventy of his closest relatives—and potential rivals—in accordance with a disquieting Burmese royal tradition, the Massacre of the Kinsmen. The first Shan princes broke with Mandalay in 1879; by 1882, a majority of the saophas were in open revolt.

The British, who had conquered Lower Burma in 1852 and feared Thibaw was coming under the sway of the French, used a picayune logging dispute to send gunboats up the Irrawaddy in 1885 to capture Mandalay. After Thibaw was exiled to Bombay, the riches of Upper Burma belonged to the Raj. The breakaway Shan States, meanwhile, had lapsed into civil war, brigandage, and slave raiding. It required several battles, many displays of firepower, and not a little diplomacy, but the British finally subjugated the region in 1890—with the notable exception of the Wa hills. After several unsuccessful attempts to control the headhunters, the region was euphemistically classified as “unadministered.” The saophas were presented with sanads—a Hindi term for agreements—allowing them to retain their traditional rights and broad powers. In return, the Shan princes promised to pay annual tribute and to grant timber and mineral rights and railroad concessions. Unlike the lowlands, which were operated by the British as Ministerial Burma, the Shan principalities—which varied in size from twelve-thousand-square-mile Keng Tung to Kyong, a domain of just twenty-four square miles—were recognized as separate protectorates under the direct control of the Governor of India. The region became a cohesive entity in 1922, when the feudatories were organized as the Federated Shan States. Their administration and finances remained independent from Ministerial Burma.

“The British knew the Burmese have a different character apart from the Shan,” said Sengjoe, who bore an ancient Shan wariness. “The British trusted the Shan and allowed them to carry swords and weapons. As for the Burmese, the British knew they have a hot temperament because they live in the lowland. Most of them are untrustworthy.”

The British had their reasons for such hands-off administration. In the mid nineteenth century, the region had been eyed as “The Golden Road to Cathay,” a back door to the enormous, untapped Chinese interior then coveted by European powers. Caravan trade had existed between Upper Burma, the Shan hills, and Yunnan for centuries. The British hoped to connect these lands by railroad, but surveys quickly revealed the daunting nature of the terrain and the staggering investment any railway would require. The British also deduced that direct rule of this mountainous, undeveloped expanse would require enormous manpower. Still, Shan State had to be kept out of the hands of the French, who held Laos and were wooing the saophas who lived between the Salween and Mekong rivers. The British chose indirect hegemony, permitting the saophas to stay on their gilded throne-platforms while the crown concentrated on exploiting the accessible, abundant riches of the western Shan States: the rubies and sapphires of the Mogok Valley; the silver, tin, and lead of Namtu; the teak from every slope.

Life in Shan State, the fringe of the empire, proceeded as it had for centuries, little affected by British rule. The Shan lived in permanent valley settlements, where they cultivated wet rice, oranges, plums, tea, and tobacco. Dozens of animist hill-tribes moved about the mountains, slashing and burning forest to grow plots of dry rice, maize, gourds, and opium. Lording over them all were the saophas, shod in their bird’s-head slippers. Occasionally, a petty Shan tyrant gave the British headaches. In Burma and Beyond, Sir James Gordon Scott described a cruel saopha in Keng Tung who enjoyed sitting on his palace gallery with a rifle and using his subjects for target practice. The saopha’s son, who encouraged Scott to pot a few peasants, was “very much of a lout,” Scott wrote, “with aspirations to become as successful a shot as his father.” But for the most part, the saophas ruled as benevolent despots in a timeless backwater. Elderly Shan were openly nostalgic for this colonial era of powerful, divine chiefs and their disengaged champion, a far-off English superpower that had rid them of Burmese authority.

Sengjoe saw me staring at the faded, fanciful Shan photographs.

“The Shan people enjoyed peace and prosperity during British rule, in colonization days,” he said. “Still the old people mention it with tears. We remember the old days while the British were ruling. It was the best. We have peace. We have tranquility. After independence, we have only all the miseries placed by the Burmese.”

Shan grievances did not mount until 1948, when the sun set forever on Britain’s Asian empire. After World War II, England wanted time to rebuild war-ravaged Burma, which had suffered widespread damage to its railroads, bridges, and port facilities, before granting it self-governing dominion status. But Aung San, the strong-minded Burmese leader, rejected this course—called the Simla Plan—and lobbied London for immediate self-government. Such sentiment was not as strong among the Anglophile Shan, who had fought with the Allies while Burmese nationalists, including Aung San, had allied with the Japanese. No matter. Preoccupied with India, Downing Street allowed Aung San to dictate immediate terms: amalgamation of Ministerial Burma with the Frontier Areas, followed by independence.

“The British are big blunderers in drawing a map,” Sengjoe added. “It was unreasonable. And they wanted to forget about the war. Burma was a war-torn country, in ashes. India … Pakistan … Burma.…” Sengjoe made a sweeping motion, as if clearing a table. “The British dropped us like a hot potato,” he said. “I think the British are responsible to take some proper course, to find a solution. The Shan are entitled to freedom and to have a country of their own. But the British have poor memories. They forget us very soon.”

In January 1947, Aung San traveled to England to meet with Prime Minister Clement R. Attlee, the Labour Party leader. The Burmese nationalist emerged with an agreement for a rapid transfer of power; among the document’s stipulations, article eight provided for “early unification” of the hill areas with their “free consent.” The following month in the Shan market town of Panglong, Aung San met with minority leaders to mollify their doubts about joining an independent Burma. On February 12, 1947, a date still celebrated as Burma’s Union Day, Aung San and the ethnic leaders signed the Panglong Agreement. The crucial accord of postwar Burma, the document promised to safeguard minority rights. Aung San was willing to be accommodating; resource-rich Shan State, which comprised one-quarter of the Union’s total land area, was too great a prize to lose.

A large oil painting of the Panglong conference hung on a wall of the Shan Human Rights Center. In the picture, uniform-clad Aung San signs the agreement, flanked by rows of saophas resembling a solemn, turban-wrapped choir. Seated to the Burmese leader’s immediate left are two influential saophas, Sao Sam Htun of Mong Pawn and Sao Shwe Thaik of Yaunghwe, who observe the historic moment with looks that can only be described as stunned, portents of the trouble that has plagued the Shan hills ever since.

“This is the day we enslaved ourselves to Burmese rule,” Sengjoe said quietly.

Just five months later, on the morning of July 19, 1947, a quartet of machine gun–toting assassins burst into a cabinet meeting and killed Aung San and six other men, including the saopha of Mong Pawn. An embittered political rival, U Saw, the last prime minister of prewar Burma, was soon convicted and hanged for the crime. The damage to the fledgling country, however, would prove irreparable. Aung San, the man who had linked the radical Burmese patriots of the plains with the conservative ethnic-minority chieftains of the hills, was gone.

Two months after Aung San’s death, a constitution was adopted. For the Shan, the critical portion of this legal instrument was chapter ten, which granted Shan State the right of secession from the Union of Burma after a ten-year trial period. On January 4, 1948, at the auspicious hour of 4:20 a.m., the Union Jack was lowered forever in Burma. Sir Hubert Rance, the last British Governor, departed Government House to the strains of “Auld Lang Syne,” replaced by the new president, Sao Shwe Thaik. At a more rational hour later that morning, the new prime minister, U Nu, a longtime friend of Aung San, broadcast a hopeful, conciliatory speech:

In the centuries that passed, the groups of Burma fought among themselves, and administrative division under the British regime kept us apart. All this is over now, and, while the Mon, Arakanese, Burmese, the Karens, the Shans, the Kachins, and the Chins will maintain their several cultures, we are now one nation, under one flag and under one elected head of the Burma Union.

The optimism of U Nu, a devout Buddhist who had translated the works of Dale Carnegie into Burmese, was short-lived. According to Josef Silverstein, the retired Rutgers University professor and leading American scholar of Burma, the duality of Britain’s administration of the lowlands and of the frontier areas hobbled the formation of a national outlook or identity for the Union of Burma. And without the charismatic leadership of Aung San, there was no center to hold against the powerful centrifugal forces of ethnicity and self-interest. Along with other minority peoples, the Shan soon grew disillusioned with a government dominated by ethnic Burmese, who accounted for more than two-thirds of the union’s population. (The Shan, according to the country’s last impartial census—conducted in 1931—comprised 7 percent of the population.) Aggrieved ethnic groups such as the Karen, Karenni, and Mon soon took up arms. In 1949, the Communist forces of Mao Zedong drove Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang battalions into eastern Shan State; to counter the presence of the KMT soldiers as well as homegrown Communist insurgents in the region, Rangoon declared martial law. To Shan such as Sengjoe, this decision seemed a pretext to hasten the Burmanization of their land. The Tatmadaw soldiers did nothing to endear themselves to the local populace, instead behaving like an arrogant army of occupation, dragooning peasants for work projects, raping women, and looting and burning villages.

Alienated by Burmese military abuses, their lack of influence in government, and the plundering of their natural wealth to underwrite development projects in the plains, a broad-based Shan nationalist movement soon emerged. The rumblings for independence grew louder as the end of the ten-year grace period on secession loomed. Overwhelmed by the ethnic pressures, Prime Minister U Nu relinquished power in 1958 to a military caretaker government headed by General Ne Win, who would deal ruthlessly with the Communist rebels and ethnic insurgents and make no apologies for his iron-handed approach. “The most pressing fundamental need of the Union,” Ne Win said in a 1959 speech, “is law and order.”

U Nu was reelected in 1960, but he soon angered the isolationist Burmese generals with his plans for foreign investment and his efforts to accommodate the ethnic minorities. The army could not abide his talks about autonomy with the frontier groups, particularly the disaffected Shan. For the Tatmadaw, the prospect of secession was unacceptable. Dissolution of the union would eliminate the fortune the government earned from gems, minerals, and timber extracted from the frontier areas. Furthermore, Shan independence would plunge the lowlands into a militarily indefensible position against China and Thailand. Such notions threatened the very existence of Burma.

Against this backdrop, U Nu convened a Nationalities’ Seminar in late February 1962. His timing couldn’t have been worse: astrologers predicted the most inauspicious alignment of the planets in nearly five thousand years. At the seminar, the leading voice of dissent belonged to Sao Shwe Thaik, who now headed the Federal Movement, an attempt by the ethnic minorities to redress political imbalances, correct constitutional defects, and negotiate continued terms of incorporation in the union. For two weeks, the people of the frontier aired their grievances; U Nu had reserved the last day to give his opinions.

But on March 2, 1962, the day before U Nu was to speak, Ne Win seized control of Burma in a military coup d’etat. The Tatmadaw immediately suspended the 1947 Constitution, abolished Parliament, and muzzled unions and political parties. U Nu and his ministers were imprisoned, as were dozens of minority representatives. Hundreds, if not thousands, of prominent Shan—community leaders, businessmen, civil servants—were detained for years. U Nu was not released until 1966; Sao Shwe Thaik, the nation’s first president, died in November 1962 while still in military custody. And Sao Kya Seng, the progressive, American-educated saopha of Hsipaw, was never seen again after his arrest outside of Taunggyi. With brutal efficiency, the Tatmadaw had silenced all official discussion of Shan autonomy and independence.

“Nobody is going to listen to that kind of claim,” says Silverstein, “unless [the Shan] rise up, seize territory, and hope they’ll be given recognition from the outside. And nobody is rushing to give them that kind of support. There has never been a unified, single command or a single leader.”

Unity has never been a hallmark of Shan State, not during the centuries of rule by the independent-minded saophas, and not during the ensuing decades of disorder resulting from the dozens of armed, squabbling groups entrenched in the hills: The Shan State Independence Army. The Shan National United Front. The Shan National Army. The Shan State Army. The Shan State Revolutionary Army. The Shan National Independence Army. The Shan United Army. The Shan United Revolutionary Army. The Shan People’s Liberation Army. The Tai National Army. The Tai Independence Army. The Tai-Land Revolutionary Army.

So many chiefs, so many grudges, so many communiqués, and so little progress for the Shan people—until now, the time of the Mong Tai Army. The other rebel groups had been disarmed, disbanded, or absorbed by the MTA. There was now only one Shan leader, however problematic, who could stand up to the Burmese: Khun Sa. His opium bought guns. The guns brought power. And that power might deliver independence. It was an unlikely gamble, but it was enough to sustain men like Sengjoe, even boys like Sai Ching. Become an officer. Fight the Burmese. Honor your parents. Avenge your village. In Ho Mong, thousands of men chanted this mantra.

*   *   *

When we returned in the evening to our guest house, Sullivan made a beeline for the privy. He reappeared a few minutes later, looking slightly clammy. “I just made myself to puke,” he announced. “I tried to avoid everything at lunch except rice and vegetables, but the commander kept putting chicken on my plate. I couldn’t be rude and not eat it. But I’m not taking any chances now. I’m not going to wind up over at Ho Mong General Hospital, rolling around on the floor next to that poor bastard with blackwater fever.” Sullivan rummaged inside his first-aid kit, then produced a pill bottle. “I believe this is a Cipro moment,” he said. “Care to join me? If we escape Burma without getting sick it’ll be a fucking miracle.”

We gulped the large, expensive five-hundred-mg. tablets; miraculous ciprofloxacin took no bacterial prisoners. Then we set about preparing the farang feast Sullivan had carried in his backpack all the way from Dover, Massachusetts; my sidekick had eaten enough local food to test his patience and his constitution. The guest-house cook had left us a Chinese thermos filled with boiled water. We now dosed the consommé-colored liquid with three iodine pills, then pumped it through Sullivan’s Pur Scout filter and into a pouch of freeze-dried beef stew. Sullivan flourished a Vidalia onion and a bottle of Ken’s Italian salad dressing, which he added to the steaming muck that would be our dinner.

“I’m so good to you,” he chortled.

The meal resembled raw, bubbling sewage, not the wishful, Bon Appetit illustration on the side of the package. I would soon be in the toilet, I thought, performing the Sullivan maneuver. We ate the effluent over wheat crackers, washed down with Tang-and-Absolut screwdrivers. I regarded my mess kit, wished I had taken more food at the commander’s banquet. Rice, klong chicken, and a Cipro chaser trumped this meal any day of the week.

As he slurped down stew and cocktails, Sullivan mused about the day’s events: “We pretty much got the lay of the land. I didn’t see any starving people. Either that, or it’s The Stepford Wives around here. It’s the greatest dichotomy I’ve ever seen. He’s the world’s biggest druglord, but he’s built hospitals and schools. His people don’t starve. Without him, they’d be nothing. They’d be living in mud huts.”

I didn’t disagree. Khun Sa had provided services in Ho Mong that seemed to go far beyond the purposes of press propaganda or military preparedness. He had taken particular care to win the hearts and minds of local Shan civilians as well.

After our regrettable dinner, we walked up the dusty street toward the talaat to meet Sengjoe and Barry Flynn. The sun had slid behind the wall of dark mountains; the first streetlights glowered in the brief, lambent light. Twenty diesel generators supplied nightly power to Ho Mong from six to ten o’clock, although our hosts warned that this coverage was wildly unreliable. The electrical supply was supposed to improve soon. An embankment dam had been constructed several miles south of town with rented Thai earth-moving equipment, and a man-made lake of three million cubic meters had formed after two monsoon seasons. The reservoir already functioned as Ho Mong’s water supply. Khun Sa planned to outfit the dam with turbines to provide his jungle fortress with inexhaustible hydroelectric power.

We found Sengjoe and Flynn across the street from the market, in a small restaurant owned by Panthays, descended from Yunnanese Muslim traders—a legacy of Kublai Khan’s Mongols—who had fled China in the nineteenth century. Flynn and Sengjoe were quaffing warm Singha over ice and eating fried mat-pe beans. We took seats and nibbled at the appetizer. The seeds of the Phaseolus mungo bush had a salty, soybean-like flavor that complemented beer. After a few pleasantries, Sengjoe stood and left.

“He went to go get whiskey,” Flynn explained. “His wife won’t let him keep liquor at home, so he hides it at a friend’s house nearby.”

Sengjoe soon returned, an old, stoppered Carlsberg beer bottle in hand.

“Jungle whiskey,” he said mischievously. “The local people call it moonshine.” He poured stiff shots into four chipped glasses. “Cheers,” he said, then downed his drink.

There was no alternative but to follow suit. The home-brewed, 180-proof rice whiskey roared down my throat like spreading napalm. Our Shan barkeep poured anew. Ever mindful of protocol, Sullivan went to fetch the Absolut and Tang from our room. This was going to be a long night; I hoped the Ho Mong statutes for public drunkenness were lenient. As the evening devolved into endless rounds of screwdrivers and rotgut shots, Sengjoe spoke of his friend, Flynn, the farang at home in the wilds of Asia, and of his liege, Khun Sa, the strong-minded jungle warrior who had built Ho Mong into a city-state to rival that of a saopha.

“I’ve never seen the General as close to a European as Barry. He even has Barry’s picture in his house,” Sengjoe said. We toasted Flynn and Hollywood. “The General is a very sophisticated man,” said Sengjoe, dispensing more whiskey.

“People call the General a druglord,” I said, “a terrorist who uses heroin as a weapon. He has even said his heroin is stronger than a nuclear bomb.”

“Arafat, he planted bombs all over the Mediterranean,” Sengjoe replied. “The United States called him a terrorist. Now Arafat goes to the White House. He is not called a terrorist anymore. The General doesn’t plant bombs, but the United States calls him a criminal. We don’t use force—we use reason. For a few million dollars, we can create a drug-free region. Shan State is a very rich region, with plenty of gems and teak. We could be a very rich people. The Shan could be the Swiss of Southeast Asia.”

Terrorist or statesman. Druglord or freedom fighter. Pariah or patriot. Smuggler or narco-saint. Opinions about the half-Shan, half-Chinese strongman varied wildly.

“He is obviously more of a trafficker than he is an ethnic leader,” a Bangkok-based diplomat had told me. I remembered the wry grin that followed. “In that country, the line between one or the other is hard to define.”

One travel book from a widely circulated series, Fodor’s 1993 Exploring Thailand, twice insisted that Khun Sa was dead. According to Fodor’s, the “colorful and shady” opium king “used to be active in this area, commanding four thousand armed guerrillas at the time of his death in 1991.” Khun Sa was also a perfect choice for novelists in search of a loathsome, exotic villain. A 1985 novel by John Balaban, Coming Down Again, about farang junkies rotting away in a Golden Triangle jail, contained an unflattering portrait of the Shan-Chinese warlord “Khan Su”: “a tubby little man in green fatigues with a green peaked cap pulled down rakishly to his left ear, but much too far, so that the effect was silly.” And he made a cameo in Peter Hoeg’s 1993 novel, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, as “Khum Na,” a feudal prince with a standing army of six thousand men, offices through Asia and Europe, and a stranglehold on the global heroin trade.

I had read of Khun Sa’s alleged cruelty less than a year before in a brief wire-service story. According to the Burmese military—hardly the most objective source—MTA troops had killed more than one hundred civilians near Mong Hsat in southern Shan State for selling opium to syndicates other than Khun Sa’s organization. The MTA had hotly denied the accusation.

To U.S. Assistant District Attorney Catherine E. Palmer, Khun Sa is nothing more than a stone-cold drug dealer, however clever, who wraps himself in the flag of Shan nationalism. “I’m sure the Shan people have a lot of legitimate complaints,” she told me. “I’m certainly no expert on the politics of Burma, but I do believe he uses the problems that the Shan State people legitimately have as a very convenient cover for what I believe his primary goal to be, which is heroin trafficking. He’s made hundreds of millions of dollars … most of which is not used to help the poor people of the Shan State.

“The money ends up in all sorts of trading companies,” continued Palmer, “jade companies, jewelry companies, investments throughout Hong Kong, and probably a lot of other places and acquisitions we know nothing about. He taxes everything that goes on; he has complete control over movement in villages, even what’s planted.

“Where does all his money go?” Palmer said. “Part of it goes to buy weapons. The rest of it goes to his empire. And some of the worst addiction in the world exists in the middle of the hill-tribes that are being used by him to grow the opium.

“He’s been indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of New York,” she concluded, “so I think by definition and by law his activities make him accountable to the U.S. government for a large amount [of heroin] that’s coming in. I think his explanations leave a lot to be desired.”

Silverstein took this a step farther, arguing that Khun Sa conducts his real enterprise, narcotics trafficking, behind the convenient façade of Shan nationalism. His movement has attracted Shan support almost by default. “Who does Khun Sa speak for?” Silverstein asked rhetorically. “He is the only Shan voice left. Other Shan resistance groups have either disappeared, or been incorporated into his own, or are not doing anything. In that sense he’s important.”

But Shan scholar Chao Tzang Yaunghwe, who helped found the Shan State Army resistance group in the early 1960s, considers Khun Sa more favorably. “He is a warlord, no doubt about it,” the exiled Shan scholar said. “So is Ne Win. So is Bo Mya. So what? Burma is the land of warlords. There is no other form of government except through warlords and armies.… That is the form of politics in Burma since 1962.” According to Chao Tzang Yaunghwe, Khun Sa was no latecomer to Shan independence. For decades, the General had maintained he was a Shan nationalist, even when he led a Burmese KKY militia in the early 1960s and was ordered to fight Shan rebels.

“He cooperated with me and with the SSA when he was still with the home guard,” remarked Chao Tzang Yaunghwe, who once commanded a Shan State Army brigade but now lives in Canada. “He always resisted attempts to make the home guard fight rebels. When he was forced to join the Burmese in operations against us, he always gave us intelligence and munitions and logistical support. In that way his involvement with the Shan patriotic cause has been consistent. As for his patriotism, he is tied to Shan State. There is no way he can escape. He can’t settle down in Vancouver or New York or Bangkok or California. He has to be there. He’s a prisoner of Shan nationalism. In a way, he’s the most sincere patriot—because there is no escape for him. He is tied to the politics and to the fate of Shan State.”

Opium authority Alfred W. McCoy considered Khun Sa a cunning, domineering leader, a personality who is both a warlord and a freedom fighter. Khun Sa’s dual, Sino-Shan ethnicity is reflected in the structure of his empire, explained McCoy. “In structure, his organization is two groups,” McCoy said. “There is a self-contained Chinese network that manages finances and arms. There is also a Shan side, which is politics. The bridge between those two halves of the movement is Khun Sa. That’s what’s so elusive about him. He’s both: the Shan nationalist and the ruthless warlord. Although he has now dedicated himself to the Shan cause, he remains as ruthless a warlord as he ever was. He has added, not dropped. He’s the man with two names—Chang Chi-fu and Khun Sa.”

For all his drug-tainted notoriety, Khun Sa is indispensable to the Shan cause. “He’s got the firepower, and there’s not another political druglord out there,” concluded McCoy. “All the Shan idealists—the purely political people who never handled opium in their lives—are now at his side, gritting their teeth. Khun Sa was the absolute antithesis of their movement for all his career. He is the ultimate warlord. By force of will and ruthlessness he’s done something I never thought possible. I never thought the Shan, in any form, would be able to unify. For good or ill, he’s the only one to bring them together. He can correct their weakness. He’s a curious phenomenon.”

Lance E. Trimmer, a former Green Beret who once accompanied Flynn and Bo Gritz to Ho Mong and now works as private investigator in Montana, offered qualified admiration: “Shit, I really kind of liked Khun Sa. He took me around, showed me all of his camp security. He was really nice and sounded sincere about all the things he wanted to do for his people. Tell you what, his people sure loved him. But you have to understand who Khun Sa is, too,” Trimmer stressed. “I’m sure he’d have cut my head off if I thought anyway else.”

I would get my own chance to form an opinion soon enough. I braced myself on the restaurant table, sticky with spilt Shan whiskey and Absolut vodka, and stood. We were all in our cups. Time to return to the guest house, make a list of interview questions.

“Michael Jackson went to Russia, and the country collapses!” Sengjoe told Sullivan. “Wherever Michael Jackson goes, everything is in a shambles! Bring him to Burma!”

Glasses rattled. We drank to the Gloved One and to foreign policy. Somehow the moonshine frog-marched me through the blacked-out town to the guest house, then shoved me into a pit of mountain air, cool and black and deep as any oubliette. I closed my eyes and landed inside a Buddhist temple at an audience with Khun Sa. Three pretty, young farang women sat beside me on zafu cushions. Why were they here? They came here some time ago, they said, to get better. And had they gotten better? The question hung in the air. The youngest, thinnest girl bowed her head, then rolled up a sleeve of her woolen, soiled sweater. Her arm, bruised and withered as spoiled fruit from repeated hypodermic injections, was wrapped in blood-crusted bandages. No, they were not getting better. But they would not leave either.

No more questions. The words would have to come tomorrow.