Chasing the Dragon through the Golden Triangle
A road trip through the former opium growing regions in northern Thailand.
Thoet Thai—an hour’s drive from Chiang Rai—appears as little more than a strip of convenience stores, petrol pumps, and hole-in-the-wall eateries. The kind of place you stop for lunch or fill the tank with gas.
Yet this unassuming place lies at the heart of the Golden Triangle, that once-mythic borderland of Thailand, Myanmar and Laos, long synonymous with narcotics and smuggling.
If nothing else, the town is interesting from a demographic point of view, with the diversity of its people best observed at the busy morning market. Here you’ll find Shan (or Tai Yai, as they’re known in Thailand), close cousins of the Thais originally from Myanmar, as well as Yunnan-Chinese and an array of hill tribes such as the Akha (identifiable by their silver headdresses they often wear), Lisu, Lahu, Yao, Hmong, and Karen.
The goods on offer also reflect this diversity, from jars of Chinese kimchi to Shan tofu noodles and Lahu-style grilled sticky rice, although the cow head resting in a butcher’s bucket is harder to place.
Yet it is better known as the former base of Khun Sa (“Prince of Prosperity”), the late Shan warlord and drug kingpin who, at his peak in the 1980s, presided over what was then the world’s largest heroin and opium empire.
Born Chan Chi-Fu in 1934 in Burma’s northern Shan State, Khun Sa went from teenage militia leader to the chain-smoking commander of his own rebel army, the Shan United Army (later the Mong Tai Army). Forced out of Myanmar in the late 1970s, he relocated his base here, to Thoet Thai (then called Ban Hin Taek), an isolated village surrounded by forested hills, just thirty kilometres south of the Burmese border.
His camp still stands and today serves as a modest museum. For a man whose drug empire was estimated to be worth millions, if not billions, it is as far from luxurious as can be imagined.
I’m not the only one visiting: a trio of monks from Chiang Mai pose—paradoxically perhaps—for photos beside a bronze statue of Khun Sa on horseback.
‘He was good for the Shan people,’ one of the monks tells me, when I ask for an opinion. ‘He fought the Burmese Army,’ he adds, before pulling me into the photo.
Today, nearly twenty years after his death, Khun Sa remains a hero for many residents here who see him not only as a champion of Shan independence, but as someone who used his wealth to build temples, schools and health centres. In the local telling, he was not so much a drug trafficker as a tax collector, levying fees on drug caravans that passed through his territories. U.S. federal authorities saw differently, believing Khun Sa was personally responsible for roughly 70% of the region’s opium production and as much as half of the heroin entering the U.S. market, and placed a $2 million bounty on his head.
Clearly, then, Khun Sa is a contradictory figure, not least for his decision to surrender to the Burmese authorities in 1996, choosing to live out his remaining years in comfort in Yangon as a semi-legitimate businessman. My own path, meanwhile, takes me northwards and, after stopping for gas, I ride on into the hills.
Along the way, I pass Chinese tombs and houses adorned with red banners bearing auspicious Chinese characters.
Many Chinese people here are descended from Kuomintang soldiers—the so-called “lost army”—who fled Yunnan Province after the communist victory in China’s civil war. Seen by Bangkok as a useful buffer against the spread of communism, they were permitted to remain and, in need of funds, soon came to dominate the local opium trade.
The hill peoples, unable to grow rice at these altitudes, also relied on poppy cultivation, often consuming the drug at great detriment both to themselves and their communities. The practice took hold in the late nineteenth century, before expanding after the Second World War, when communist China suppressed domestic production and global demand for opium and heroin soared.
Today, opium cultivation has been eradicated in Thailand, and since the 1980s the area around Doi Tung—the highest peak in the Doi Nang Non range, a spur of the Shan Hills—has been transformed by the Doi Tung Development Project. Credited to the late Princess Mother Srinagarindra and her Mae Fah Luang Foundation, the initiative sought to improve local livelihoods by replacing opium with sustainable crops such as coffee and macadamia nuts.
The Doi Tung Visitor Centre, with its botanical gardens and market stalls selling handicrafts and vacuum-sealed bags of coffee—along with the princess’s Swiss chalet-style retreat—is far removed from lingering perceptions of the Golden Triangle as dangerous and undeveloped. Once ravaged by poppy farming, the landscape has since been rewilded, and mixed evergreen forests and pine trees now blanket the slopes.
A short way north lies the Akha village of Pha Hi, hard against the Myanmar border. Until the 1980s, these hillsides were thick with opium poppies (Papaver somniferum, to give it the scientific name). Each winter, after the petals fell, the women would score the opium pods with small curved blades. The milky sap would then be left to darken before being scraped off.
Today, the slopes are given over to coffee plantations, and in the village itself—with its mix of wooden houses and modern homestays—I find carpets of coffee beans drying in the sun.
I stop in at one of the village’s many cafés, and take a seat on the veranda, watching as a Rorschach of cloud shadows drifts across the mountainside—a dreamlike vista not even an opium pipe could improve.
‘The coffee here is made from catimor beans,’ says the barista, a young Akha man. ‘It has a nutty, herb-like taste.’
I could almost be in a hipster café in Bangkok. How times have changed.
The thirty-kilometre stretch of road from Doi Tung to Mae Sai—Thailand’s northernmost city—must surely count among the country’s most spectacular, with coffee bushes on my right and unimpeded views across Myanmar’s Shan State on my left. The interlocking ranges look empty and remote, with only the distant smoke of cooking fires evidencing human habitation. Other than the occasional bunker flying a Burmese flag and the odd stretch of barbed wire, there is little to prevent me from pulling over and entering this forbidden, seemingly Arcadian, land.
Instead, I pause to take a photograph, only for a Thai soldier to emerge from a camouflaged army post and, offering a wai, gently usher me along.
Yet I’m reminded how porous the border remains, and how readily it is exploited. Though opium production has increased since the 2021 coup, methamphetamine now dominates the drug trade, produced in hidden labs in northern Shan State by the region’s latter-day Khun Sas.
The town of Mae Sai—where I retire for the night—feels a lot like Myanmar, with its dusty, tumbledown air and with many of the town’s residents sporting yellow thanaka paste on their cheeks or chewing bright red betel nut. It’s easy to think I’ve overshot my mark and ended up in Tachileik by mistake, the Burmese town which is separated from Mae Sai by the narrow Ruak River. So close are the two, you can clearly see people going about their business on the Burmese side, the monks in maroon robes—not saffron, like Thai monks’—and men loading goods onto their motorcycles.
Until the 1970s, heavily guarded mule caravans carried raw opium through Tachileik, where it was smuggled onwards into Thailand and Laos. Seeking to find traces of ongoing illicit activities, I make my way through Mae Sai’s maze-like border bazaar, but find mostly stalls selling blankets, knock-off sunglasses or cheap electronics, though a store selling Kachin jade—the mining of which is mired in controversy—comes close.
Yet I notice my phone signal has been cut—an effort by the Thai authorities, locals tell me, to curb the proliferation of “scam centres” which frequently take advantage of Thai telecoms services and which have plagued the border areas in recent years.
I’m tempted to stay longer in Mae Sai—with the border gate closed to tourists, this is the closest I’ll get to Myanmar anytime soon—but choose to press on and after a breakfast of samosas bought from a Burmese lady near the border crossing, I leave the Shan Hills behind and enter the gentler lands of the Mekong floodplain, the road curving through cornfields and banana groves. A cement truck holds up traffic for a time—a near-permanent presence on Thai roads—and then, following a final bend, a rampart of high-rises appears implausibly out of nowhere.
The buildings are in Laos and form part of the Golden Triangle SEZ at the point where the Ruak River meets the Mekong and the borders of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar converge—the official, tourism-branded “Golden Triangle”.
Operated on a long-term lease by a Chinese businessman who is currently under US sanction and with the garish, lotus-shaped Kings Roman Casino as its centre, the SEZ has attracted attention for all the wrong reasons, yet the most immediately questionable thing upon my arrival at Ban Sop Ruak, the Thai tourist town opposite, is the Chinese karaoke carrying across the Mekong.
It was here, at the tripartite border, that fighting broke out in 1967 between Khun Sa’s forces and Kuomintang troops over control of opium caravans crossing into Laos—a five-day battle that ended when the Lao army bombed the battleground and stole the opium.
Today, things are outwardly more peaceful—bad karaoke aside—with tour boats replacing gunboats and, on the Thai side at least, “elephant pants” as the only dubious item on offer. Still, for all its progress, diversity and natural beauty, the Golden Triangle offers more than a glint of its shadowy past.
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