“From the flags the different armies carried, we thought it was a battle between the Green Yunnanese and the Red Yunnanese. It was only much later that I learned what really happened.”
The battle, now remembered as the 1967 opium war, was fought between the armies of a Burmese warlord and a Lao general, and a renegade division of Chinese Nationalist, or Kuomintang (KMT), soldiers, who faced off over a 16-ton shipment of opium that had come by mule train from the Burmese highlands.
The conflict ended when the Royal Lao Air Force bombed the battlefield, driving the Burmese and KMT soldiers back across the Mekong and leaving the Lao army to plunder the drugs.
Those were much wilder times, at least on the Thai side of the border.
The KMT were everywhere! They ran shops selling dumplings and steamed buns in the village. We saw them in the village every day
A pair of nearby museums pay tribute to opium’s history, while distant hills hold unofficial memorials to past drug lords, men who were once the Pablo Escobars of Southeast Asia and now have come to be remembered, at least in their own communities, as folk heroes rather than villains.
“The history of opium trading here makes this area special,” says Phatcharee, who in 1989 opened the area’s first museum, the House of Opium. “I simply hope people can come and appreciate the artistic and cultural side of this history.”
Phatcharee was born in Chiang Saen in 1953, and her delightful museum is very much an ode to and product of the opium-trading heydays.
Her uncle used to ferry opium up and down the Mekong, and as a girl in the 1960s, she saw “helicopters with white soldiers” retrieving bundles from the river’s banks. (Though she cannot be sure, she suspects these were drug syndicates run by American GIs, which operated during the Vietnam war.)
After attending university in Bangkok, she taught high school science for two years before returning to her hometown in 1986 to open a shop selling souvenirs and antiques.
It was the same year the government began building a paved highway to the town. Soon after, European travel agencies began running “Golden Triangle” tours, led by the French and the Germans.
“Mine was the only shop in the area, and the local villagers would come in and try to sell me anything I would buy,” she says. “I would resell these as antiques and quickly learned that opium paraphernalia were the bestsellers.
“After two or three years, however, I realised I was selling rare items and would never see their like again. So I stopped selling and turned my shop into a museum.”
Phatcharee’s collection, which now includes around 2,000 pieces, is “the largest collection in Asia and within the top five in the world, after museums in Amsterdam and France”, claims her son, Keerati Sivakuae.
Don’t eat street food or at places with great views: travel expert’s tips
Don’t eat street food or at places with great views: travel expert’s tips
Owing to the collection’s rarity, the museum regularly cooperates with researchers from Bangkok and Chiang Rai.
Nearby is a Thai government-funded edifice called the Hall of Opium, which contains extensive historical sections, with roughly a third devoted to the evils of drugs and addiction.
Opium’s use, the museum tells us, is as old as recorded history. The drug is extracted as the latex-like sap of the Papaver somniferum, the only one of more than 250 varieties of poppy flowers to induce narcotic effects.
Its earliest known cultivation was in the Mediterranean region around 3400BC, and archaeologists know it was used in ancient Sumerian and Egyptian societies. Over the centuries, it was carried east along trade routes, likely reaching China and Burma around 1,000 years ago.
Although opium has been used in the Golden Triangle for centuries as a traditional medicine, it is only relatively recently that it has become a cash crop.
Large-scale cultivation began in the late 19th century at the hands of both British and French colonialists. Drug warlords took over following Burmese independence from Britain in 1948 and the end of the Chinese civil war, in 1949.
From war shrine to gulag memorial, ‘dark’ tourist sites and why they matter
From war shrine to gulag memorial, ‘dark’ tourist sites and why they matter
One of the region’s first drug-funded armies was a rogue assemblage of Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT soldiers, who had retreated into Burma following their defeat by Mao Zedong’s communists.
Instead of evacuating to Taiwan, they dug themselves into the Golden Triangle’s highlands and, while ostensibly there as a potential vanguard force on China’s southern border, they quickly took over the regional opium trade.
Even on the flat farmlands near the Mekong, Phatcharee recalls, “The KMT were everywhere! They ran shops selling dumplings and steamed buns in the village. We saw them in the village every day.”
The KMT’s main stronghold, however, was almost 80km (50 miles) west of the Mekong in foreboding, mountainous terrain that was accessible only by dirt mule tracks until the ’80s – the village of Mae Salong.
Today, served by a glorious ribbon of road with magnificent views, it has transformed into a tea-growing region populated mainly by around 8,000 descendants of the KMT’s “lost army”.
Here one can still find the immaculately kept, white marble tomb of their commander, General Tuan Shiwen. After I ascend an imposing flight of stairs to the grave, a man wearing dark green military fatigues with a KMT star on his cap snaps to attention and offers me a salute.
Yan Si-zhong, a third-generation Chinese and now a Thai citizen, comes daily to maintain the tomb of the great man, he tells me in Mandarin.
Although the memorial makes no mention of opium, when I ask Yan, he declares, “It was necessary for our survival! By the 1960s, we no longer received any support from Chiang Kai-shek. We had to fend for ourselves. General Tuan guided us through difficult times.”
Just two mountains away, Yan tells me, is the former camp of the Burmese warlord Khun Sa, the KMT’s rival in the 1967 opium war. The two sides began fighting because Khun Sa refused to pay the KMT’s tax for opium transit.
Ethnically Chinese, Khun Sa gained his initial training from KMT troops in Burma and would eventually supersede the KMT’s lost army to become what United States authorities considered the “world’s most notorious drug lord”.
He was believed to have controlled 60 per cent or more of the world’s heroin supply and commanded an army of up to 30,000 men, remaining the Golden Triangle’s dominant drug lord for two decades, from the mid-’70s to the mid-’90s. (The Burmese territory he controlled facing the Thai border is now in the hands of a new drug militia, the United Wa State Army.)
Khun Sa’s drug empire started in Thailand’s Mae Fah Luang district, where he had a camp from 1976 to 1979. Located in a dusty river valley much lower in the hills than the KMT base at Mae Salong, the compound is now dilapidated. Holes have rusted through the corrugated tin roofs and cobwebs fill soldiers’ concrete dormitories.
A pair of better-kept buildings hold rudimentary museum displays and a wizened Thai man ambles over to wordlessly remove the padlocks to their creaky wooden doors.
The rooms contain a series of two-dimensional panels showing maps, photos, illustrations and explanatory text in Thai. The first presents Khun Sa’s biography.
Although it does not make light of his drug exploits, it also advocates for his positive contributions in the nearby town, where he built bridges, roads, a reservoir, a power plant, a stage, an orphanage and the still-functioning Ban Theat Primary School.
Why first Lonely Planet Thailand guide author fell in love with the country
Why first Lonely Planet Thailand guide author fell in love with the country
A second room offers a history of Shan State nationalism, a cause that Khun Sa grafted onto his drug empire.
“I don’t grow poppies and I don’t deal in drugs,” he once claimed. “I’m just my people’s servant, fighting to win back our lost land.”
The memorial’s only other visitors are three women, who arrive in a shiny white Japanese sedan. One is a locally born Chinese who speaks Mandarin and explains that the museum is maintained by the village headman and the many local descendants of Khun Sa’s militias.
“The people here see him as a freedom fighter who wanted to create a nation for the Shan peoples,” she says. “They really respect him. And even though this is not the case in the rest of the world or even the rest of Thailand, we remember him for his positive contributions.”
Opium’s imprint in northern Thailand is deep and its legacy complex.
The Golden Triangle’s slices of Myanmar and Laos, however, remain havens of criminality.
In 2023, Myanmar’s Shan State returned to its status as the world’s top producer of opium, while in Laos, a new Chinese-built casino city, the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, has been linked to drugs, telefraud syndicates and human trafficking.
The Chinese casinos are now easily visible from the riverside promenade in Chiang Saen. As Phatcharee and I gaze across the Mekong at this bizarre illuminated city rising out of the placid flats of Southeast Asia’s ultimate backwater, she points and says, “Back in 1967, that’s where they were fighting, exactly where the casino is now.”
Clearly, the Golden Triangle’s wild and lawless story is not finished yet.