Borderlines E-Book

Charles Nicholl

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

In 1986 Charles Nicholl went to Thailand, intending to take a 'spiritual rest-cure' in a Buddhist forest temple. But the way there had many surprising side turnings. A chance meeting on the night train north takes him on a circuitous journey in the company of Harry, a French gem-trader with a chequered past, and his mercurial Thai girlfriend, Katai. For the travel writer, he learns, it's not what you go looking for that counts, but what you find. They drift along the banks of the Mekong, up into the Golden Triangle and into the rebel strongholds of northern Burma. Opium dreams and jade windows, spirit-callers and moon-hares: Nicholl's crisp, vivid prose captures every detail of this elusive adventure, as we travel with him across Borderlines both real and imaginary.

Leseprobe

Borderlines

A Journey in Thailand and Burma

CHARLES NICHOLL

for my daughter Georgia and for my friend Nopporn

Author’s Note

I spent three months travelling in and around Thailand in 1986. This book is a record of some of the people I met, and some of the places I passed through, and some of the feelings I felt. I make no other claims for it.

Many people gave me their help, or their knowledge, or simply – by no means least – their good company along the way. Of these I wish particularly to thank: Nopporn Chanthakaeo, Geoffrey Walton, Ajahn Pongsak Tejadhammo, Suk Soongswang, Mon Chanyaem, Tony Davies, John Everingham, David Love, David and Toi Parry, Francis Deron at AFP, Sayam Tipkhome and all at Wat Mau Komtuang, David Irwin and Vince Mendès.

Many Thais, whose names I have forgotten or perhaps never knew, added some brief touch of warmth and charm to my time there. They call Thailand the ‘Land of Smiles’. It sounds suspiciously like a promotional catch-phrase, but in my experience it is true.

Back home, my thanks to David Godwin, Jacqueline Korn, Hilary Davies, Barnaby Rogerson, Rose Baring and, of course, to Sally.

Those who know the language may find my presentation of Thai phrases and names a little haphazard. I have tended to follow the sound, rather than any systematic transliteration from the Thai alphabet. The name Katai, for instance, is more correctly written ‘Kratai’, but the Thai ‘r’ is hard to catch, and I heard the name as Katai, and that is how I’ve written it down. I suppose something similar is true of this book as a whole. It is not a book ‘about’ Thailand, and certainly not a book ‘about’ Buddhism. I am not qualified to write those. My only qualification is that I was there, and this is what I made of it all.

Contents

Title PageDedicationAuthor’s NoteMapEpigraph Night TrainLan NaAngelsKataiMekong DaysCalling the KhwanMister HarryPa KhaPoppy FieldsThe KingfisherTupu’s CaveKayahExperience Flows Away About the AuthorAbout the PublisherCopyright

In the sky there is no east nor west.

We make these distinctions in the mind, then believe them to be true.

Everything in the world comes from the mind, like objects appearing from the sleeve of a magician.

Buddha, Lankavatara Sutra

Night Train

Dusk was falling as the train pulled slowly into Lop Buri. A few minutes from the station there was an ambush of small boys, some of them jumping aboard with wares to sell – iced drinks in polythene bags, smoked fish strung on poles, corn-cobs, green mangoes – and some of them just running and shouting alongside the train for the hell of it.

They woke the old man opposite me from his nap. He grumbled at them: ‘ling ling’, little monkeys.

I leaned out the window. The air was warm and dusty, lilac-coloured. The station was lit with sodium lights and the fires of fry-stalls. The clatter of the train met the chatter of the platform, and further off I could hear a diffuse tinkling of temple bells.

Among the crowd I spotted a farang, probably an American. He was clearly visible because he stood a head taller than anyone else on the platform. He had sandy hair and wore a red singlet that showed a lot of muscle. There was a small circle of space around him, where the crowd had fallen back to make room for his fidgety movements. Thais give big farang a wide berth, as one might a large muddy dog.

The word farang is actually a Thai derivation from ‘Français’, but it is used to describe any fair-skinned, round-eyed foreigner from Europe or the USA. According to Thai tradition, the farang inhabit a far-flung region called the muang nauk, the ‘outside kingdom’. One chronicle, the Thai Nya Phuum, sums them up as follows: ‘They are exceedingly tall, hairy and evil-smelling. They school their children long, and devote their lives to the amassing of riches. Their women, though large and round, are very beautiful. They do not grow rice.’ When the Thai call you farang it is not pejorative. They disarm the 14 word with a grin or a giggle. But they remain cautious. The farang does not have the great Thai virtue of jai yen, a ‘cool heart’. His heart is liable to overheat.

The big guy swung a backpack onto his shoulder and made ready to board. He spoke a few words to another, older man. I saw that this man too was a farang, though not from the look of him American. He was thin and wiry, with a long nose. He had a moustache beneath a scrub of stubble. He was less conspicuous, partly because he was smaller, and partly because he wore the same kind of hat – a rattan hat, much in the shape of a trilby – as many other men on the platform. He was sitting on a packing case, smoking a cigarette. He threw it away as the train came to a halt, but he didn’t seem to be hurrying.

As soon as the train stopped you could feel the heat again, but it was now the gentle, lifting warmth of evening, not the laden heat of daytime. This is an hour the Thais love, when the lights go on, and it’s cool enough to promenade, and the all-importance of sanuk – having a good time – is beyond dispute.

I was beginning to feel a lot better myself. Bangkok was four hours away now. It wasn’t enough but it was something.

I watched the big farang struggling in a couple of carriages down from me: third class, no air-con. There was a scrum round the door and even after he’d got himself in, it took another few heaves to get his backpack in. The man in the rattan hat was still on the platform, talking to one of the cooks at the fry-stalls, a woman in a scarlet and yellow sarong. In the harshness of the strip-light above the stall, the colours of her sarong were mesmeric. He seemed to be thanking her for something. His luggage was light – a cloth shoulder-bag of hill-tribe design, a battered leather satchel, a cotton sleeping-roll tied up with rope and fastened beneath the satchel. He slung the two bags crosswise, one from each shoulder. The big American was back on the platform now, minus his backpack. I guessed he had got them some seats. Their clothes were dusty. They looked like they had done some hard travelling. The American’s shoulders gleamed from recent tanning. They talked for a bit: the American tense and 15 rangy, chewing hard on some gum, the other more poised, seeming to keep an eye on everything.

The train hooted, lurched forward, stopped. There was a last-minute surge of people. A Chinese couple joined our carriage. They had passed everything in through the window – cartons done up with twine, baskets of food, finally a baby, sound asleep in a green blanket – and now they were collecting their belongings around them, nodding and smiling and saying, ‘Kam sha, kam sha’. There were many Chinese on the train. It was early February, coming up to Chinese New Year. I had been down in Sampaeng – Bangkok’s Chinatown – that morning. There were kites and lanterns in the shops, scrubbing and sluicing in the grille-fronted restaurants. Soapy water flowed down the gutters, lapped around the wheels of the sleek black Mercs. A time of purification.

The two farang made for their carriage, but still the one in the hat seemed to linger. He let the other passengers in before him, and only as the train began to pull out did he climb up onto the step. He scanned the platform for a moment. Then, seeing that all was apparently in order, he braced himself against the hand-rail and swung out of view.

The lights of Lop Buri soon fell away, but some of the young vendors stayed aboard a bit longer. It was good psychology: the passengers were nestling back into their seats, glad to be on the move again, feeling disposed after all to buy a snack before the long night’s journey. One boy cleared his entire stock of corn-cobs in this last few minutes. The train slowed in the darkness. It was some kind of crossing. I could make out a thatched roof, some fencing, a pitted dirt road. Here the last of the kids jumped out. They set off back down the tracks to Lop Buri, clutching their few precious baht, and we set off north, the train soon settling into the leisurely pack-mule rhythm that had brought us up from Bangkok, and would take us on through the night to Chiang Mai.

A bit later, I went down to the compartment at the end of the carriage, to stretch my legs and have a cigarette. One of the railway police was there. He wore a gun, and he was drinking rice whisky. 16 We conversed in the lingua franca of these encounters: my pidgin Thai, his pidgin English. The window was open wide and we had to shout above the din of the tracks.

He said, ‘Do you know what Lop Buri is famous for?’

I recalled my guide book. The town, though now very modest, was once a royal Siamese capital. Did he mean the old summer palace? The fine Khmer-influenced temples?

He shook his head in tipsy pleasure. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It is famous for its monkeys.’

The monkeys of Lop Buri, it transpired, are notorious thieves. A troupe of them lives around a ruined temple, the Sam Phra Karn, and steals cameras and handbags from the tourists. They are skilled and cunning, he said. They are trained up by the locals, a regular troupe of Artful Dodgers. All the cameras they steal are raked in for resale on the black market.

He moved easily with the lurching of the train. He had worked on the railways for eighteen years. It was in the family: his father had been a guard on the train when the line was first opened, back in the 1920s. Before the railway came it took a week by boat and elephant to get from Bangkok to Chiang Mai.

I asked him if he had ever had to use his gun. He shook his head. ‘In the old days there were many attacks on the train. Bandits, communists. But no more.’ There was a tint of regret in his voice. Nowadays, he said, there are just a few sneak-thieves to deal with. He told me to beware of people offering me sweets or cigarettes, because they might be drugged, and then I would be robbed while I slept. I have heard this warning on buses and trains all over the world but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has been the victim of these Mickey Finns.

While we were talking, the big American I’d seen at Lop Buri came out to use the lavatory. He nodded at us. His face was reddened with sun, his eyes were a fierce pale blue. He was still chewing gum. When he came out of the lavatory he stopped a drinks boy who was walking through, and bought a can of Kloster beer. He felt the can, grimaced, and said to the boy, ‘Sure you can’t get it any warmer?’ 17 The boy laughed back uncomprehendingly. The American took a long slug of beer, let out a hiss of satisfaction, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. There was reddish dirt under his fingernails. ‘Needed that,’ he said, ‘Yes sir,’ and tipped the can back again.

His name was Khris – ‘with a K, like Kristofferson’. He was in his early thirties, I guessed. His hair was fine and frizzy and beginning to recede. His arms were wide and smooth. He had a small tattoo on his right forearm, a dagger with a snake twined round the blade.

I asked him if he’d spent time in Lop Buri. He shook his head. ‘Just passing through.’ He strummed on an imaginary guitar, sang in a gravelly voice: ‘Busted flat in Lop Buri, waiting for a train.’ He frowned. ‘Weird place, man. These fucking monkeys.’

I glanced over at the policeman, but he was tipping the bottle of Mekong to his lips. ‘I’ve heard about them,’ I said. ‘They’re trained to steal.’

‘Trained? You’re kidding. Those are wild sons of bitches, man.’

He told me how they’d nearly pulled off this woman’s arm getting her camera from her, how you get rabies if they bite you, how personally he’d shoot the whole bunch of them. I asked what they did with the camera once they got it.

‘Carried it to the edge of the trees and tore it apart. You could see them beating it against a rock to get at the good bits.’

So much for the Artful Dodgers of Lop Buri.

I asked him where he was travelling from. He told me that he and his friend had been up in Kanchana Buri Province, in the far west of Thailand. ‘We got right up to the Burmese border, a place called Three Pagodas Pass, but they wouldn’t let us across.’

‘Fighting?’

‘Nah, just some border police who didn’t like our faces.’

‘Why did you want to get across the border?’

He shrugged. ‘Harry wanted to. That’s the guy I’m travelling with. Just to get a jump on things, I guess. You know how it is with borders.’

I nodded, wondering quite what he meant. He finished off his beer and crumpled the can in his big fist. I saw there were letters tattooed below his knuckles. His fist spelt ‘Carol’. He made to throw 18 the can out of the window, but the drunken policeman moved forward to block the window.

‘No throw, danger, no throw,’ he slurred.

‘Oh yeah?’ said Khris, his arm still raised with the can in his hand. I thought for a moment he was going to make something of it, but he checked himself and laughed. ‘Guess you’re right, sergeant,’ he said, and turned the gesture into a mock salute. He turned to me, blue eyes flashing, sweat on his face. ‘Guy with the gun buckled on is always right, ain’t that the truth?’ The policeman muttered something in Thai and moved away from the window.

Another drinks boy came through and we bought more beer. Khris offered to buy the policeman one. The policeman shook his head, but it eased things up a bit. ‘Not while you’re on duty, huh?’ said Khris, and we all three laughed. The train whistled as we rolled through a village, tin roofs beneath big dark trees, a snatch of Thai dance music on some jukebox. The buildings threw back the sound of the train to us, then we were out again in the empty rice-fields.

‘So what’s in Kanchana Buri apart from the border?’ I asked.

His blue eyes went wide. He said in a stage whisper, ‘Stones.’

‘Stones?’

‘Gem-stones, man. Siamese sparkies. Sapphire, ruby, topaz. Harry’s kind of a trader. He deals in stones.’

‘I thought most of the sapphire and ruby came from the east of Thailand.’

‘Sure, that’s the main area, down along the Gulf, near Cambodia. But that’s where everyone else is. It’s all sewn up there. Harry’s looking for new strikes. Get in with the local boys, cut out the middlemen. We were up at a place called Bo Ploi, a day north of Kanchana Buri Town. They’ve been mining the area for a while, but there’s word going round that they’ve hit a new strike. Harry says they’re panning out star sapphire somewhere up there. Man, did you ever see one of those little babies smiling up at you?’

I shook my head. ‘Did you find any?’

Khris shrugged. ‘We bought some stuff. You’ll have to ask Harry. I was just along for the ride.’

19 When someone starts to rein in, that’s when you start to feel there’s a story. I liked the sound of star sapphires. I was about to ask what exactly they were, when the policeman blathered into view again. He had decided it was his turn to show there were no hard feelings after the beer-can incident. First he offered us some of his Mekong whisky. Thanks but no thanks. Then he pulled out a grubby piece of paper and thrust it in my hand. We peered at it in the dull yellow light. It was a mimeographed leaflet advertising some hotel in Chiang Mai.

‘You go Noi Hotel,’ he urged. ‘Number one guest house.’ He pronounced it, as Thais invariably do, ‘guess how’.

Khris shook his head. ‘I’m fixed. Harry’s got friends in Chiang Mai.’

I said that I was fixed up too. It wasn’t true, but I like to make my arrangements on the ground. Khris turned back to me. ‘So what takes you to Chiang Mai?’ he asked.

I said, ‘I’m going to visit a forest temple.’

It had begun by chance, or so it seemed, one winter’s night in England, looking for a late-night movie on the TV, and finding instead an Open University broadcast about Buddhism. And there on the screen was a famous Thai monk, Ajahn Cha, small and bald, with a beatific, frog-like face. He was describing the beauties of life in a forest temple. He said, ‘Your mind will become still like a pool in the forest. Many strange and beautiful animals will come to drink at the pool. You will see wonderful things, but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha.’

Who could resist a promise like that?

For a long while after, his words hung in the mind, serene and cool amid the small fevers of one’s life. I was not entirely clear what a forest temple was, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew I wanted to visit one. I would learn all about Buddhism, take that spiritual rest-cure I had always promised myself. I would become a new man. And of course, this being my trade, I would write a book about it.

20 The rest followed, bit by bit. I had arrived in Thailand ten days ago, bound for a remote temple in the hills of the north: Wat Tham Tupu, the Temple of Tupu’s Cave.

But first a little look around Bangkok. Not the best place to start your pilgrimage: stepping from an English winter into this fetid hothouse, the air as thick as broth, the streets paved with broken promises. Bangkok made it very plain that I could always change my mind if I wanted to. There were small, plausible men on the corners: ‘You want something? I get you what you need.’ They could get me girls. They could get me boys. They could scratch my itches any way I pleased. Their hands dangled by their sides, little canisters nestling in the palm: ‘Ganja? Smack?’

In Bangkok there was Heinz, the connoisseur of cut-price sex, who insisted on showing me round the pleasure-dens of Patpong. And there was Sunny. She was a plump, buck-tooth Lao girl who slipped in beside me in a coffee shop one day. Before long she was offering to be my ‘wife’ for the duration of my stay. This meant she would travel with me, look after me, minister night and day to my sugar-daddy whims. There were good reasons for refusing: my actual wife, for one. My alleged quest, for another. Also the possibility that she had AIDS. She had been on the game since she was fifteen. She also had a heroin habit. She mostly smoked it, but sometimes she used the needle, in her knuckle to leave no scars. Heroin smokers are called moo (pig), she explained, ‘because they sound like a pig when they smoke’. Those who shoot are called pei (duck), ‘because they live with dirty water’. She was a sweet girl with a quick smile but you could see the hurt in her eyes. ‘The law on Thai wives’ – a farang later told me – ‘is to take two. If you take one you’ll fall in love with her.’

And then, coming from another tack, there was Dixon, a beer-bellied, denim-shirted Australian I met one night at Tiger’s bar on Suriwong Road. ‘Don’t call me a journalist,’ he snapped. ‘I’m a reporter. That’s when you write it before you go home.’ Predictably, the forest temple didn’t cut much ice with Dixon. ‘That’s just features stuff,’ he said, when there was real hard news crying out all 21 over the country. There was fighting on the Kampuchean border in the east, fighting on the Burmese border in the west. There was Vincent Arnoni, an MIA hunter mounting covert reconnaissance operations into Laos. There was the heroin trade and its highly-placed abettors. And – perennially – there was the disappearance of the silk magnate, Jim Thompson.

‘But I’m going north,’ I said.

‘Well, get your butt up to the Golden Triangle then. You’ll find some real stories up there.’

Every weak card in my hand, the city knew it, the city played to it. But now I was on my way, sweat drying off in the cool night breeze, heading at last for Tupu’s Cave.

Khris shook his head. ‘Forest temple, huh? That’s a new one on me.’

‘And you?’ I asked. ‘What takes you to Chiang Mai?’

He flashed a grin and waggled his tongue. ‘All the prettiest girls in Bangkok said they came from Chiang Mai.’

‘And you believe them?’ said a voice behind me. I turned round and there – suddenly there, it seemed, but that was surely an illusion, it was just that the noise of the train covered his arrival – was the other farang, Harry the gem-trader.

He spoke quietly, a seedy-looking man with an air of formality. He was older than I’d taken him for. His black hair – he was no longer wearing the rattan hat – was thinning and swept straight back. There was dust in the lines of his face. His long nose, slightly bulbous at the end, had a thin but prominent scar running up from the left nostril. It made me think of the scene in Chinatown where Jack Nicholson has his nose slit.

Khris introduced us. Harry said, ‘I’m very pleased to meet you.’ I couldn’t place the accent. It had an American overlay, certainly, but there was a twang of some other language underneath it. His handshake was hard. I felt the dust on his hand, the same red dirt.

He nodded a greeting to the policeman. We swayed in the smoky compartment. He was dressed like an out-of-luck card-sharp: faded blue waistcoat, big silver rings on his left hand.

22 ‘You are an Englishman,’ he observed.

I said I was. He smiled and gave a faint shrug, as if to say that no one is perfect. I was beginning to get a suss on his accent now. The shrug gave him away. ‘And you, I think, are French.’

The same sardonic smile, wrinkling his dark eyes out of view. ‘Bravo!’

‘But you speak excellent English.’

‘A necessity these days.’

‘This guy,’ said Khris loudly, laying a hand on Harry’s shoulder, ‘speaks Thai, Lao, Vietnamese and Chinese, as well as fucking French and English. Have I left any out, captain?’

‘I speak them all badly, especially the French.’

‘What the hell,’ said Khris. ‘We’re all goddamn mongrels out here.’ He seemed suddenly moody. He drained his beer. The policeman was dozing against the lavatory door. Khris winked at me, and deliberately lobbed the empty can out of the window. ‘Old Siamese proverb, right? Don’t take shit from a sleeping cop.’

Khris was beginning to make me nervous. He was restless, and he brought his face up close when he spoke. But it’s not every night you’re stuck on a train with a couple of prospectors fresh in off the sapphire fields. I was intrigued by Harry. I wondered why he was called Harry, and was his real name Henri. I wanted to know how he came to speak all those local languages, and how he got that scar on his nose, and which animal the big yellow tooth hanging on a chain round his neck came from. And I wanted to hear all about star sapphires.

But it was not tonight, Josephine, for Khris was now leaning out of the window singing, ‘Asia, Asia, just an old sweet song keeps Asia on my mind,’ and Harry was pulling him in, saying, ‘OK, Khris. Cool down and I’ll tell you something. I’ve got one of the boys back there to fix us some chow. I’ve even told him to tell you it’s called American Fried Rice, OK? So, we go and eat now. Then we get some shut-eye.’

‘Sounds good to me, captain.’

Harry turned to me. ‘I would invite you to dine with us, my friend, but we are in third class and a little crowded.’

They were going, leaving me with none for company but the 23 snoring policeman. Harry shook my hand. Khris slapped me on the shoulder and said ‘Good luck’.

‘Perhaps we’ll meet up in Chiang Mai,’ I said.

Harry said, ‘Where are you staying?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘Try the Noi Guest House, near the old town walls. It is run by an old friend of mine, a compatriot. His name is Guy. Tell him you’re a friend of Harry’s. He’ll fix you up.’

‘That’s funny. The policeman here told me to go there.’

Harry looked at the policeman. ‘But, of course. We must listen to what the locals tell us. Even when they’re drunk and asleep they know more than we do.’

‘Thanks for the advice,’ I said. I heard a sour note in my voice. They headed off through the bucking concertina passageway that linked the carriages, Khris stumbling as he went, Harry moving neatly, like a fox through a hedge.

I went back to my carriage. It was quiet, and had the muggy smell of sleep in it. Men slept straight out, legs splayed, mouths open. Women nested, curled ingeniously into the narrow seats. A pair of young soldiers lay against one another, a crew-cut head on a khaki-green shoulder. Some people wore a cloth or sarong over their faces. Sleep is a private business: you go off across some borderline and leave your body alone and unguarded.

The old man opposite was awake, having slept all afternoon. He was smoking a cigarette, staring out at the blackness, or at his reflection, or at neither. He nodded and smiled when I sat down. That had been the extent of our communication through the journey. He didn’t speak English and he didn’t understand me when I spoke Thai. All I knew was that he was heading for Tak, a crossroads town a couple of hours before Chiang Mai, and that his only luggage seemed to be a gearbox for a Massey Ferguson tractor.

The train rolled on, a little arrow of light and purpose bisecting the dark plain. We were still in the flatlands of the Mae Nam basin, the ‘rice bowl of Asia’. Stubble fires burned in the distance, 24 flickerings of orange light like a message one couldn’t understand. I settled down to try and sleep. The old man reached out to touch the window-pane. I felt I knew what he meant: that the window must be strong to hold all that emptiness at bay.

Lan Na

I slept a bit: inconsequential dreams into which the reality of the journey inserted itself from time to time. The old man disembarked at Tak. He wished me luck, ‘Shoke dee na, kap.’ Dawn over the paddy fields, the shadowy blue promise of the hills on the horizon. Then suddenly it was morning, the carriage was awake, Chiang Mai was half an hour away.

Somewhere in the night we had crossed an invisible but not forgotten borderline. We were in Lan Na now, the Kingdom of a Million Rice Fields.

Lan Na, or Lannathai, is one of the old kingdoms that make up modern Thailand. Its early history is hazy. According to the chronicles, the founder of the Lan Na dynasty, King Lao Cankaraja, ruled in the eighth century AD. His capital, Ngoen Nyang, was on the south bank of the Mekong River, near present-day Chiang Saen. The early monarchs of Lan Na are semi-legendary, but they represent a historical reality – the southward migration of the Thai people from their ancestral home in southern China; their pacification of the aboriginal tribes of the region, mainly Mon and Khmer; and their establishing of small principalities or city states (muang). In the thirteenth century, under threat from the Mongol armies of Kublai Khan, the various muang buried their differences. King Mengrai, a descendant of Cankaraja, founded Chiang Mai in 1296, and ruled over the unified kingdom of Lan Na. To the east, in present-day Laos, was Lan Chang, the Kingdom of a Million Elephants (the name survives in Frenchified form as Vientiane, the modern capital of Laos). In the lowlands to the south was the kingdom of Sukhothai, ‘Dawn of Happiness’, the forerunner of Siam. 26

Lan Na flourished for a couple of centuries. Its art and literature reached a peak in the mid-fifteenth century, under King Tilokaraja. The eighth world synod of Theravada Buddhism was held at Chiang Mai in 1477. But the incursions of the Burmese and the growing political power of Siam combined to weaken it, and in 1796 – exactly five centuries after the founding of Chiang Mai – Lan Na was annexed by Siam. It continued to have a measure of autonomy, and it was less than fifty years ago that the office of chao (prince) of Chiang Mai was formally abolished.

The people of northern Thailand still call themselves khon muang, the people of the principalities. They consider themselves Thai in as far as they are citizens of the nation-state of Thailand, and Thai in the broader ethnic sense as well, but they are very conscious of their difference from the Siamese Thai of the central plains. The Siamese are their tribal cousins, no more, as are the Lao of Laos and the Shan of Burma, and the various smaller tribes of ethnic Thai origin: the Lue, the Phuan, the Black and White Tai.

A young man I met in Chiang Mai pointed to a map of Thailand on the wall and said, ‘Our country is in the shape of a bird, like a rooster.’ The eastern bulge is his tail-feathers, the long narrow isthmus of the south his legs. ‘So you see, the land of the Muang is the head of the rooster, and Bangkok is his arsehole.’

Travelling in northern Thailand one senses the hidden shapes beneath the map. The modern nation is both a unifying of older divisions and a dividing up of older unities. There are more Lao in north-eastern Thailand than there are in Laos itself. The Shan of Burma do not call themselves Shan at all, but Thai Yai, the ‘great’ Thai, as opposed to the ‘little’ Thai of the lowlands. Some of the cultural base of northern Thailand is Mon and Khmer, not Thai in the ethnic sense at all. Other groups, like the Karen and the Haw Chinese of the Yunnan, have been here for centuries, and the more recent migration of Chinese hill-tribes into Thailand has further clouded this complex nationality. The hill-tribes – Akha, Hmong, Mien, Lahu, Lisu – belong to clans spread indiscriminately through Thailand, Burma, Laos and southern China. They cross and recross the frontiers as if they don’t exist. 27

Early morning villages, misty banana groves, a bent figure fanning a small fire of brushwood, a tattered sang khati – the monk’s orange robe – tied around the bole of an enormous jackfruit tree. Finally we were at the station on the eastern outskirts of Chiang Mai.

Everyone’s got someone to meet them, it seems, and I’m in that blithery melancholy mood, alone after a night journey, a strange city to deal with before breakfast. It’s best to arrive somewhere in late afternoon or evening, when there’s sanuk in the air and the people are disposed to greet you. In the morning they have many chores, and the farang is just another one.

There were trishaws outside the station, and the pick-up trucks converted for passenger travel which they call song taow, ‘two benches’. Various touts waved bits of paper on behalf of various guest houses. The early morning light was grey and flat, and the street leading off into town looked nondescript. As I negotiated with a trishaw boy, a pick-up passed, and in the back I saw Harry and Khris. Khris leaned forward to wave, called ‘Hey!’, but Harry had his rattan hat tipped low over his eyes and was apparently dozing.

Closer to town were signs of the Flower Festival: the policeman on the train had mentioned this. The trishaw boy said it would be opened by the Prime Minister himself, General Prem Tinsulanoinda. I asked when it would begin and received the typically Thai answer, ‘When Prem comes.’ The floats were parked in a long line leading up to the bridge over the Ping River. They were elaborate constructions, a brilliant topiary of statues and emblems: elephants and monkeys, garuda and naga, and one or two more Disneyesque creations. Each float looked like a solid, sculpted mass of flowers. In fact the flowerheads are tacked onto a frame of wood and polystyrene built over the chassis of a truck or car. The vehicle is invisible except for the wheels and a thin visor of windscreen for the driver.

By the time we drove over the grey sluggish waters of the Ping, the sun was beginning to break through. The light quivered amid the lush bankside greenery. There was something tonic about it: it revived me like a strong cup of coffee.

28 As recommended by Harry, I made my way to the Noi Guest House. It was a two-storey building, L-shaped, tucked down a rickety side-street near the north-eastern corner of the town walls. Wicker tables and chairs were set out in a courtyard shaded by banana and palm trees. It looked cheap and amiable, and I was disappointed to see a carboard sign on the bar, saying ‘Hotel Full’ in several languages.

A tall, bespectacled man in well-pressed jeans was standing by the bar. It was Guy, the patron. I said, ‘I’m a friend of Harry’s. He told me to try here.’

He smiled cautiously. ‘Harry Vincent?’

I realized I didn’t know Harry’s full name. I said, ‘Frenchman, gem-trader, I met him on the train.’

‘I didn’t know he was back in town.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘I wonder what he’s up here for?’

I shrugged. ‘He didn’t say much.’