Narcotopia E-Book

Patrick Winn

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 645

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Award-winning journalist - and author of Hello, Shadowlands - Patrick Winn reveals the inside story of a forbidden republic - the narco-state of the Wa. The jagged mountains dividing China and Burma belong to the Wa, an indigenous group who have outwitted the CIA to create the world's mightiest narco-state, controlling more territory than Israel and with more troops than Sweden. Are they crime lords? Or visionaries? Wa State has become a real nation with its own highways, anthems, schools and flags. Its leaders promise freedom, using profits from trafficking heroin and meth to attain what China's other frontier peoples, Tibetans and Uyghurs, can only dream of: a state of their own. Patrick Winn embarks on a risky journey of discovery, chasing clues about the forbidden republic from Thailand to Burma to the secretive Wa State itself.

Leseprobe

 

 

Copyright © 2024 by Patrick Winn

Published in the UK in 2024 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-178578-973-1

eBook: 978-178578-974-8

The right of Patrick Winn to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Print book interior design by Bart Dawson

To all the world’s highlanders

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

The Nations and People of Narcotopia

Maps

Prologue

Superstar

BOOK ONE

First Encounter

Stranger in the Peaks

Guns, Drugs, and Espionage

The League of Warlords

Enslaved No More

BOOK TWO

Unspeakable

The Prodigy

Mr. Success

Nativity

BOOK THREE

Confidential Informant

Kick the Cat

The Burn

Torpedo

The Summit

BOOK FOUR

Manifest Destiny

The Great Migration

Vanilla Speed

Whiskey Alpha

Mountain Fortress China

The Reckoning

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Saw Lu’s Manifesto

Notes

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Most accounts of the drug trade are told from the law enforcement perspective. There is a reason for this. Drug Enforcement Administration agents who describe their adventures to journalists are often lionized. They might even score a budget hike for their department.

But drug traffickers have little incentive to tell their stories. In that profession, running your mouth leads to prison or worse. The upshot is that most drug war stories sound the same: valorous detectives battling vile figures—the junkie, the pusher, the kingpin.

It is a genre of half-told tales.

This book does not presume virtue among antinarcotics agents or cruelty among traffickers, or vice versa. I’ve relied heavily on accounts of lawbreakers in the Golden Triangle, some of whom risked their necks to talk to me. Because few of these sources are scrupulous record keepers, I’m forced to lean on their memories. Every attempt has been made to corroborate their oral histories with other witnesses, but in some cases I can only present recollections as they were told.

Police records and anthropological studies of Wa rituals helped me reconstruct scenes. Central Intelligence Agency and DEA documents proved vital. Some are declassified, others acquired by creative means. For clarity’s sake, I’ve sometimes rendered multiple conversations into one or shifted the order in which certain facts were revealed to me. Most names in this book are genuine, but I’ve disguised several identities to prevent retribution, from either criminals or government agents.

These are my caveats. They allow for perspectives seldom heard. Few of the stories in this book appear elsewhere. My goal is to present a narrative that is more expansive and truthful, less monochromatic. There is good and evil in this book, but it mostly resides in the heads of its characters, crusading for honor and power and always believing themselves more righteous than their enemies.

Finally, a note about the term Golden Triangle, which lacks a formal definition. I use it to describe Southeast Asia’s drug-producing heartland: a mountainous area, almost entirely in Burma, that seeps across the borders of China, Laos, and Thailand. It is, to coin a phrase, a Narcotopia—a place where narcotics are a defining force shaping commerce, politics, and daily life. This zone powers a regional heroin-and-meth economy that is, according to the United Nations, possibly worth more than the entire GDP of Burma itself.1

THE NATIONS AND PEOPLE OF NARCOTOPIA

THE NATIONS

Wa State

Population: 600,000

Size: ~12,000 square miles

Governance: authoritarian

Ruled by the United Wa State Army (UWSA). Split into two noncontiguous territories, the motherland and Wa South, both inside Burma’s borders but off-limits to Burmese authorities. Wa State does not seek formal independence status with the international community; yet it functions, for all intents and purposes, as a sovereign state.

Burma (officially, Myanmar)

Population: 54 million

Size: 261,000 square miles

Governance: military dictatorship

Former British colony that broke free in 1948. Since 1962, controlled by an isolationist military regime. This junta fears both China and the United States—as well as its own citizens, especially ethnic minorities in the hills. Burmese is the dominant ethnicity, accounting for two-thirds of the population, living mostly in the lowlands. Burma’s mountainous borderlands are beyond government control and ruled by indigenous armed groups, the Wa being the most powerful of them all.

Shanland (defunct)

Peak population: 3–4 million

Peak size: ~5,000 square miles

Governance: authoritarian personality cult

A rogue nation that existed from 1976 to 1996. Controlled patches of territory along the Thai-Burma border. Led by Khun Sa, a world-class heroin trafficker. He was also a self-avowed freedom fighter for the Shan, the largest of Burma’s minority groups and ethnic cousins to Thais. Shanland was targeted by both the Drug Enforcement Administration and Central Intelligence Agency.

Thailand

Population: 72 million

Size: 198,000 square miles

Governance: military-dominated quasi-democracy

Major US ally since the Cold War. Then and now, provides a base of operations for the CIA and DEA. Narcotics produced in Burma’s landlocked mountains flow south through Thailand to reach global markets, making the Thai-Burma border one of the world’s busiest drug-smuggling zones. Much of that border is now controlled by the UWSA.

China

Population: 1.4 billion

Size: 3.7 million square miles

Governance: communism (one-party authoritarianism)

US rival. Strives for dominance of Southeast Asia. Ruled since 1949 by the Communist Party of China, which enforces strict laws against drug use among its own citizens. However, China is not above colluding with drug traffickers. Beijing supports the UWSA under an agreement: the Wa can only traffic drugs to other countries, never China.

Communist Party of Burma (associated group, now defunct)

A disbanded surrogate of China’s Communist Party. This armed group, headed by ethnic Burmese Maoists, hoped to conquer all of Burma but failed. It only succeeded in occupying the Wa motherland from the late 1960s to the late 1980s.

United States of America

Population: 332 million

Size: 3.8 million square miles

Governance: democracy, empire

Strives for global supremacy. Competes with China for sway over Southeast Asia. Strongly allied with Thailand. Antagonistic toward Burma’s isolationist dictatorship, which resists taking sides. America also seeks the UWSA’s downfall. Historically, the United States exerts influence on the Southeast Asian narcotics trade through two agencies: the DEA and the CIA.

US Drug Enforcement Administration

Collaborates with overseas police and troops to seize narcotics and arrest foreign drug traffickers.

US Central Intelligence Agency

Upholds American supremacy by covert means: gathering intel and sabotage. Willing to conspire with criminal organizations, even drug traffickers.

The Exiles (associated group, now defunct)

Once Asia’s largest opium-trafficking cartel. Rooted in the Thai-Burma border from the 1960s to the 1980s. Protected from prosecution by the CIA. The Exiles cartel assisted US and Taiwanese spies in espionage operations along the Burma-China border, sometimes using Wa warlords as assets.

The League of Warlords (associated group, now defunct)

A short-lived coalition of Wa warlords in the late 1960s to early 1970s. Sold opium to the Exiles. Some members aided CIA operations against China. Led by four warlords: Saw Lu, Shah, Mahasang, and Master of Creation.

THE PEOPLE

Saw Lu (Wa): Born in 1944 on the China-Burma border. Raised in an American Baptist missionary sect. An anticommunist warlord in his youth. Later a top UWSA leader—and DEA asset.

Jacob (Wa): Saw Lu’s pious son-in-law, married to his daughter, Grace. Born in the late 1970s.

Lai (Wa): Born circa 1940 in the Wa highlands. Full name: Zhao Nyi Lai. A Maoist guerrilla in his youth but later rejected the ideology in favor of Wa nationalism. Founding father of Wa State.

Bao (Wa): Wa State’s current leader. Born in 1949 in Wa highlands. Full name: Bao Youxiang. Former communist guerrilla commander turned Wa ethnonationalist.

Wei Xuegang (Wa-Chinese): The most successful drug lord of the twenty-first century so far. Born mid-1940s in the Wa peaks. Former Khun Sa protégé. Finance czar of the UWSA since 1989.

Khun Sa (Shan-Chinese): The most powerful Asian drug lord of the latter twentieth century. Born in 1934 in Burma’s Shan foothills. Original name: Zhang Qifu. Founder of Shanland and a former mentor to Wei Xuegang.

Gen. Lee Wen-huan (Chinese): Born in 1917 in China’s Yunnan province near the Burma border. Scion of an opium-merchant clan. A die-hard anticommunist, he fled to Burma after China’s Maoist takeover in 1949. A founder of the Exiles. Protected by the CIA and the Thai military.

Angelo Saladino (American): Lead DEA agent in Burma from 1989 to 1992. Formerly posted in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Rick Horn (American): Lead DEA agent in Burma in 1992 and 1993.

John Whalen (American): Longest-running DEA agent in Burma. Arrived in 1997 and retired in 2014.

Franklin “Pancho” Huddle (American): Top US State Department official (chargé d’affaires) in Burma from 1990 to 1994. Oversaw feuding DEA and CIA bureaus inside the US embassy.

Bill Young (American): DEA operative based in Chiang Mai. Former CIA officer who became disgruntled with the spy agency. Grandson of legendary Baptist missionary William Marcus Young, known as the “Man-God.”

PROLOGUE

The Wa are among the most vilified people in Asia, if not the world.

This has been true for ages. To the Imperial British, they were “filthy” and “undoubtedly savage.” Before that, China’s Qing dynasty deemed them the “most obstinate among the barbarians.”1

Even Vasco da Gama slandered the Wa, though the sixteenth-century explorer never reached their homeland: a jagged stretch of mountains dividing Burma and China. He’d only heard rumors about the tribe, which he immortalized in a poem:2

On human flesh, with brutal hunger they feed

And with hot irons stamp their own—rude deed!

He was wrong. The Wa weren’t cannibals. They were headhunters, ritually planting enemies’ heads on spikes. Like Scottish clans and French revolutionaries, they had their reasons.

From the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, the Wa have been steadily denigrated. They quit head-hunting a few generations ago—the last skulls were lopped off sometime between Beatlemania and disco—but the stigma endures. They’re now branded as a narco-tribe. Practically everything written about the Wa portrays them as vicious hill people who churn out illegal drugs.

Few cultures are so strongly linked to a commodity. The Amish build furniture. The Swiss make watches. The Wa cook meth—and before meth was in vogue, the Wa churned out heroin. Their soil is cold and bitter, terrible for vegetables but ideal for heroin’s raw ingredient: Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy.

Like mountain peoples from Chechnya to the Ozarks, the Wa like to do things their own way. A tribal authority called the United Wa State Army (UWSA) controls their native terrain, even though every inch technically sits inside Myanmar, also known as Burma. The UWSA makes laws, defends its motherland, builds roads, and collects taxes. It even issues driver’s licenses. In every sense, it is a government. Yet to the United States of America, the latest empire to target the Wa, the UWSA is just a cabal of “kingpins” and “drug lords” presiding over a “dangerous criminal syndicate.” Dangerous to whom? Americans, we are told. That may surprise the Americans who’ve never heard of the Wa people, which is practically all of them. Still the Drug Enforcement Administration insists that the Wa foster “crime, violence and terrible social damage here in the US.”

Illegal drugs are indeed one of the UWSA’s top revenue sources. Over the years, tons of narcotics produced on Wa soil have hit the black market, and traffickers have smuggled them onto American shores. The DEA therefore sees the UWSA as a Mastodon-sized trophy kill. America’s stated goal is to “disrupt and dismantle” the entire system of Wa governance.

Herein lies the problem. The UWSA isn’t some jungle-dwelling mafia. It’s running an honest-to-God nation called Wa State, home to more than half a million people. It has its own schools, electricity grid, anthems, and flags. Because it is not sanctified by the United Nations, its territory isn’t marked on official maps, but it comprises more than twelve thousand square miles. Wa State controls nearly as much soil as the Netherlands.

Wa State’s army commands thirty thousand troops and twenty thousand reservists, more than the militaries of Sweden or Kenya. The Wa possess high-tech weaponry: artillery, drones, and missiles that can knock jets out of the sky. When it comes to firepower, the UWSA makes Mexican cartels look like street gangs. The Wa stockpile guns for a reason. America isn’t the only country they’ve had to worry about. Wa people are indigenous to China’s frontier, just like Tibetans and Uyghurs, minorities who’ve suffered deeply under a Chinese government that micromanages their every move. The Wa have faced the same threat.

So why is there a “Free Tibet” movement but none to free the Wa? Because they freed themselves. Yet, through Western eyes, they did it the wrong way: by producing illegal drugs, spending the profits on weapons, and daring outsiders to come take their land.

There’s no getting around it. Just as Haiti was built on sugar and Saudi Arabia on oil, Wa State was built on heroin and methamphetamine. The UWSA sits at the core of a Southeast Asian drug trade generating $60 billion each year in meth alone.3 The national economies of most “real” countries are smaller than that.

Wa leaders are indeed sovereigns of a narco-state. But to capture them and toss them into American prisons would wipe out the executive branch of a foreign government. In other words, it would constitute regime change. This book is based on a modest conviction: when a superpower tries to undermine an entire civilization and doom its people as untouchables on the world stage, it is essential to seek out the underdog’s side of the story. That is what I’ve spent years trying to do.

I’m an American journalist who has lived and worked in Bangkok for more than fifteen years. In my day job with The World, a foreign affairs show airing on National Public Radio stations, I might cover anything from pop groups to riots. But I’m also a part-time narcoperiodista: a reporter specializing in drugs and organized crime. The premise of my first book (Hello, Shadowlands) is that lawbreakers tend to be rational actors, not just black-hearted ghouls. It’s a collection of real-life stories about smugglers and rebels in Southeast Asia. You might suppose it would offer the UWSA more than a cameo, but that was all I could muster. Like Vasco da Gama, I’d only encountered the Wa through secondhand tales.

I’ve been fascinated with Wa State—a forbidden republic hiding in plain sight—since the moment I learned of its existence. Growing up in a factory town in the Appalachian foothills, I have a soft spot for mountain peoples and always assumed the Wa couldn’t be as sinister as their reputation. But it is hard—no, really damn hard—to get to Wa State, vastly more difficult than traveling to North Korea or Antarctica. Americans face the highest bar to entry because the UWSA regards all US citizens as potential spies. Harder still is sitting down with UWSA leaders, many of whom are wanted by the DEA. Still I set out to meet the supposed supervillains of Asia’s drug trade and understand their worldview.

This book is the result. It is the saga of an indigenous people who’ve tapped the power of narcotics to create a nation where there was none before. But much more is at stake here than the struggle of a little-known tribal group. Hollywood and cable news would have us think the War on Drugs is a conflict solely waged in the Americas. They’ve wrung dry every last detail about Latin kingpins. Meanwhile, Asia’s underworld goes ignored. It is treated as a fringe curiosity that has little to do with the United States.

That is a dangerous lie.

When I began peering into the UWSA’s inner workings, I didn’t expect to find puppies and marshmallows, but what I uncovered was far stranger than I ever imagined. As it turns out, the origin story of this narco-army is smudged with American fingerprints. Not only did the Central Intelligence Agency create the conditions for its inception, but one of its foremost leaders was also a DEA asset.

The American government tells us the UWSA is a monster “poisoning our society for profit.” But this is a beast that US agents, through malice and incompetence, have secretly nurtured.

Every empire needs its barbarians.

SUPERSTAR

They called him Superstar.

His former Drug Enforcement Administration handlers still speak of him with reverence, which is unusual, because confidential informants are seldom praised by anyone. CIs rat out fellow criminals to spare themselves from prison. Some CIs snitch for envelopes of cash, others to help police arrest their underworld rivals. As DEA agents see it, most are liars and squirmers who believe in nothing bigger than themselves.

But Superstar was different. Unlike other CIs, he brought a grad student’s intensity to the informant role. His DEA handlers would go to a rendezvous in some Burmese safe house and find him already waiting inside, a sheaf of papers on his lap. His handwritten reports contained coordinates of heroin refineries and upcountry poppy farms, even rosters of corrupt police. They read like almanacs of crime.

“My God,” said one DEA analyst, “the intel he gave us and the things he did to get it.” Said a DEA agent, “I don’t want to give away any sensitive secrets. But he certainly earned it—the name Superstar.” And yet another agent said, “I’d never met a CI who was also an idealist.”

As DEA agents extracted information from Superstar, he sought to extract something in return: a promise that America would honor its Christian soul and uplift the world’s downtrodden, including his own people: the Wa. Superstar had a dream that, one day, Wa children would tote schoolbooks instead of Kalashnikovs. That Wa elders, once prone to decapitating outsiders on sight, would welcome foreigners into their homes. He imagined a doctor on every mountain to spare the sick from pointless death. A Wa nation of which he could feel proud.

Superstar told the DEA that the Wa wanted to go clean. They would torch their poppy fields, demolish their heroin labs, and stop making the white poison that so entranced addicts in New York and Los Angeles, a people clueless about the Wa yet spellbound by the silky powder they produced. In exchange, Superstar wanted American aid: schools, hospitals, expertise in building a modern nation, and the glory that comes from friendship with the United States.

Superstar believed divine forces sought to bind together the world’s most powerful country and its most despised tribe—and that he was God’s intermediary. He was a CI who talked like a messiah. “Like the heroin addicts that result from opium we grow, we too are in bondage,” he wrote in one of his classified reports. “We are searching for help to break that bondage.”

He dreamed of an alliance between the DEA and the United Wa State Army—known to the United States as a drug cartel. The agents had every reason to laugh. Yet, one by one, Superstar seduced them with this radical idea: that the DEA might bring about the largest narcotics eradication in history without firing a single bullet. For a brief time, there emerged on the horizon the glimmers of a bloodless alternative to the War on Drugs.

The DEA called him Superstar. But by the time I met him, no one had used his code name in a very long time. He was an old man with scars and a conviction somehow undiminished by a tragic life.

He made me call him by his Wa name: Saw Lu.

BOOK ONE

FIRST ENCOUNTER

It’s been said there are two ways to enter Wa lands: fight your way in or get invited.1 Since my last fight was in middle school (I lost), I’d have to invite myself. If only I knew how to start the conversation.

The United Wa State Army (UWSA) has many trappings of government: a central committee and departments of finance, health, and education, but it does not have a press bureau that actively courts international media. The UWSA would rather starve journalists of contact, particularly Westerners, assuming anything we write will further the same old “narco-tribe” narrative. Google UWSA and you’ll see why. The acronym conjures thirdhand stories about meth labs and child soldiers inside what the BBC calls “one of the most secretive places on earth.”

Over the years, I’d requested permission to visit Wa State through various interlocutors. Sometimes I’d get a curt no. Usually I was ignored. But in 2019 my stubbornness generated a twinkle of hope. My emails to a senior UWSA officer—an envoy of sorts—received a reply written by the envoy’s assistant in Google Translate–assisted English. First he asked for scans of my passport, which I sent reluctantly. Then he told me to come to their office later in the week—a de facto UWSA embassy, located in a Burmese city called Lashio, roughly fifty miles west of Wa territory.

The assistant did not provide a street address or a date or time. I tried to nail down the particulars, but his follow-ups made little sense.

Good morning, Patrick, thanks to received your concerning.

Yours, Wa State

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

Screw it, I thought. An invite’s an invite. I bought a ticket from Bangkok to Lashio and started packing. In my luggage: envelopes full of pristine $100 bills (always good to have in Burma) and a box of chocolates for the envoy. My wife was skeptical—“Is this a date?”—but the chocolates, I explained, were treats for his children, a gesture that might skirt the Kingpin Act, a piece of US legislation that can put anyone ­conducting “dealings” with the UWSA in prison for ten years.

Then I scrambled to line up a translator, ideally a Wa person in Lashio who could articulate my long-shot request: to enter the UWSA’s territory and interview its leaders. I contacted a local travel agency, usually a good source of people who are bilingual and outgoing. Over email, they put me in touch with a “high-character Wa guy around 40 years old with a history of working for the Wa government.” Perfect.

The interpreter introduced himself in an email—I’ll call him Jacob—and wrote that he looked forward to meeting me at Lashio’s airport. I told him not to bother. I could make my way to the hotel just fine on my own. But he wouldn’t have it. Jacob was waiting outside the arrival hall, among the taxi touts and ladies with thanaka, tree-bark paste, painted on their cheeks. He was scanning for a pale face coming out of baggage claim. When I emerged, he jostled forth, flip-flops squeaking on the tile floor—a stranger coming straight at me with a handshake. His free hand relieved me of my luggage.

“Oh, Jacob? I can carry that.”

“No, Mr. Patrick. Let me do it. It is a pleasure to make fellowship with you.”

Bespectacled, his onyx hair gelled into a schoolboy part, Jacob wore a clean sweater and gray jogging pants in lieu of the usual sarong, worn by men and women alike in Burma. We walked toward his car, parked beyond a security booth manned by officers with shotguns. My wheeled suitcase rattled behind him.

“Your first time in Lashio,” Jacob said. I took it as a question.

“Yes, though I can’t count how many times I’ve been to—”

I stopped myself from saying either Burma or Myanmar. A person’s preference between these names indicates their politics, and I did not want to reveal much about myself, not just yet.

“—this country.”

I detected a stagger in Jacob’s walk, more pronounced as he wheeled my luggage. Most Wa males have served in the UWSA—each household must hand over at least one son for a few years, sometimes at the tender age of twelve—and I wondered if he’d been injured while soldiering.

“Did police bother you inside the airport?” he said.

“Not really.” When I came off the plane, two vacant-eyed Burmese cops waved me aside and took camera-phone snaps of my face. Nothing atypical. I was relieved they didn’t ask the purpose of my visit.

“I don’t think police will be a problem on your visit,” said Jacob, sliding my suitcase into the trunk of his old Japanese hatchback. “Don’t worry. We will take care of you here.”

JACOB TOLD ME my hotel was close to the airport distance-wise, “but we’ll have to take the long way around.” There was something in the way: Northeast Command Headquarters, a giant Burmese military base.

Lashio is an army town and has been since the British colonial days. It sits on a plateau with mountains hunkering on the horizon. As far back as Queen Victoria’s time, British troops used it as a staging ground for raids into the peaks. They were hellbent on conquering native tribes.

This subjugation drive remains unfinished. When the Brits pulled out after World War II, ending more than a century of occupation, Burma became an independent country. Its military picked up where their colonizers left off, deploying brute force into the borderlands. The old colonial machinery creaks on—only now the generals are Buddhist and ethnically Burmese, the country’s majority race, native to the balmy lowlands. Their mission is to dominate everyone inside the former colony’s borders, especially the unruly mountain folk. They’re not very good at it though.

Beyond Lashio, eastward in the direction of China, military rule weakens and the country shatters into pieces. It is an archipelago of rebellions—the scattered domains of hill-dwelling minorities: the Shan, Kachin, Kokang, and Lahu, to name a few of Burma’s minorities, which number in the dozens. They intend to rule themselves, and most have their own mini-governments, complete with armed wings defending patches of homeland with rifles and rockets. Among these groups, the UWSA is the mightiest. Just as the Wa terrified the British in the 1800s, they terrify the Burmese military now.

Cruising past Northeast Command HQ, I took in a sprawling fortress secured behind spiky iron gates. Seeing Burmese platoons running drills on a dusty field, I wondered which indigenous group they’d attack next. “It’s good you didn’t need to fly here last month,” Jacob told me. Apparently some guerrillas crept down from the hills, lobbed mortars at the army base, missed, and blew up the airport runway. “There were no flights for a while.”

Jacob was full of questions. Was I married? Yes. Is your wife American? Thai-American and we live in Bangkok. In which American state did I grow up? Carolina. I omitted the “North” so he wouldn’t mistake me for a northerner, but Jacob knew his US states, asking if I was from the Carolina that touches Tennessee. Impressive.

My turn. You work for that travel agency? No, I am well known in town, and they just connected us as a courtesy. Where do you work? I have various jobs, he said, failing to elaborate. Family? Yes, wife and kids. Languages? Wa, Burmese, English, some Chinese.

Are you friendly with the UWSA envoy? Yes, he said, the Wa community here is small. Jacob said he was finalizing a meeting for me inside the UWSA “embassy,” a compound where the Wa conduct diplomacy with lowlanders.

“That’s great. So wait. Are you in the UWSA too?” Jacob hesitated. After a long pause, he said no.

It was late afternoon. Lashio appeared typical of any second-tier Burmese city. Leafy creepers running up concrete walls. Metal rooftops splotched coffee-orange with rust. Sun-bleached billboards for instant coffee powder or jade necklaces. A patina of dust cast a sepia tint over the streetscape.

Jacob braked in front of my hotel. A sign out front depicted a handgun x-ed out: a “no weapons” pictogram. “Patrick, I have prepared a schedule,” Jacob said as he retrieved my luggage from the car. “Tomorrow, I will greet you here at 8:15 a.m. We will eat breakfast from 8:20 to 8:45. Then we will arrive at the UWSA office at 9 a.m. for your meeting.”

I’d only seen that degree of punctuality in Germans and military officers. Jacob was not German.

“That’s very specific,” I said teasingly. He did not smile.

“I like to be on time. Enjoy your rest and God bless.”

THE NEXT MORNING, I took the stairs down to the lobby, declining the elevator over fears that a citywide power outage could trap me in that metal box and sabotage my precious appointment. I descended to find Jacob sitting on a sofa, his forehead crumpled in a pained expression.

“Oh, Patrick. I am very sorry. I just found out. Our meeting is canceled. The envoy was called urgently to Panghsang.”

Wa State’s capital, UWSA headquarters. Located on the China- Burma border, roughly one hundred miles and a zillion checkpoints away. Jacob stared down at his phone, holding it like a kid presenting a bad report card.

“When will he return?”

“In a few days maybe. It is not certain.”

“What if I just hang out in Lashio until he comes back?”

That was fine; Jacob’s week was open. But even as I voiced the suggestion, I thought it sounded risky. There was no way to know if there had been a genuine scheduling mishap or the envoy had zero intention of ever seeing me. The envoy’s main role was smoothing relations with Burma, the country that Wa State awkwardly nests inside. That made him a bureaucrat, and in my experience, bureaucrats in Southeast Asia never tell you to get lost. They’d rather ghost you or rain-check the meeting eternally.

Jacob took me to a tea shop for breakfast. Then we cruised around town, two strangers with an ocean of time ahead of us. I assumed he was driving aimlessly until his car strained up a hill and he announced, “Here it is. Our Wa village.”

In a typical village in Burma, you see bamboo shelters bent by gravity and mothers squatting over charcoal fires. Here the streets were arranged in blocks lined with two-story homes. There were middle-class signifiers: satellite dishes, trucks in driveways, balconies with wrought-iron banisters. Painted on the sides of a few homes were buffalo skulls, a Wa symbol of vitality.

“A village? This looks more like a neighborhood.”

“A village in spirit,” he said. “All people here are Wa. All coming from the same place.”

I pointed at the mountains in the distance. He laughed. “Yes, from that direction but more far than you can see. There was trouble in an old Wa village called Pang Wai. They had to flee here and start over. It happened before I was born.”

The largest home, squatting atop the hill’s summit, was painted sea-foam green and defended by heavy steel gates. Security cameras peered down from the awnings. “The home of our village leader,” Jacob said. “A very important man.” I was surprised to see an old red-brick chapel right across from the very important leader’s home. A crimson cross painted on its wooden doors removed any doubt: this was a church. Out front, there were two wooden beams jutting upward from the dirt, and strung between them with a heavy chain was an ancient-looking bombshell. Jacob parked next to it, engine idling.

“Patrick, what is your religion?”

I’d expected this. Race and religion undergird every social interaction in Burma. They predetermine your allies and rivals, your career prospects, whether you are merely neglected by the state or targeted by its attack choppers. The stakes for me, a foreign visitor, were obviously far lower, but the wrong answer could close doors. I wasn’t sure how to respond. I knew the UWSA was a strictly areligious organization. I knew that the Wa traditionally worshipped a multitude of spirits in nature. But atheist still felt like the wrong answer.

“I was raised going to church.”

“Yes, but what kind? RC or Baptist?” RC meaning Roman Catholic.

“Baptist.”

Jacob perked up. “This is our Baptist church!” He hopped out of the car, shuffled over to the dangling bombshell, and rapped it with his knuckles. It groaned like a Tibetan gong. A makeshift church bell, he explained. Hung by the village leader after he established this village, long ago, in the wake of a terrible exodus from their Wa homeland.

“Your people here were pushed out because they were Christian?”

“Something like that. Very few Wa are Christian, and the rest view us with suspicion.” Jacob said the Christian Wa had been seen as judgmental by the other Wa going back a hundred years, when the former urged the latter to quit planting human skulls on sticks.

Last stop on the tour: a cobbled-together house, half brick, half wood, roof of crinkle-cut tin. It looked a touch shabbier than the other homes. “This is where I live with my wife and children. I hope you will come to dinner sometime. How about tonight?”

It was decided. Jacob would drop me back at the hotel while he and his wife prepared a Wa feast. He would then retrieve me at 17:20 for our 17:30 meal.

JACOB’S LIMP DID NOT owe to some old battle injury. I realized this on the way into his house as I knelt by the stoop to unlace my shoes. I got a close look at his right foot, wrapped in fresh gauze. A minor infection, he said, catching me staring.

“I just need to buy some pills. I will take care of it after your trip.”

I felt a twinge of guilt. My imagination had superimposed a grim backstory on Jacob just because he was Wa. I also worried he needed my payment for his translation services to afford antibiotics. That guilt surged when I saw the dinner table. His wife, Grace, was laying out a fantastic spread: fatty cubes of pork, a big golden-fried fish, and a Wa staple called moik, a risotto-like rice dish flecked with herbs. So much for stereotypes about unwelcoming Wa. For many in Burma, meat is a once-a-week luxury. They were splurging on my behalf.

They asked me to bless the food, Baptist style. We held hands, and I bumbled through. Then we dined al fresco on a concrete patio by their back garden. Over dinner, I confessed that I was not a churchgoer. That’s fine, Jacob said. Not long ago, his life had been devoted more to the UWSA than to Jesus Christ.

“So you were a soldier.”

“An officer,” he said. “But never fighting. I don’t like fighting.”

“What did you do?”

“Mostly education. I started by teaching small soldiers.” I asked if he meant soldiers with low rank. “No,” he said, standing up and holding his hand at rib height to indicate a short person. “Ten years old. Eleven, twelve.”

As we talked about the UWSA, Jacob slipped into the tone of a man recounting a tragic divorce. “It is a lot to explain, Patrick. There are good people in the UWSA wanting to make our government better. But some leaders, they are not so good. Inside our society there is . . .”

Fumbling for the right word, he beat his fists together.

“A war?”

“Not that strong. But OK. Like a war. Between people who are striving and people who only care about money.” Striving was one of Jacob’s favorite English words. He believed all of humanity was divided between the selfish and the strivers, the latter pursuing some cause bigger than themselves.

His wife spooned more moik onto my plate. “Imagine you want to set up a dirty business deal,” Jacob said. “The UWSA officers will run to meet you. But if you want to discuss doing good, like building a school, they will arrive two hours late or not at all.”

“You like people to be on time.”

“Yes,” he said. “Wa people are far behind. We cannot waste time.”

I sensed an opening. My obsession with the UWSA centered on two leaders. One was Chairman Bao Youxiang, the face of the Wa nation. Like Fidel Castro, he appears to own only one set of clothes: olive-green fatigues, occasionally accented with an Hermès belt. His resting expression is grumpy: lips downturned, eyebrows slanted in a V of vexation.

“What about Chairman Bao? Have you met him?”

“Many times.”

“Is he good or bad?”

“Pretty good. A very striving man.”

The Drug Enforcement Administration has a different take on Bao. It identifies him as a “drug lord.” But in the DEA hierarchy, drug lord is a rung below the more treacherous “kingpin,” a title for narco-moguls so paramount that, were they killed, a huge part of the global drug trade would instantly collapse. So goes the DEA theory.

The leader on whom I was truly fixated was the UWSA’s so-called kingpin: Wei Xuegang, the organization’s finance czar and the DEA’s most wanted man in Asia. Whether the UWSA is itself a drug cartel—or a government financed by an in-house drug cartel—is a matter of semantics. Either way, Wei masterminds its drug trafficking, and he is as mysterious as he is powerful. In one of the only known photos of Wei, a grainy mugshot from the late 1980s, he is scowling. He may be 5'6", but to the DEA he is Sasquatch.

I started to ask Jacob about Wei but didn’t want to spook him. Better to stick to Bao for now. “Jacob, what do you think? Am I crazy to ask for an interview with Chairman Bao?”

Jacob pushed his glasses back up his nose and sighed. He translated my question to his wife. Grace said nothing but studied my face carefully. Jacob asked what I wanted to know exactly. Everything, I said. Opium. Heroin. Crystal meth. How the whole operation started. What it all looked like from the inside. What the outside world got wrong. And I wanted it from someone with gravitas.

Jacob muttered something to his wife. Both of them seemed to be thinking hard. Grace abruptly scooted her chair back, legs screeching on the concrete. She went into a back garden and rang someone on her mobile phone. I could see her pacing under a canopy of banana trees, talking in a deferential voice. Jacob’s ears were cocked to his wife’s conversation. The energy felt odd, and I was beginning to regret bringing up Schedule II narcotics during an otherwise lovely dinner.

When she returned to the table smiling, I could not have felt more relieved.

“OK!”

“OK what, Jacob?”

“The village leader will meet you. An important man like Chairman Bao. His name is Saw Lu. He is the father of my wife. He is . . .”

Jacob was grasping for the word.

“Father-in-law?”

“Yes, Patrick. Saw Lu is my father-in-law.”

WE WERE IMMEDIATELY up and moving, trying to catch Saw Lu before bedtime. Jacob talked fast. He had only five minutes to brief me on our walk. Saw Lu was once the UWSA’s top statesman, his ranking equal to that of Chairman Bao. Jacob struggled to convey the totality of his eminence. He’d been a warrior, a diplomat, and an inspiration, but most of all Saw Lu was a founding father—an architect of Wa nationhood. There was little about the UWSA he did not know. Whether he would indulge my questions would depend on his mood.

A servant girl unlocked the gates to Saw Lu’s compound and led us into a living room. The man of the house would be down in a moment. His home’s decor looked very 1970s: the walls were painted teal and splotched with condensation stains too deep to scrub off; the furniture looked straight out of a Sears catalog. There were tables topped with doilies and, in one corner, a clunky electrical converter. Everyone in Burma has one, lest power surges fry your electronics, but this model was prehistoric. It wasn’t a poor home but one in which the owner did not believe in extravagance.

I deduced the family’s prestige by looking up. As in many Southeast Asian homes, photos of kids and grandkids who’ve gone to college are mounted high on the wall, mortarboards and tassels on their heads, staring down at guests. You usually see one or two at most. Saw Lu’s exhibition of university graduates ran wall to wall. In the center of it all, in pride of place, was a portrait of the patriarch: Saw Lu in full regalia, emerald-colored uniform with brass buttons, a peaked cap and a crimson breast tag reading “UWSA.” It was a novel sight for me at least—a Wa leader presented not as a fugitive glowering in a mugshot but as a hero worthy of a gilt frame.

This young Saw Lu in the portrait looked debonair with his bright black eyes and service pistol jutting from his leather belt. Though clearly Christian to the core—the opposite wall was graced with a painting of white Jesus—Saw Lu had a face like the Buddha: broad nose, full lips, imperturbable confidence.

The door creaked, and I turned to see a grayer, heavier Saw Lu. He wore slacks and a plaid shirt. Jacob offered an arm to steady the old man’s walk, but he waved him off and plopped down in a chair.

I introduced myself as a journalist. Saw Lu asked in his sandpaper rasp if I was American. I thought the answer would make him tense up. Instead his shoulders relaxed. He murmured a question to Jacob in the Wa language, and I caught the letters “D-E-A.” Jacob stole a glance at me, looked back at his father-in-law, and shrugged, as if to say he had no idea.

“Like I said, Saw Lu, it’s an honor to meet you. Is it alright if I take notes?”

Go ahead, he said. I’d expected an interrogation or long preamble, but it seemed like he’d done this before—played man with the answers for a foreigner scribbling on a notepad. Scoring an interview like this should have taken months. Here I was, on day one, sitting across from the Wa nation’s answer to Ben Franklin, apparently, and despite years of research, I felt utterly unprepared. All I could manage was a run-on question about how the Wa started their nation and got mixed up in narcotics.

“No,” he said.

No?

The opium came first. Then the nation. And before both, an epoch of self-annihilating blood feuds that stretched back before recorded history. Skull collecting. The tribe’s original sin. A ritual that left the Wa weak and disunited, unable to come together as one powerful race.

Saw Lu sent the servant girl to fetch tea.

“Let’s start at the beginning. Would you like to hear about the headhunters?”

STRANGER IN THE PEAKS

WINTER, LATE 1966.

Saw Lu plodded uphill on feet numb with cold. At his back were Burma’s nubby hills, rounded like molars. He was advancing into the Wa highlands where mountains take the shape of fangs. As he ascended, the whine of insects dimmed. The trees grew stunted, and the air went thin, quickening his breath.

Beside the pebbly trails were skulls mounted on sticks. Crania were arranged in neat rows with eye cavities facing west: the direction of setting suns, the direction of death. That is how the Wa conveyed “no trespassing” without words.

Two or three skulls posted by the trail warned that a small Wa hamlet was nearby. A midsize Wa village might declare itself with twenty heads. But Saw Lu’s destination was Pang Wai, a larger settlement worthy of many dozens of skulls glaring at intruders from hollow sockets, some splotched green-black with lichen, fresher kills gleaming white. Headhunters always arrayed skulls at a fair distance from any settlement’s entrance—as if to offer uninvited visitors one last chance to heed their squirming bowels and turn back.

Saw Lu saw this grim menagerie and trudged onward. Call it courage if you like. Anyone who knew the Wa by reputation would think him insane. You simply did not enter the realm of headhunters, not without an army. Saw Lu wasn’t even carrying a rifle. Worse yet, he’d brought his new wife, Mary, baby-faced, barely out of her teenage years, and wed to a man dragging her through a forest of horrors.1

Saw Lu was only twenty-two himself, and once he got an idea in his head, he would not let it go, even if it could get him decapitated. This was not just some facet of youth. Stubbornness was coded into his very being. At the time, Saw Lu’s notion was this: I am going to get inside Pang Wai, this bastion of headhunters. And I will not leave until its inhabitants, my ethnic kinfolk, are civilized Wa like me.

As an agent of Burma’s military regime, Saw Lu had orders. He was sent to assimilate among the headhunters, then somehow persuade them to hone their killing prowess against Chinese communists. High peaks form a natural buffer between Burma and China, but at the time China’s government was plotting to come over those mountains and spread communism to Burma’s indigenous peoples, starting with the Wa.

Though their land technically fell on the Burma side, the headhunters felt no loyalty to Burma or any nation at all. So if he managed to gain their trust, Saw Lu would present the pitch: defend the status quo, for the Burmese will never try to dominate your ancestral lands—unlike Chinese communists, fervid under Mao Zedong’s leadership, who hope to erase your unique tribal identity and extinguish your way of life.

Saw Lu intended to follow orders, but only because they aligned with his own personal agenda. As a self-proclaimed “civilized” Wa, educated since childhood by American missionaries, he hoped to enlighten his race in every single way. As Burma’s junta instructed, Saw Lu would unite them against communism, but then go further: abolishing their head-hunting ritual, teaching them to read, and perhaps even converting a few to Christianity. It was a near-impossible feat, and Saw Lu didn’t have much of a plan. But he felt confident that, in time, he’d find a way to succeed and all Wa would hail him as their savior.

As Saw Lu and Mary reached the outskirts of Pang Wai, they realized the town was larger than they’d imagined. Its outer defensive walls rose high as the trees. At a distance they could see these ramparts were made of packed mud and thick logs, and upon those walls, the Wa had planted hrax, a shrub with lacerating thorns, a living form of barbed wire.

They could not walk toward the fortress town from any which way. The Wa were known to surround settlements with traps: moats filled not with water (for water was scarce in the highlands) but with wooden spikes, each sharp point lathered with poison milked from amphibian glands. There was only one proper way to approach the town: a trench path. Entrants had to climb down into a dirt rut and proceed forward. With each step, the trench deepened, gradually forming a mini-canyon that blocked out the sun. This dark corridor snaked at odd angles, shortening lines of sight. Navigating that black gauntlet, Saw Lu and Mary feared swordsmen would lunge from blind corners. But none emerged as they pushed ahead. After a few minutes, the tunnel disgorged them into the sunlight, and they stood before two wooden doors, tall as giants, set into the fortress walls.

Pang Wai’s doors were ajar. Within minutes the couple was spotted.

Soon they stood half encircled by Wa men and women, nude except for cloth scraps hanging over their genitals, their bodies plastered with dust the color of yellowed bone.

Saw Lu told Mary to keep quiet. He stepped forward to let the people assess him. He was doe-eyed, thin but sturdy, and richly melanated like most Wa, more so than the Chinese to the east or the Burmese to the west. But the similarities between his appearance and that of his onlookers ended there. Saw Lu was dressed like a lowlander: plaid sarong, shirt with buttons, leather shoes. His panther-black hair was combed to the side. The barefoot observers were unsure what to make of him. It did not seem this man could belong to their race until Wa words spilled from his mouth.

We want to live among you, Saw Lu said. My wife and I. We have come to seek permission.

Permission? From whom? There was no one to give it, they said. Anyone who was truly Wa ought to know that.

THE WA DID NOT obey any man with a golden crown or some council of priests. The fortress town of Pang Wai didn’t have jailers or shopkeepers either. With few exceptions, there was only one class of person: the warrior-farmer, an anarchist who did as he or she pleased.2

The few outsiders who’d encountered the Wa in the past always struggled to believe people could be so free. In the late 1800s, British colonizers—intent on adding the Wa highlands to Burma, their colony—marched in with a similar request: take me to your leader. Surely, the explorers wrote, this “race of ogres . . . dark-skinned, dirty, poor and savage” must kneel to a great Wa chieftain whom the British Crown could manipulate.3 But they were wrong. The tribe was scattered into a constellation of many fortresses, each thoroughly independent and often estranged from the others.

How to subjugate a people with no leader? The British were flummoxed. Still they persisted in encroaching upon Wa lands, even after receiving a warning, in 1897, from a village: “Please return by the route you came. Ours is a wild country and the people devour rats and squirrels raw. Our people and yours have nothing in common.” 4 Only after losing a few of their own heads did the would-be colonizers get the message. They slunk away in defeat but added the Wa highlands to paper maps of Burma anyway—as if the peaks had been conquered. This was pure fiction. Privately the Brits groused that the Wa were “notoriously subject to nobody.”5

That remained true in Pang Wai well into the mid-1960s when Saw Lu and Mary showed up at the town gates. All the better, for there was no ruler who could make them leave. Had they come as gun-toting colonizers or warriors from a rival clan, the locals might have chopped them down on the spot. But the couple was deemed harmless, led inside the town walls, and shown a patch of land where they might build a home.

Not a home, Saw Lu said, correcting his hosts. A school. We’ve come to build a school for you.

Saw Lu and Mary explored the cloistered interior of Pang Wai. Within its walls were hundreds of wooden dwellings with bristly thatch roofs and spacious interiors, big enough to light a cooking fire inside. The town was well populated with more than five hundred denizens and alive with singing children, groaning buffalo, and the clink of ironwork. A painted drum carved from a log occupied its center. This was their public broadcasting system. Morse code–like rhythms could signal danger (enemies incoming) or joy (a successful hunt). Pang Wai even had aqueducts: bamboo piping snaked over the walls and up to a gurgling stream on the mountainside. Fresh water on demand was a great convenience, the locals explained, because they hated traveling beyond the front gates. They would only do so in groups lest they fall victim to enemy clans. Women hardly ever left the walls except to till nearby poppy or corn fields. The men only left to farm, hunt, or slay rivals. They always hurried back.

The locals were kind to Saw Lu and Mary, helping them gather bamboo to build their house. Actually, we’re building a school, they repeated. Within days, the couple’s novelty wore off. Saw Lu kept repeating that he was ethnically Wa just like them. No one argued, even though his incessant questions revealed an ignorance about the simplest facts of life in the highlands.

Saw Lu and Mary felt hopeful. Though they’d feared living among crazed headhunters, there was little sadism on display. Perhaps the skull-gathering ritual was only perpetrated by a vicious few. Surely most of these softhearted villagers would recoil at such violence. But this naïveté would not survive the month of March—when they witnessed neighbors cheering in front of a newly severed head.

Head-hunting season was beginning.

Half a dozen Pang Wai men had just returned from the wilderness, and they nestled the human head in the crook of a tree, right at eye level. It had a ferrous stink, like rusty nails. Everyone in Pang Wai crowded around, eager for face time with the year’s first kill. At these spectacles, aunties would shoulder their way to the front of the throng to gently tease the head: Oh, dear, why did you walk through the forest alone, presenting such a gift to our warriors? They’d crack an egg on its teeth and dribble yolk into its mouth: a final snack for the dead, whose sacrifice would bless them with good fortune.

What had the victim done to anger the headhunters? Another one of Saw Lu’s obtuse questions. It wasn’t personal, the killers explained. Wrong clan, wrong place, wrong time. The headhunters said they’d crept toward an enemy fortress and laid an ambush on the approaching trail. Some guy happened to walk past. They sprang from the bramble, jostling to sever his spinal cord, and left the body twitching on the trail. They stuffed the head into a wicker basket and hoofed it back to Pang Wai with blood crusting on their chests.

That was the how of the killing. As for the why, Saw Lu knew the gist. Though not raised among headhunters, he was Wa enough to know the tribe’s guiding belief—that every human head was suffused with a mystical force. Only the Wa race could extract its power and manipulate it for their own needs.

The procedure was simple: plant the head on a pole, let the flesh decompose and drip onto the soil below. The warrior-farmers would scoop up that gore-sopped dirt and scatter it among seedlings in the fields. Its death force acted as supernatural pesticide, scaring off vermin and insects.6 Failure to uphold the ritual would result in pests eating your crops and starvation in your village. Per local custom, this newly cleaved head would remain inside Pang Wai’s walls until every bit of tissue had sloughed off. Only when the skull was sun blanched and smooth would the warriors add it to their exhibition by the trail—the one Saw Lu and Mary had passed on their way into the fortress town.

Saw Lu was repulsed. But the locals were joyful, as if the home team had just pulled off a victory. Their joy had a sharp edge, though, especially among men who’d failed to join the hunt. They were possessed by a restless feeling that found its release with the favored sport of the highlands. Someone trotted a hulking black buffalo into a dirt arena next to the drum. Men clutching blades encircled the beast. One of them hacked off its tail and flung it skyward; like the firing of a starter pistol, this signaled the game’s start. They pounced on the buffalo, swords rising and falling, misting the air red. Whoever sheared off the biggest flanks would be declared victor and enjoy honor second only to that of the headhunters. Competitors often lost fingers in the frenzy, Saw Lu was told. Sometimes ears.

The game was over in minutes. But celebrations carried on into the evening. When the sun fell behind the peaks, they replaced its warmth with a bonfire. The Wa skewered buffalo meat and glugged rice wine from communal bamboo jugs. The drum was rhythmically thwacked. Young and old alike twirled around the flames and collapsed in fits of glee.

But Saw Lu was not in a twirling mood. Their fun was obscene to him. He stood with Mary at the edge of the circle, in the flickering orange light, pitying the revelers for falling under a demonic trance. Some old-timers gathered around them, hoping to impress the newcomers with big-fish tales. One elder, bent with age, boasted that he’d once lopped off the head of a man sprinting at full speed. Nudging Saw Lu in the ribs, he asked, How far do you think a man can run without his head attached?

I wouldn’t know, Saw Lu said.

Farther than you think! His body kept running down the trail as I held his head in my hands.

Lord, give me strength, Saw Lu thought. How will I ever make such people decent? He breathed in deeply and reminded himself it was possible—for he was Wa, after all, and the Americans had civilized him.

SAW LU WAS born in 1944 amid the last days of an unusual sect. His people were Wa, but not noticeably so, for they covered their bodies in scratchy black tunics and believed that decapitation angered God.

That is what their oracle had taught them.

The oracle’s name was William Marcus Young, an American Baptist missionary from Nebraska. He had a walrus mustache and a conviction that his fiery gospel could refine any nonbeliever, even people from forsaken tribes. Young longed to test his skills in remote parts of Asia, and at the beginning of the twentieth century, in his early thirties, Young sailed with his wife to Burma. It was then a colony ruled by the British Empire, which encouraged missionaries to roam its fringes as “civilizing agents.”

The Youngs made their way to the colony’s northern environs: a rolling hill country known as Shan State, home to many ethnic groups. At first they focused on converting the Shan, Burma’s largest minority group and the most populous race in its north. Most Shan dwelled in fertile valleys, congregating in small, upcountry kingdoms with glittering temples and lively bazaars. Like the Thais, their ethnic cousins, Shan people nurtured a rich faith in Buddhism.7 They were painfully disinterested in diatribes about Jesus. William Marcus Young lurked around a town called Kengtung, attempting to convert the locals, but he was mocked and occasionally robbed. He achieved little during his first two decades in Burma apart from fathering two sons.8

Then came a miracle on four hooves: an alpine-white pony ambling toward the preacher one afternoon. Trailing it were three tribesmen from some faraway place. This creature is enchanted, the bare-chested strangers told Young. We have chased it for weeks down forbidding mountain paths. It leads us to a “great white teacher,” an oracle bearing the “true religion.”9

Me?

Indeed. Our tribe is called the Wa, the men said. And you, sir, must be the “bearer of the white book and white law of God.” The trio implored William Marcus Young to pack up his belongings and venture east—beyond the reaches of the British Empire. Follow us to a desperate place where wickedness reigns. Your arrival will fulfill a prophecy that a white man shall someday come to teach our tribe to live in piety.

So goes the Young family lore. Apocryphal would be putting it politely. But this is how the Youngs always explained why they moved to the Wa ancestral lands—or rather to their outlying edges. The tribesmen would not lead the Youngs directly into the Wa peaks where headhunters ruled. Even we cannot go there safely, they said. We are a peace-loving offshoot of Wa who’ve abandoned our violent heartland to settle nearby, in lower-lying green knolls close to the peaks—an area called Banna.10