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In the geography of AIDS, a town called Ruili, In a line of indigo hills along China's border with Burma, features prominently on the world map. From all around Asia, men gravitate to Ruili for jade, rubies, heroin and sex. Then they move on. This has turned Ruili into a confluence of HIV, a main artery where various strains flow together and mutate in lethal ways before racing up into China's bloodstream.

To chronicle the advance of AIDS in the region, TIME reporters traveled to towns like Ruili on China's AIDS highway, retracing what researchers currently believe to be the most active transmission route for a viral strain unique to Asia. In 1989, AIDS made a new inroad into the mainland, penetrating China around the Burmese border. The virus has since hitchhiked along a transportation corridor through Sichuan and Gansu provinces northward to Urümqi, a city in the far western deserts of Xinjiang province. The disease's traveling companions are a familiar crew: drug users and traffickers, prostitutes and truckers, itinerant workers and salesmen. And wherever AIDS visits, it finds familiar accomplices to help it jump to the next town: official denial, public ignorance, discrimination, poverty.

In Ruili's main plaza, where two ancient banyan trees shade a statue of a princess stroking a peacock and where hookers, johns and junkies mingle, you can almost see AIDS spreading from one human to another as clearly as you could under a microscope. No one is a better witness to this death dance under the banyans than Dr. Mong, a Burmese physician whose clients are the invisible people—the underage prostitutes and illegal immigrants who don't officially exist in Ruili but who number in the thousands. Mong is an alias. The doctor prefers not to use his real name because investigating and treating AIDS in Ruili can be dangerous. Local Chinese authorities downplay the epidemic—it's bad business for the gaudy karaoke clubs and the hundreds of beauty parlors where painted women stare at you blankly if you ask for a haircut.

Some evenings, Dr. Mong tightens the knot on his Burmese sarong and strolls up to the plaza. He's in his forties, broad-shouldered with close-cropped hair. The doctor is cheerful but wary of the secret police cruising the square. On the stoop beside a beauty shop, a few junkies are pooling their coins to share a hit of heroin and a single, bloody needle. Farther down, a covey of teenage Burmese prostitutes are negotiating prices with a trio of jade dealers from India. Under their black wigs and their rice-white face paint, the girls look young, spooked and desperate. They try selling themselves for 125 yuan (about $20) but will settle for half that. "Most men here don't like wearing condoms, and the girls can't afford to turn away customers," laments Mong.

Just that morning, a chubby Burmese hooker in her twenties had wandered into the doctor's one-room clinic. Mong had to evict a Burmese youth lying on a cot, wounded in a knife fight, so he could give the girl a private checkup. He found telltale signs of AIDS on her tongue and around her genitals. The doctor reached into his wallet and gave her bus fare back to Burma. "Run away!" he urged her. "Don't even go back for your clothes because the pimp will stop you." A pimp Mong knows, a sinewy man with yellow eyes and reptilian tattoos, forced one of his girls to keep working until the sores on her face were visible even under the greenish glow of Ruili's streetlights and the customers started fleeing from her in terror. If she leaves immediately, the doctor explains, "At least the girl can die at home."

Nearly 20 years have passed since AIDS claimed its first Asian victim, believed to be a 48-year-old male Japanese hemophiliac who received a tainted blood transfusion. Despite advances in treatment, the scourge continues to bully its way into new regions and new demographics. Every day in Asia, 1,192 people die of AIDS-related diseases. Another 2,658 become infected, according to UNAIDS, a U.N. group that monitors the disease globally. Even countries such as Japan and South Korea, which responded aggressively to curb the threat at the outset, are seeing an upsurge in contagion. More than 7 million Asians contracted HIV or AIDS by the end of last year; new cases reported in 2001 totaled 1.07 million, up 17% from the previous year.

Fatalities are still far lower than in AIDS-wracked Africa. But researchers are worried that the mechanisms for transmission are more numerous in Asia, and it's just a matter of time before the slow-simmering epidemic erupts. Asia is more populous than Africa, and Asians are more likely to move from country to country seeking jobs, trading goods and hunting for pleasure. In Africa, HIV is mainly transmitted by sex, while Asia is hit by the double whammy of sexual transmission and infection among intravenous drug users. The virus is striking a younger generation that has become sexually active and believes that AIDS is no longer a killer. Of course it is. Vaccine programs are still in the experimental stages; anti-retroviral drug cocktails can prolong life but are too expensive for most afflicted Asians, even at the bargain price of $24 a month in India. (Treatments cost $850 a month in the U.S.) Because the virus can hole up in the body for up to 10 years without triggering symptoms, it can spread quietly through a community—or even a country—before it breaks the surface like some terrible Leviathan. Warns Chris Beyrer, an Asian AIDS expert and epidemiologist at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health: "This could become an enormous time bomb."

What researchers fear most: AIDS is about to explode in the world's most populous nations—China and India. Each has more than a billion citizens, most of them impoverished. Neither country has comprehensive AIDS awareness programs or adequate health care. India has an estimated 4 million HIV sufferers; that number is growing exponentially as migrant laborers carry the virus from the cities back to the villages. "India may not reach the prevalence of 30% as in Africa, but even a 1% increase for HIV would mean about 1 million new cases," says Dr. Sunithi Solomon, an AIDS worker in Madras who diagnosed the first Indian case in 1986. Ominously, the epidemic has got out of hand in India's northeastern state of Manipur, a locus of Burmese heroin trafficking. Says Dr. Narendra Singh of the Jawaharal Nehru Memorial Hospital in the state capital, Imphal: "Manipur is now doomed."

China, with its 1.3 billion people, looms as an especially large and potentially devastating target for the virus. Per capita, the HIV/AIDS rate in China is still relatively low at 0.08%, or 1 case in every 1,300 citizens. But in a June report titled "China's Titanic Peril," researchers for UNAIDS warned that unless the epidemic is checked swiftly, it could strike 20 million Chinese by 2010. "China is on the verge of a catastrophe that could result in unimaginable human suffering, economic loss and social devastation," according to the report, as the virus spreads from high-risk groups, mainly drug users, to the general population. They placed most of the blame on ineffective government response, characterized by "insufficient openness in confronting the epidemic ... a lack of commitment and leadership ... a crumbling public health care system and severe stigma and discrimination" against AIDS victims.

Mainland health officials—who have been reluctant to acknowledge a disease linked to homosexuals, drug users and prostitutes—are awakening to the threat. This month, official estimates of the number of people in the country infected with HIV were raised from 850,000 to more than 1 million, an encouragingly frank admission for a country that has long handled the problem like a dirty secret.

For TIME reporters, China's AIDS trail began in Ruili, the Chinese border town in Yunnan province. With a centuries-old jade market that draws fortune seekers from as far away as Pakistan and Bangladesh, Ruili is a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities. Here, a new branch of the AIDS family tree, a group of viral substrains broadly referred to as "B/C," has been identified. Dr. Mong, the town's first line of AIDS defense for Burmese prostitutes, collects HIV-positive blood samples from many of the locals, packs them into coolers and sends them to molecular biologists in the U.S., China and Japan. Some of the highly contagious Ruili samples are stored in seven-milliliter vials behind five locked doors in a basement vault of Tokyo's National Institute of Infectious Diseases. There, researchers don rubber gloves, sterile masks and surgeons' gowns as safety precautions before they extract genetic material from the corrupted plasma. Unlocking the structure of the B/C strain could help the Chinese develop better methods for combating it. Similar work is being carried out at Beijing's Center for Disease Control (CDC). Says its chief, Dr. Shao Yiming, China's foremost AIDS expert and a pioneer of B/C molecular research: "The more we understand about the virus and the nature of the host it attacks, the more chance we have of designing an effective vaccine."

There is an urgency to the work. HIV is a mutable germ. As it spreads worldwide, it multiplies into a menagerie of genetically distinct substrains—there are at least 10 different types in Asia—making it more difficult to understand, harder to control and impossible so far to eradicate. A vaccine or drug created for one strain isn't necessarily an effective treatment for another. "The AIDS virus uses very smart [survival] strategies," says Yutaka Takebe, 52, chief of molecular virology and epidemiology in the Tokyo institute.

Variants make drug discovery difficult, but genetic differences at least make it easier to follow the tracks of the disease as it spreads. From blood samples taken from the citizens of Ruili and elsewhere, the Japanese scientists have drawn road maps of the progression of AIDS through China's southwest. For example, HIV-positive blood taken from a Burmese prostitute is likely to harbor the "B" strain, which swept up from Thailand. Scientists say Type B HIV, one of the first to hit Asia, was probably brought in by homosexuals and foreign students returning from the U.S. and Europe in the mid-1980s. Meanwhile, a sample taken from a drug-shooting Indian gem dealer in Ruili would probably belong to the "C" strain common in India. Scientists tracked that virus back to sailors from South Africa, who passed it on to sex workers in Bombay.

In 1996, researchers were startled to discover the Thai and Indian strains had combined in and around Ruili to form a new one: B/C. This recombinant virus, incubated in the bodies of individuals infected with two distinct strains, moved at frightening speed. In just two years, it vaulted through Sichuan and Gansu and invaded Xinjiang. At first, researchers feared B/C might be a superstrain of the virus, capable of replicating more rapidly in the blood and semen of its victims than its parent strains. They have since concluded it does not, but they are still not sure why it is spreading so efficiently. Experts at Beijing's CDC are testing one hypothesis: that China's minority populations are more vulnerable genetically than are the Han majority. First, B/C swept through the Dai along the Burmese border. Then it struck another tribe, the Yi, in Sichuan, followed by the Hui in Gansu and then the Uighurs in Xinjiang, where it quickly came to account for 100% of HIV infections. Reported cases alone in Xinjiang more than doubled to 4,416 between 1998 and 2000. The actual number of those with the disease may be much higher.

Beyrer from Johns Hopkins doubts the answer lies in genetics. He suggests the reason may be simpler: tribesmen use drugs more than the Han Chinese do, and minorities have the tradition of sharing community resources—from food to dirty needles. "Behavior always comes first," Beyrer says.

Indeed, when scientists shared their notes with Chinese police, they found the new strain was sticking closely to China's heroin trafficking route. Long-distance truckers carry Burmese heroin hidden in their flatbeds. They can end up hauling deadlier freight in their veins. One pharmacist at a roadside stop between Urümqi and the desert oasis town of Turpan says that many truckers have gonorrhea, a sign that they are having unprotected sex—and leaving themselves wide open to HIV. In the Sichuan capital, Chengdu, by the Four Carriage Horses Bridge, a hundred or so trucks were parked last month in a muddy courtyard, waiting for new loads. The drivers wolfed down bowls of spicy noodles, gambled at cards and, if they hadn't lost their earnings, summoned over the teenage waitresses. The girls led them up a stairway filled with trash to rooms for a 30-minute romp. Sex without a condom was negotiable, a couple of yuan extra. According to UNAIDS, half of prostitutes surveyed in Sichuan said they never used condoms.

All it takes is a single infected trucker to arrive at one of these motor courtyards and pass HIV to a girl, who in turn spreads it to another trucker, and another, and soon the virus has fanned out across the country. Until recently, China's AIDS problem was largely confined to people infected through tainted blood transfusions and intravenous drug users—about 70% of China's HIV/AIDS victims got the disease by sharing dirty needles, according to 2001 government statistics. But epidemiologists say it is starting to infiltrate a larger swath of the population, using as conduits China's booming prostitution industry and 100 million unregistered migrant workers. Migrants and prostitutes, because they work illegally, are beyond the reach of state health care.

Farther up the AIDS road, at the Salt Lake truck stop in Xinjiang, Yufa leans against the pink neon-lit doorway of a café. She's a farm girl who has been in the sex game for only two weeks. She's wearing an ill-fitting red gown, and her feet hurt. Her pale, exposed shoulders are a sharp contrast to her face, burnt from laboring in fields. She came from Sichuan to look for factory work in Urümqi after her young husband died, leaving her with two children "and only the sky overhead," she says. In Urümqi, there were no jobs. A stranger fixed her up at a roadside brothel where she sells herself for $3. "Sure, I know about the disease," she says. "But I'm not so pretty, and I only get maybe three clients a week. If they won't use a condom, fine. I'll do it anyway. What choice do I have? I can't let my children die of hunger." Then her eyes return to the desert highway, where the trucks roll by.

In the provinces, many people have never heard of AIDS. Even when they have, awareness is distorted by superstition and bureaucratic myopia. An official for a foreign ngo operating in western China says an AIDS survey in Yunnan was halted when a local official realized that the HIV rate was rising far higher than expected. The official didn't want to lose face with his superiors, so he stopped counting. In Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, a local government billboard proclaims AIDS a "foreigners' disease" and cautions that anyone who has overseas guests should burn their bedsheets and slippers. (HIV is not transmitted through incidental contact with objects.) "My damn pimp lied to me," complains a Burmese girl at a Ruili cafE upon being informed that HIV is passed on by sex without condoms. "He told me I couldn't get the disease from men who were Han Chinese—only from the Dai minority. If I have it, I'll kill myself."

The fragmented nature of China's AIDS prevention and treatment programs leaves the country's flanks exposed to epidemic. Beijing's current five-year plan for AIDS education aspires to enlighten just 45% of the country's 900 million peasants by 2005. Officials are so conflicted over how to attack the problem that they wind up attacking those who are trying to help. On the mainland, there are a handful of AIDS activists, scientists and health care workers waging lonely campaigns against the disease. One of the most famous, Wan Yanhai, founder of an organization called the AIDS Action Project, is best known for exposing the plight of perhaps as many as a million farmers in Henan province who contracted HIV when they sold their plasma to illegal blood banks using unsanitary collection methods. Wan's whistle-blowing has made him very unpopular in certain Communist Party offices. On Aug. 24 he was picked up by state security officers and held secretly for nearly a month. Last Friday, amid mounting international pressure, he was released without formal charges. He could not be reached, but a friend who visited him shortly after he was freed noticed "a clear change in his demeanor. He seemed disoriented and rather shaken."

Because authorities think activists are abetting undesirables—drug addicts, homosexuals, prostitutes—AIDS workers must keep a low profile. That's antithetical to effective prevention programs, which work better when they are broadcast widely and loudly through the media. Activists instead conduct underground, door-to-door campaigns among high-risk groups, passing out condoms and safe-sex booklets like Avon ladies handing out lipstick samples in China's brothels, saunas, massage parlors and gay meeting places.

It's proselytizing at its grittiest, and it's easy to despair, says activist Chung To. A Hong Kong resident who was a financial adviser in New York City and San Francisco, Chung lost many friends when the virus scoured those cities in the 1980s. He now regularly visits the mainland to spread the gospel of prevention and operates a one-person office in Beijing for his Chi Heng Foundation. Chung says he was recently at a sauna in Beijing where the man next to him bragged that he had had sex with seven men the night before, all without a condom. "The more I see, the more problems I see," says Chung, shaking his head. "There's too much to do and too little time."

The story is much the same throughout Asia. Most countries, even the poorest, have AIDS awareness programs, but they tend to be underfunded and slow to react. AIDS workers cite a litany of other shortcomings. Medical blood supplies need closer surveillance. Condoms are too expensive for the poor. "There's a massive failure of prevention," says Beyrer from Johns Hopkins. "This is a human tragedy that doesn't have to happen."

Asians, too, can't shake the notion that AIDS victims deserve their misery because of their own misbehavior. Xiao Su, a Beijing AIDS patient in his early thirties, says he can no longer return to his home village in Yunnan. His parents, who are doctors, are shunned by their neighbors because of his illness. "When old friends pass them on the street, they look the other way," Xiao says. Ostracism makes it all the more difficult to arrest the epidemic's spread. Throughout the region, a depressing pattern emerges: people who find out they are HIV positive feel too panicked and guilty to confess to their partners that they are ill, so the disease festers secretly and is passed on to spouses and children.

In Burma, it is believed that the heat from an ordinary funeral pyre isn't fierce enough to kill the virus, and so the dead are cremated with burning tires. This way, even in death, the AIDS sufferer is stigmatized. "The cruelest part about AIDS is the rejection," says Alongkot Tikapanyo, a Buddhist monk who since 1992 has tended to more than 10,000 AIDS victims at the Wat Prabat Nam Poo temple north of Bangkok. Today, his hospice takes care not just of men and prostitutes but a growing number of infected housewives and children.

Inside the "Bone Museum" located on the temple grounds, Alongkot keeps the ashes of more than 1,000 dead, each in a gray, brick-size box—remains that families did not want. The collection has become a macabre local attraction. "AIDS tours" arrive daily at the temple. Some Thais come to pay homage to Alongkot, while others bring their sons and daughters to scare them into good behavior. After viewing the withered corpses of several AIDS victims floating in a cloudy formaldehyde pool, 11-year-old Kannika says with a shiver, "I'm afraid. Now that I know, I won't do anything bad."

Still, too few know. Meanwhile in U.S. and Japanese labs, researchers are playing catch-up with a virus that keeps mutating. In Xinjiang, it may be only a matter of months, they say, before the B/C strain melds with another strain carried over the Hindu Kush mountains by drug users from Pakistan and Afghanistan, evolving a new, invisible menace for which there is no vaccine and no cure. Says AIDS researcher Kitty Poundstone from Johns Hopkins School for Medicine and Public Health in Baltimore: "You've got to be faster than the virus. So far, we're not." Science, it seems, can't save this continent from AIDS. Asians will have to save themselves.

• Tim McGirk and Susan Jakes
• Far from being contained, Asia's HIV epidemic is poised to explode. TIME tracks the route of the virus