Well, not quite. Situated in Burma's Shan state, less than a mile from the Chinese border, Mongla is ruled by a brutal heroin trafficker and has an unsavory reputation as a freewheeling center for gambling and prostitution. Yet, curiously, the Burmese regime is promoting it as a model town. Why? To find out, I hired a car and driver and set out for Monglathe town that drugs built.
Until very recently, it was just an insignificant village in a sparsely populated area of northeastern Burma. It owed its remarkable transformationand its notorietyto a Shan Chinese druglord called Lin Mingxian. Lin had been a field commander in the Communist Party of Burma, or CPB, a formidable insurgent group that once occupied a large swath of northeastern Shan state. When the CPB collapsed in 1989, Lin led a breakaway faction of over 3,500 soldiers, taking control of an opium-rich wilderness bordering China, Laos and Thailand.
What happened next was extraordinary. Rather than take on Lin and his well-equipped private army, Burma's generals cut a generous deal with him. In return for keeping the peace, Lin was granted immunity from prosecution and full autonomy in the Mongla region. The regime also gave him lucrative business concessions in gold, timber and gems, as well ascruciallytacit permission to trade in opium.
This Faustian deal was one of several the junta made with the opium warlords within its borders. They have helped Burma become one of the world's largest opium producers, and the source of at least half the heroin sold in the U.S. Soon Lin was opening new heroin-smuggling routes in Southeast Asia to get his product to the U.S. and Australia. The U.S. State Department identified Lin and his Wa allies as key players in the heroin and methamphetamines trade. A single refinery belonging to the Lin syndicate could manufacture anything up to 2,000 tons of pure heroin every year.
Drugs made Lin a very rich man, but they were only one source of his enormous income. Mongla was a transshipment area for smuggling Chinese laborers through Thailand and into America. For this service the laborers paid up to $40,000 each; some paid again with their lives. Three hundred Chinese hailing from Lin's territory were aboard a ship that ran aground off New Jersey in 1993. Scores of them drowned trying to swim ashore through heavy seas.
Meanwhile, Mongla grew. Casinos and other tourist attractions were built, and soon thousands of Chinese day-trippers from neighboring Yunnan province were pouring over the border to visit them. Later I picked up an official tourism leaflet, written in Chinese, which described Mongla as "a beautiful and prosperous region (with) unique natural scenery and curious local customs." One of those curious customs was public executions. Lin governed his private fiefdom with medieval brutality. On one occasion three men suspected of plotting to assassinate him were dragged into the busy market and machine-gunned to death by his teenage bodyguards.
To reach Mongla you must negotiate a bewildering variety of checkpoints. An hour or so before the town, I stopped at a bridge to show my documents at a Burmese immigration post. On the other side I was waved through two fortified checkpoints manned by conspicuously armed soldiers. This was the first indication that I had entered Lin's territory: the soldiers were not Burmese, but belonged to the National Democratic Alliance Armya fancy name for Lin's private militia. A few miles farther on, my entry was officially recorded at a small roadside booth by a grumpy, half-naked man playing Tetris.
Mongla sprawls across a spacious valley bound by dark hills. I drove along the high street, where many old buildings had been demolished and replaced by the standard-issue shophouses, some of which doubled as cheap brothels. Most residents had retreated inside to escape the sweltering heat, and the streets were empty apart from a grimy Akha woman sifting through the trash cans.
I didn't linger for long, since there was a chance I'd miss the first attraction on my whistle-stop tour of Monglathe transvestite show. The venue was on a hill to the south of town, at the end of a road leading past the crocodile show and through landscaped hills. At the top of the hill was a large parking lot packed with Chinese minibuses. The show was taking place in a dark hall packed with people, its air moist and overbreathed and circulated by several ineffectual ceiling fans.
A low stage festooned with blinking lights ran the length of the room. One transvestite gyrated upon it in a translucent top and high heels. Another lay nearby, legs akimbo, doing something unspeakable with a cigarette. I couldn't quite see what: there were so many heads craning into my line of vision. A song was playing, scratchily amplified: "Ladyboy, ladyboy/ I wanna be a ladyboy."