LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘Whose houses are those?’ I enquired at the first village we came to, where several new dwellings stood out glaringly among the old dark wooden ones.

      ‘They belong to families who have daughters working in the brothels in Thailand.’

      ‘And those cars?’

      ‘They are on the way from Singapore to China. The Wa, they’re no longer headhunters. They’re smugglers.’

      ‘In heroin?’

      ‘Only in part. Here in the south they’re in competition with Khun Sa, the real drug king.’

      We drove into the mountains, which still looked as if they were hiding a thousand mysteries. In the old maps this part of the world was labelled the ‘Shan States’ because the Shan, who came from China in the twelfth century to escape the advancing Mongols, formed the bulk of the population. The whole region was a sort of living museum of the most varied humanity. Apart from the Shan there were dozens of other tribes living there, each with its own language, its own customs and traditions, its own way of farming and hunting. The encounter with these different groups, of which the Pao’, Meo, Karen and Wa tribes became the best known, was one of the great surprises that greeted the first European explorers in the region.

      The long necks of the ‘giraffe women’ of the Padaung, like the tiny bound feet of Chinese women, exemplified Asia’s bizarre aberrations. Even today, the Padaung judge a woman’s beauty by the length of her neck. From birth every girl has big silver rings forced under her chin. By the time she is old enough to marry her head will be sixteen to twenty inches above her shoulders, supported by a stack of these precious collars. If they were removed she would die of suffocation: her head would fall to one side and her breathing would be cut off.

      For centuries the Shan have resisted every attempt on the part of the Burmese to dominate them, and have managed to stay independent. The British too, when at the end of the nineteenth century they arrived from India to extend their colonial power, recognized the authority of the thirty-three sawbaws, the Shan kings, and left them to administer their rural dominions, which bore names like ‘the Kingdom of a Thousand Banana Trees’.

      In 1938 Maurice Collis, a sometime colonial administrator who became a writer, visited the Shan States and tried to bring to the attention of the British public this unknown wonder of the Empire. Kengtung, with its thirty-two monasteries, struck him as a pearl, and he found it absurd that no one in London seemed to have heard of it. The book he wrote, The Lords of the Sunset – as the sawbaws were called, to distinguish them from the ‘Lords of the Dawn’, the kings of western Burma – is the last testimony of a traveller in that uncontaminated world of peasant kings, where life had been the same for centuries, its rhythm that of old ceremonies, its rules those of feudal ties. I had brought that fifty-five-year-old book with me as a guide.

      The road that took us to Kengtung was in places little more than a cart track, barely ten feet wide and full of potholes, often perilously skirting the edge of a precipice, but it was obviously of recent construction.

      ‘Who built it?’ I asked Andrew.

      ‘You’ll see them soon.’ Andrew had realized that we were not normal tourists, but that did not seem to worry him. Quite the contrary.

      After a few miles Andrew told the driver to stop near a pile of timber at the side of the road. We had scarcely got out of the jeep than we heard a strange clanking sound from the brushwood, like chains being dragged. Yes – chains they were. They were around the ankles of about twenty emaciated ghosts of men, some shaking with fever, all in dusty rags, moving wearily in unison like an enormous centipede, with a long tree trunk on their shoulders. The chains on their feet were joined to another around their waists.

      The two soldiers accompanying the prisoners made us a sign with their rifles to drop our cameras.

      ‘They’re missionaries. Don’t worry,’ said Andrew. It worked. A couple of cigarettes added conviction.

      The prisoners put down the trunk and stopped. One of them said he was from Pegu, another from Mandalay. Both had been arrested five years before, during the great demonstrations for democracy: political prisoners, doing forced labour.

      It is strange to stand before such an atrocity, be obliged to take mental notes and discreetly snap a few photos, trying to avoid risks and not to give those poor devils more problems than they already had; and then to realize that you have not even had the time to feel compassion, to exchange a word of simple humanity. You suddenly find yourself looking into an abyss of pain, you try to imagine its depths, and all you can think of asking is, ‘And those?’ pointing to the chains.

      ‘I’ve had them on for two years. One more and I’ll be able to take them off,’ said the young man from Pegu. He was one of the lucky ones: he was wearing a pair of old socks that slightly mitigated the contact of the iron rings with his flesh. Others, lacking such protection, had ugly wounds on their ankles.

      ‘And malaria?’

      ‘Lots,’ said the young man from Mandalay, turning mechanically to his neighbour, who was shaking, yellow and puffy-faced. His bony hands were covered in strange stains, like burns. The prisoners – about a hundred in all – lived in a field not far away. Soon we were to see their companions, also chained, breaking stones on the riverbed. These too were guarded by armed soldiers, who would not allow us to stop.

      Since the coup in 1988, the massacre of the demonstrators and the arrest of the heroine of the pro-democracy struggle Aung San Suu Kyi, the Rangoon dictators have continued to terrorize the country and to stifle any expression of dissent at birth. Tens of thousands, especially young people, have been arrested and sent to forced labour, used as porters in the army or in fields mined by the guerrillas. Political prisoners are thrown in with common criminals in this forgotten tropical gulag.

      ‘There are camps like this everywhere,’ Andrew said. ‘Private firms acquire contracts for road-building, and go to the prisons for the men they need. If they die they go back and take some more.’ He had heard that to build the 103 miles of road from Tachileck to Kengtung several hundred men had already died.

      It took us seven hours to cover those 103 miles, but by the time we arrived in Kengtung the use of that road was clear to us: it was Burma’s road to the future. Though its original purpose had been to finance the dictatorship and to provide an umbilical cord linking Burma with the neighbouring countries that shared its goals – China and Thailand – by now the road lived by a logic of its own, and served all sorts of people for all sorts of traffic. Communist ex-guerrillas, recently converted to opium cultivation, use it to move consignments of drugs; the Wa, former headhunters, to smuggle cars, jade and antiques; Thai gangsters to top up their supply of prostitutes with young Burmese girls. Thanks to its isolation Burma has, so far, staved off the AIDS epidemic, so these girls, often only thirteen or fourteen years old, are in great demand for the Thai brothels, where thousands of them are already working. At the end of 1992 about a hundred who tested HIV positive were expelled and sent home. Rumour has it that the Burmese military killed them with strychnine injections.

      We arrived in Kengtung at sunset. After many miles of tiresome ascents and descents, through narrow gorges between monotonous mountains where the eye never had the relief of distance, we suddenly found ourselves in a vast, airy valley. In the middle of it white pagodas, wooden houses and the dark green contours of great rain trees were silhouetted like paper cutouts against a background of mist that glowed first pink and then gold in the setting sun. Kengtung was evanescent, incorporeal like the memory of a dream, a vision outside time. We stopped; and perhaps, from the distance, we saw the Kengtung of centuries ago, when the four brothers of the legend drained the lake that once filled the valley, built the city, and erected the first pagoda. There they placed the eight hairs of Buddha, which the Great Teacher had left when passing through.

      The town was at supper. Through the open doorways of the shop-houses, with dogs on the thresholds, we could see families sitting around their tables. Oil lamps cast great shadows on walls dotted with photographs, calendars and sacred images. There was no traffic on the streets; the air was filled with

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