we climbed inside that blacked-out car, at a
casino on the muddy banks of the Mekong River.Our rustbucket longboat spluttered
gamely across the river from Thailand
to Laos and into another world.
Brownshirted guards at the Laos border took
£27 for visas into their country. But the place
beyond the exit signs – the place I and three
others had travelled halfway across the world
to see – was somewhere else altogether. The
Kings Romans resort is a jungle Vegas, carved
out of a special economic zone (SEZ) the size
of 20 Hyde Parks in the heart of the Golden
Triangle, where the borders of Laos, Thailand
and Myanmar meet. Its vibe is low-rent hedon-
ism, a Roman orgy with nibbles from Greggs.
The resort’s owner, Zhao Wei, is Chinese. So
is everything else. People spend yuan, speak
Mandarin and may travel there visa-free from
China. A statue of Confucius greets visitors to
a faux-historic Chinese village. Lao cops rarely
patrol. Even its clocks are set an hour forward
to Beijing time.
The first suggestion you’re stepping into a
modern-day Gomorrah is the gold dome of
a half-built hotel that pokes from a rolling,
low-slung landscape of trees and hills. The
second is a Routemaster-sized gold-and-green
crown that sits atop the Blue Shield Casino, the
Kings Romans’ premier gaming venue. Loaded
Chinese come to gamble away millions – some-
thing that, until recently, they could do within
China’s borders only on the island of Macau.
Our hotel, the Kapok Garden – named for
a sprawling Central American tree – was less
glamorous. Its sky-blue walls were peeling in
the heat and a lot of rattletrap cars and pedal
rickshaws hardly screamed wealth. Inside, a sign
on the wall advertised a “Zero Clock” room to
rent by the hour. Alcohol, as inside the casino,
was banned. Just down the street is a Chinese
“Ayia Napa”, where neon signs beckon punters
into restaurants, bars and dozens of pink-lit
venues with names such as “Leisure Club”.
Cranes cast long shadows on crumbling streets,
along which convoys of trucks transport con-
struction material throughout the day. Despite
its shady reputation – or more likely because of
it – the Kings Romans is a boomtown.
Zhao’s own journey began 66 years ago in
Heilongjiang Province, a vast, poor region on
China’s northeast border with Russia, where
he became a successful timber merchant. He
poured his earnings into gambling – first in
Macau, then the Burmese-Chinese border town
of Mong La, where in 2000 he built the Nan
Dun Casino. Zhao imported Chinese workers
and exotic fauna, some of which is said to have
wound up on the casino’s food menus.
The region became a ground zero for the
region’s illicit drug trade. Mong La sits in Shan
State, an empty, lush corner of Myanmar theAn unmarked car, its windows tinted, lurches
along barely paved jungle roads. In it are four
soldiers of an army with no state – backed
by China, tolerated by Myanmar and recog-
nised by nobody. I’m sitting in the back, dressed
in a green military uniform made for me the
previous day.
Around us is dense, green jungle, Burmese
military and little else. Ahead is part of the
biggest illegal drug industry on earth. If our
guides get cold feet, or if the Burmese guards
see that the men on the back seat aren’t locals,
we could be killed. We don’t care. Our destina-
tion is to see something no reporter has before:
inside a Burmese meth lab.
This was supposed to be a simple story about
a jungle “Las Vegas” that had sprouted allegedly
to service the booming drug manufacturing
trade in the lawless borderlands between Laos,
Thailand and Burma, about drug cartels so huge
that their bosses make El Chapo look like a
street-level pill pusher. These jungle mafias have
created a £47 billion cash cow that destroys lives
from Europe to New Zealand and has brought
entire Southeast Asian cities to a halt.
At the heart of all this is the thing we’ve
spent weeks hurtling through perilous hin-
terlands to find: The Machine. It’s a saga
that’s taken us to corners of Myanmar in
perpetual conflict, cleaved by dozens of armed
groups and riddled with mines. Foreigners are
forbidden entry to these “black zones”, in
which hundreds die and from which, by some
estimates, 250 tonnes of methamphetamine –
not to mention heroin, crystal meth and other
perilous narcotics – are pumped into a world
that is now home to 24.7 million addicts.
It’s a journey that began four months beforeNightfall,somewhereon the Thai-Burmeseb or der.Inside the Leisure
Club on the grounds
of Laos’ Kings
Romans resort
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182 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2020