British GQ - 04.2020

>> Aside from its garish Greco-Roman marble

pillars and statues, there was little to report.

Roughly the dimensions of a football pitch, it

comprises a ground floor of low-stakes bacca-

rat tables, a pool room and an upstairs lounge

of high-rolling, chain-smoking Chinese youth,

tossing $1,000 chips like peanut shells.

Outside the Blue Shield, things get weird. At

night the resort comes alive with street-food

alleys and thumping techno that hops across

streets filled with groups of drunk young men.

Many of them sport bloodshot, thousand-

yard stares – a sign of meth abuse. Women sit

on plastic chairs looking bored – or nervous.

It’s as easy to buy drugs as noodles. Finding

underage girls (the legal age of consent in Laos

is 15) is tougher. Twice we visited brothels,

telling madams their employees were “too

fat”, a gnomic for wanting kids that we said

through gritted teeth. Twice we were turned

away. Annoyed we were wasting her clients’

time, our driver – the same from that morning

• took us to another hulking club, 15 minutes
  away on the edge of the SEZ border.
  Swarms of skinny-jeaned Scheherazades
  swayed to ear-piercing electronic music, back-
  dropped by a big screen relaying sexts punters
  left via WeChat. Beers were bought by the
  dozen and sex workers took clients to six small
  rooms behind the main stage. A group of pimps
  sat beside us, slapping our backs and laughing
  every time a girl danced in front of us. Most
  of the girls were aged somewhere between
  15 and 20. At one table in the farthest corner
  of the club, however, sat six girls who looked
  much younger.
  We left before midnight and wound up in a
  bar in the resort, whose owner – lanky with
  side-swept hair and a plaid shirt – told us
  he could buy drugs. After a couple of drinks, he
  loosened up. Life in the Kings Romans was
  crazy, he conceded. The tourists hunted women
  and drugs in packs. Local law didn’t exist. “The

land belongs to Laos,” he said. “But the sky

belongs to China.”

T

he next morning we rose determined to

find exotic animals. A widely covered

2015 report by the Environmental

Investigation Agency, which described the Kings

Romans as a “lawless playground”, claimed a

nearby enclosure held 26 tigers and 38 Asiatic

black bears. Its head keeper had allegedly

boasted about his tiger breeding and butchery

skills (Laos lost its last wild tiger in 2013).

Other exotic animals, including pangolins,

and furs and ivory were on sale in shops. One

had needed only to ask a restaurant owner for

“yewei” (“wild flavour”) and they’d be handed

an alternative, illegal menu. The 2015 report

caused four restaurants that offered trinkets

made from illegally poached animals to shutter.

The tiger and bear enclosure had since been

torn down and the secret menus were gone.

But some claimed tigers were still held on the

property. And a speakeasy-style nod, they said,

might still win some yewei.

After a day’s enquiries, however, we were

empty handed. Most people shook their heads

nervously and refused to talk. Others said it

was gone; a couple simply pointed at the casino.

Dozens of security guards and cameras ensured

we’d never find out. Our photographer left us to

go into town to investigate further, and as the

sun set we strolled across an overgrown field

opposite the casino’s entrance, where children

played football.

Buried between temporary buildings and piles

of rebar was a collection of cages the width of

a bus. A tarp on its side announced “Protect

the Blue Planet” in English and Mandarin.

Inside were 20 tigers, their fur faded and bodies

gaunt. Chicken carcasses were scattered on the

concrete floor. Faeces lay everywhere and

the place stank.

Some tigers paced back and forth; others lay

deathly still, staring at us. There was no way

this was a zoo. After around 15 minutes, having

spotted some concerning gaps in the metalwork,

we beat a retreat back into town to wash away

our experiences with cheap beer. I sent our pho-

tographer a message and dropped a pin.

The next morning we woke to a photo on our

WhatsApp group: a tiger had mauled the pho-

tographer’s arm, gouging it with three deep claw

marks. It was a good time to leave the Kings

Romans. We hopped back over the Laos border,

across the Mekong and back to Thailand.

I was left with more questions than answers.

If the Kings Romans was a conduit – albeit

a grotesque one – for a gigantic drug trade,

where was the industry that lay behind it?

How could such a massive issue be under-

stood by so few? And why had nobody been

inside The Machine? We headed to the Thai-

Myanmar border to find out.

Myanmar

was a

d r ug lor d’s

heaven

long

before

Zhao Wei

arrived.

For centuries it was a collection of kingdoms

home to a bewildering number of ethnic

groups, before British invaders landed in the

19th century and steamrolled them all into

one giant colonial possession, gluing it to

the British Raj on the Indian subcontinent.

Poppies, grown in the country’s lush highlands,

were the primary crop in many regions. In the

1920s George Orwell, stationed in Burma as an

imperial policeman, described the “cool sweet-

ish smell of opium” that wafted through the

country’s towns and cities. Colonial overlords

granted “indirect rule” to tribal leaders, who

paid patronage back to Yangon, the country’s

biggest city (then called Rangoon).

Orwell’s five-year stint in the country would

inform his later dystopian works, including

Animal Farm and 1984. They may have been

written about the decades of military rule that

While taking shots

of caged exotic

animals in Myanmar,

GQ photographer

Chien-Chi Chang was

attacked by tigers

04-20FeatureMyanamar_3468200.indd 184 13/02/2020 17:18

184 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2020