followed Burma’s 1948 independence. Ne Win,
who won control of his country in a 1962 blood-
less coup, threw a socialist “bamboo” curtain
around Burma, isolating it from the world.
Win, who believed his lucky number was
nine, issued banknotes in denominations of 45
and 90. When in 1970 a soothsayer told him
he’d be killed from the right, Win ordered cars
to switch from the left side of the road to the
right. He ruled Burma just as bizarrely, decree-
ing a “Burmese way to socialism” that crippled
the economy, making Burma one of the planet’s
poorest countries. Opium producers switched to
heroin, which is far stronger, in the 1970s, led
by warlords who bivouacked in the jungles of
Shan and other semi-lawless states, while the
junta hermitised itself with Rangoon.
Win’s luck ran out on 8 August 1988
(the eighth day of the eighth month of the
eighty-eighth year) when a pro- democracy rev-
olution (whose lucky number was eight) won
Rangoon. But the Tatmadaw denied the victory
of Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s democratic
icon, two years later and Burma was plunged
back into darkness. Information was controlled
by the state, the internet didn’t exist and mobile
phones cost thousands of pounds. Burma’s
generals renamed their country Myanmar –
a more florid version of the same word – and
Rangoon returned to its pre-colonial name of
Yangon. In 2006 the junta decamped to a new
capital built from scratch in the jungle, called
Naypyidaw, from which it could safely steal as
much of the country’s paltry wealth as possi-
ble, building a surveillance state that imprisoned
dissidents at will. Naypyidaw had a 20-lane
highway with no cars and neighbourhoods with
no residents. Orwell’s paranoid fiction had man-
ifested in his former home.
A 2008 constitutional referendum finally
ended Myanmar’s North Korea-like isolation.
Today, locals are less likely to look over their
shoulder for spooks than at the screens of cheap
Chinese smartphones. Outside the major cities,
however, Myanmar is a failed state.
Warlords and militias had long controlled vast
tracts of Myanmar. Some of the more infamous,
such as former soldier Khun Sa, amassed billions
of dollars flooding the world with opium and
heroin. In recent years, if anything, the coun-
try’s control has been sliced and diced even
more. Splinter groups have split from splinter
groups, most of which fund their fight with drug
money. Some militias barely govern land outside
their own towns, with states carved up by
People’s Front Of Judea-reminiscent acronyms.
The Tatmadaw, weak and corrupt, has bro-
kered dozens of Faustian pacts with these
groups, allowing them a scrap of self-
administered land as long as they quit violence.
The result is a quilt of quasi-kingdoms – some
small enough to drive a golf ball through – all
of which are producing heroin, ice or yaba.It has turned Myanmar into a semi-lawless,
bureaucratic nightmare, cleaved into crumbs
and barely functioning.
To us, once we crossed the Thai border into
the small Burmese border town of Tachileik a
day after leaving the Kings Romans, it meant
our journey to The Machine would likely
involve a multitude of rebels, drugs syndicates
and government roadblocks.
Nonetheless, we chugged back across the
Mekong confident we’d see it. We had no idea
just how difficult seeing The Machine would be.Two types of tourists come to Tachileik.
Some cross the bridge from Thailand, walk
through its parasol- covered market, grab
a coffee and leave again, happy to have another
stamp in their passport, avoiding hawkers who
aggressively sell Viagra, cheap cigarettes and
counterfeit football shirts. But others come for
the vice. In Tachileik, everything is for sale.
Fixers at the border offer tours of the town’s
surrounding green hills, studded with stupas
and monasteries. They can also direct you to
casinos and “VIP clubs”, buy shipments of meth
or heroin or matchmake any sexual predilec-
tion (one told us he travelled from Tachileik to
Mandalay to find a virgin for a Japanese visitor).
If somehow one has failed to satisfy illegal urges
in Thailand, Tachileik will oblige.
At night the saccharine smell of opium wafts
across bars and restaurants all over Tachileik.
Drinkers keep the party going with the heart-
pounding, red-eyed high of yaba bought for
under £1 a pill. An overgrown Chinese ceme-
tery on the town’s edge bustles with addicts and
the homeless. They gather to share needles or
suck up the wispy entrails of freebased yaba. So
widespread is Tachileik’s yaba use, you become
acutely aware of its visible effects after just
a couple of days. If the Kings Romans is the
Golden Triangle’s Vegas, Tachileik is its faded,
beer-bellied Reno.
But it was production of drugs, not con-
sumption, that we arrived in Tachileik to see,
just three hours after we left the SEZ. Beyond
the town’s limits is an area so heavily sliced up
between ethnic armed groups that accurate
maps are nonexistent and those that try look
like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Find your way through or around the myriadTatmadaw checkpoints that sit outside every
major town and you might wander into a
region governed by the Restoration Council Of
Shan State, Ta’ang National Liberation Army,
the Kachin Defense Army, the Lahu Democratic
Union or any one of dozens of smaller “border
guard forces” – former rebels co-opted against
ethnic militias by Naypyitaw. And that’s not to
mention Wa State, whose 30,000 or so commu-
nist troops patrol a region the size of Wales and
as secretive as North Korea. Getting into Wa,
once believed to be Southeast Asia’s leading
drug producer, is an Iliad all of its own.
Suffice to say, where there is division and
misrule, there are drugs. Producers, users
and smugglers routinely told me many cartels
are stationed outside Tachileik – from mom-
and-pop pill mills in bamboo huts to meth labs
the size of tennis courts. Tachileik’s proximity
to the Thai border and Mekong gives land and
river trafficking options. Cops, who may earn
as little as £90 per month, are easy to buy.
Casinos and brothels wash money overnight.
Tachileik is a two-bit town and a gangster’s
paradise. I didn’t know it the day I arrived, but
over the next four months it would become
my Rome.
Still, after a couple of days the Tachileik grape-
vine brought us to Mark, best described as a
Burmese Derek Trotter. (Mark is not his real
name.) He is short with wide shoulders and bow
legs. The edge of his mouth is forever stained
red from chewing betel, a nut whose high is
equivalent to six cups of coffee.
Mark’s side hustle is running Chinese gam-
bling machines across Tachileik – psychedelic
shoot-em-ups the size of pool tables on which
punters destroy digital fish for cash prizes.
His other earner is meth. Mark shareholds
a cartel shifting ice and yaba from the Shan
jungle. A dual-US national, he spent over a
decade searching for Burmese footholds in
the American meth market. But he returned
to Myanmar having failed to find a state that
wasn’t already controlled by South American or
Vietnamese gangs. Now, he focuses on logistics
between Tachileik and Thailand.
It was Mark who first mentioned The
Machine. Speaking as if it were a mythical
creature, he described a new kind of drug lab,
one that could switch from ice to yaba to >>Drinkers keep the partygoing with the red-eyedhigh of yaba bought forunder £1 a pillMYANMAR04-20FeatureMyanamar_3468200.indd 185 13/02/2020 17:18
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