PEACEFUL BUZZ IN THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE
March 22nd 2007 00:55
BURMESE DAYS DRIFT BY IN THE HEART OF THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE
Sitting under the grand banyan tree overhanging the Golden Banyan Restaurant in downtown Kyaing Tong, the Myanmar (Burmese) capital of the Golden Triangle, I idly pick up a tattered ink-smudged copy of the antiquated Stalinist-style State-run English language newspaper, the New Light of Myanmar. I read the following: “True to a Myanmar aphorism that goes, ‘Visitors come when the house is pleasant,’ a continuous stream of precious visitors from foreign nations come to Myanmar. The precious guests and other tourists visiting Myanmar, where stability and tranquillity prevail owing to the absence of the smell of cordite as well as destructive acts and armed insurgencies, witness with their very own eyes how peaceful and pleasant Myanmar is to travel.”
I figure I could well do without the smell of cordite, but I savour the smell of tea I’ve just been served, and the perfume of the jasmine and orchid flowers decorating my table.
A peaceful silence permeates Kyaing Tong this morning, interrupted only by the soft drone of chanting monks, and the buzz of the hundreds of Chinese motor scooters scuttling through the streets in surging packs like startled cockroaches.
‘Burma watchers’ were surprised when Kyaing Tong, one of the country’s most remote towns and the scene of decades of heavy fighting between rival opium lords, was opened for tourism in 1993. Peace has now settled upon this valley, but the tourism trade has yet to be fully developed. I can wander the streets for a day without seeing another white face which suits me just fine.
Kyaing Tong is an atmospheric but torpid old town comprised of narrow twisting laneways and small streets running erratically through the downtown district. I’ve only been here for a few days, resting from the rigours of Yangon (Rangoon) where I worked as a journalism trainer at The Myanmar Times, and I’ve already fallen in love with Kyaing Tong, also known as Kengtung.
The days pass pleasantly as I wander around taking in the sights and the penultimate moments are the evenings, when the striking sunsets are smudged with smoke curling from the braziers, wood fires and lanterns lit late every afternoon as back-up to the erratic electricity supply. As the sun slides from the sky I watch the hill tribe women, the Akha people, Wa people, White Wa people, Lahu,, Shan, and Khun, trudge out of town homeward-bound.
Visits to the hill tribe villages scattered in the mountains surrounding Kyaing Tong constitute the town’s main tourist industry, and travellers are whisked to these villages by guides on trail bikes or in Toyota pick-ups.
The weekly buffalo market is held in a clearing in the foothills just out of town, and the surrounding mountains are shrouded in fog and roiling mists. Groups of villagers walk from every direction leading their strong sturdy buffalo. The buffalo mill in the centre of the clearing, chewing clumps of hay, while serious men, mostly in traditional garb but with western style hats, walk around their beasts expertly assessing them. Long drawn-out Myanmar haggling then commences.
But for me the main attraction is the central market place where the hill tribe women, dressed in finery, mingle with more modern town locals. I love disappearing in the twisted maze of crowded alleys, taking in exotic sights and smells, buying ornate bead-and-silver studded Akha woven baskets and traditional Shan clothes and jackets.
Writer Somerset Maugham rested in Kyaing Tong after a 400 mile pony trek through the Shan states and he was so enthralled by this market place that he devoted two chapters to it in his 1930 travel tome, A Gentleman in the Parlour.
Kyaing Tong is an ancient town, dating back to the great Buddhist Lanna kingdom of the thirteenth and fourteenth century which encompassed much of Thailand and some of Burma, particularly the Shan states, and the inhabitants were known as Khun people. King Mangrai, the Thai king who founded Chiang Mai, circled Kyaing Tong with a 7.5 mile wall containing seven gates. Later kings added other fortifications, and in the grand old days noisy rockets were fired from the parapets to stampede war elephants. Only one gate or arch, reportedly the site of executions, still remains.
The name Kyaing Tong means The Walled City of Tung, and the Tung refers to the town’s legend allegedly prophesied by Buddha. A Moses-like mythical hermit, Tunga, or Tungkalasi, drained an inland sea with his magical staff and the devout city that rose in the wake was named after him. There is still a supposed remnant of the sea, a natural lake in the centre of Kyaing Tong. Lore has it that Guatama Buddha himself came to the town as part of his wanderings and left behind six strands of hair which are now enshrined in the Wat Zom Kham, one of about 32 monasteries and pagodas in Kyaing Tong.
Kyaing Tong became a strategic trading town, the first Burmese destination for mule caravans traversing from Thailand to Southern China and travelling to the coast of Thailand, or vice versa. An Englishman, Holt S. Hallet, searching for a rail route between Burma and China, described the Kyaing Tong caravan trade in his 1890 book, A Thousand Miles on an Elephant in the Shan States, noting that thousands of mules arrived every year from Chiang Mai carrying dates, walnuts silk, tea and camphor, and returning with cotton, gold and silver, tobacco and laquerware.
But the last big caravan that passed through Kyaing Tong carried a much more contentious cargo – opium. In 1967 the feared war lord Khun Sa brought an opium convoy to Kyaing Tong, a single file column of five hundred men and three hundred mules stretching over a mile, laden with more than 16 tonnes of opium.
Kyaing Tong and the surrounding regions were colonized by the British in the nineteenth century, and their legacy remains in the many colonial buildings centred around the town’s lake. When the British first arrived in Kyaing Tong it was one of the most-far flung of the Empire’s encampments, about a month’s arduous travel from the nearest British outpost. The Pall Mall Gazette reported bleakly that, “Only twelve or fifteen thousand tigers and as many people inhabit it, and the latter are nearly all hill-tribesmen of the most primitive sort.”
Now Kyaing Tong is a charming retreat which is slowly and carefully embracing the twenty-first century. There are just enough western creature comforts for the modern traveller, and yet a way of life that has been lost throughout much of our globalised world still prevails.
Back at my breakfast nook at the Golden Banyan my new loyal local friend Sai Zoom, my unofficial guide to the mysteries of this far-flung foreign patch, pulls up on his scooter and sits next to me revealing today’s plan. “Aiyee,” he says, “I have the idea. You can marry a Shan girl, live in her village, and we can run a business for the tourists.”
If only it could be so easy.
Sitting under the grand banyan tree overhanging the Golden Banyan Restaurant in downtown Kyaing Tong, the Myanmar (Burmese) capital of the Golden Triangle, I idly pick up a tattered ink-smudged copy of the antiquated Stalinist-style State-run English language newspaper, the New Light of Myanmar. I read the following: “True to a Myanmar aphorism that goes, ‘Visitors come when the house is pleasant,’ a continuous stream of precious visitors from foreign nations come to Myanmar. The precious guests and other tourists visiting Myanmar, where stability and tranquillity prevail owing to the absence of the smell of cordite as well as destructive acts and armed insurgencies, witness with their very own eyes how peaceful and pleasant Myanmar is to travel.”
A peaceful silence permeates Kyaing Tong this morning, interrupted only by the soft drone of chanting monks, and the buzz of the hundreds of Chinese motor scooters scuttling through the streets in surging packs like startled cockroaches.
‘Burma watchers’ were surprised when Kyaing Tong, one of the country’s most remote towns and the scene of decades of heavy fighting between rival opium lords, was opened for tourism in 1993. Peace has now settled upon this valley, but the tourism trade has yet to be fully developed. I can wander the streets for a day without seeing another white face which suits me just fine.
Kyaing Tong is an atmospheric but torpid old town comprised of narrow twisting laneways and small streets running erratically through the downtown district. I’ve only been here for a few days, resting from the rigours of Yangon (Rangoon) where I worked as a journalism trainer at The Myanmar Times, and I’ve already fallen in love with Kyaing Tong, also known as Kengtung.
Visits to the hill tribe villages scattered in the mountains surrounding Kyaing Tong constitute the town’s main tourist industry, and travellers are whisked to these villages by guides on trail bikes or in Toyota pick-ups.
The weekly buffalo market is held in a clearing in the foothills just out of town, and the surrounding mountains are shrouded in fog and roiling mists. Groups of villagers walk from every direction leading their strong sturdy buffalo. The buffalo mill in the centre of the clearing, chewing clumps of hay, while serious men, mostly in traditional garb but with western style hats, walk around their beasts expertly assessing them. Long drawn-out Myanmar haggling then commences.
But for me the main attraction is the central market place where the hill tribe women, dressed in finery, mingle with more modern town locals. I love disappearing in the twisted maze of crowded alleys, taking in exotic sights and smells, buying ornate bead-and-silver studded Akha woven baskets and traditional Shan clothes and jackets.
Writer Somerset Maugham rested in Kyaing Tong after a 400 mile pony trek through the Shan states and he was so enthralled by this market place that he devoted two chapters to it in his 1930 travel tome, A Gentleman in the Parlour.
Kyaing Tong is an ancient town, dating back to the great Buddhist Lanna kingdom of the thirteenth and fourteenth century which encompassed much of Thailand and some of Burma, particularly the Shan states, and the inhabitants were known as Khun people. King Mangrai, the Thai king who founded Chiang Mai, circled Kyaing Tong with a 7.5 mile wall containing seven gates. Later kings added other fortifications, and in the grand old days noisy rockets were fired from the parapets to stampede war elephants. Only one gate or arch, reportedly the site of executions, still remains.
The name Kyaing Tong means The Walled City of Tung, and the Tung refers to the town’s legend allegedly prophesied by Buddha. A Moses-like mythical hermit, Tunga, or Tungkalasi, drained an inland sea with his magical staff and the devout city that rose in the wake was named after him. There is still a supposed remnant of the sea, a natural lake in the centre of Kyaing Tong. Lore has it that Guatama Buddha himself came to the town as part of his wanderings and left behind six strands of hair which are now enshrined in the Wat Zom Kham, one of about 32 monasteries and pagodas in Kyaing Tong.
Kyaing Tong became a strategic trading town, the first Burmese destination for mule caravans traversing from Thailand to Southern China and travelling to the coast of Thailand, or vice versa. An Englishman, Holt S. Hallet, searching for a rail route between Burma and China, described the Kyaing Tong caravan trade in his 1890 book, A Thousand Miles on an Elephant in the Shan States, noting that thousands of mules arrived every year from Chiang Mai carrying dates, walnuts silk, tea and camphor, and returning with cotton, gold and silver, tobacco and laquerware.
But the last big caravan that passed through Kyaing Tong carried a much more contentious cargo – opium. In 1967 the feared war lord Khun Sa brought an opium convoy to Kyaing Tong, a single file column of five hundred men and three hundred mules stretching over a mile, laden with more than 16 tonnes of opium.
Kyaing Tong and the surrounding regions were colonized by the British in the nineteenth century, and their legacy remains in the many colonial buildings centred around the town’s lake. When the British first arrived in Kyaing Tong it was one of the most-far flung of the Empire’s encampments, about a month’s arduous travel from the nearest British outpost. The Pall Mall Gazette reported bleakly that, “Only twelve or fifteen thousand tigers and as many people inhabit it, and the latter are nearly all hill-tribesmen of the most primitive sort.”
Now Kyaing Tong is a charming retreat which is slowly and carefully embracing the twenty-first century. There are just enough western creature comforts for the modern traveller, and yet a way of life that has been lost throughout much of our globalised world still prevails.
Back at my breakfast nook at the Golden Banyan my new loyal local friend Sai Zoom, my unofficial guide to the mysteries of this far-flung foreign patch, pulls up on his scooter and sits next to me revealing today’s plan. “Aiyee,” he says, “I have the idea. You can marry a Shan girl, live in her village, and we can run a business for the tourists.”
If only it could be so easy.
| 33 |
| Vote |
Subscribe to this blog
