Cold war warriors and hot tea
Until he begins to tell his story, neither the old general’s tranquil face nor the surroundings – mist-wreathed peaks, terraces of tea, even a rose garden – give any indication of the staccato violence of his life or the gangland past of this mountain aerie in Thailand.
‘Already, in my mother’s womb, I heard the sounds of gunfire,’ says Lue Yu Tian, the last warlord of China’s ‘Lost Army’, a robust relic of the Cold War. ‘I had to learn to shoot when still a youngster. I was not born at a fortunate time.’
Indeed, the timing could not have been worse. Fate slotted the general, now 92 years old and still parade-ground erect and highly articulate, right into the brutal Japanese invasion of his homeland, civil war and defeat at the hands of Mao Zedong’s Communists, a long inglorious retreat ending, finally, in permanent exile among these rugged slopes in northern Thailand.
Tea and tourism
It’s mid-morning. The silky mist begins to tatter, and a light monsoon rain patters on Lue’s hillside compound. Below lies Mae Salong, a town with a look, atmosphere and history unlike any spot in Thailand. It could well have been plucked right out of the countryside of Lue’s native Yunnan in southern China.
The town’s main road, which twists along a ridgeback like a dragon’s tail, is lined with picturesque tea shops serving ‘cha’ in delicate porcelain cups. There are neatly whitewashed one-storey houses with red lanterns swaying from the eaves and scrolls wishing guests good fortune in Chinese characters. Children playing in the streets chatter in the Yunnanese dialect.
And around this community of some 6,000, which includes a welter of ethnic minority groups as well as the exiles, the hillsides are carpeted with tea bushes thriving under ideal growing conditions – rich soil, cool nights, humid days and an altitude of 1,300 metres above sea level. Where once opium poppies bloomed, tea is now the crop of choice. Thanks to the universal brew and Chinese industriousness, Mae Salong scrabbled through difficult and unsavoury times, pulling itself up by its own bootstraps to emerge as the heart of Thailand’s ‘Tea Country’ and become a prosperous place by the country’s rural standards.
Along the way, the town began to attract tourists. Thais prefer to come during weekends in the cool season, from November through February, when temperatures can plunge low enough to dictate thick sweaters and jackets, allowing the tropical dwellers to pretend they have arrived in Switzerland. Western backpackers like the laidback, exotic feel of the town, not to mention cheap and charming places such as the Little Home Guesthouse or the Sweet Mae Salong Bakery, noted for its blueberry cheesecake and home-made bread. The Taiwanese, and increasingly Chinese, come to learn about their distant (and for the Chinese, once renegade) cousins, and imbibe, along with endless cups of tea, a time warp of a China that is no more.
The general was among the pioneers of both tea and tourism, and still spends several hours each day at a onetime military encampment that he converted into the Mae Salong Resort in 1985. Its garden, sprinkled with red and pink roses around a Chinese pavilion, was once the training field, and the hotel’s shops were soldiers’ barracks.
Sitting outside his Yu Tian Tea Plantation Shop, overlooking the flower beds, the white-haired general smiles at a clutch of bounding youngsters, including one doll-like girl. ‘How time flies,’ he says wistfully, gesturing toward the fourth generation of Chinese in Mae Salong before taking visitors to a small adjacent museum that depicts the exiles’ history.
‘We had no money, no food, no guns, and no country. We had nowhere to go,’ he says, recalling the bitter trek of the battered 93rd Division – later dubbed the Lost Army – as it wound its way out of Yunnan in 1949 while Mao sealed his victory over Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang: the KMT. ‘The past was a nightmare.’
Some 12,000 troops fled into the jungles of neighbouring Burma, and most never saw their parents and relatives again. From Burma, the fighters staged futile forays into their homeland with weapons airlifted for a time by the USA and Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek planted the KMT government after escaping from the mainland.
They proved unwelcome guests in Burma: in order to sustain its military organisation, the KMT built up a major drug trafficking operation, later expanding into the smuggling of jade, antiques and consumer goods. Lue denies such nefarious involvements, but the man he succeeded as head of the Mae Salong KMT, General Tuan Shi-wen, once admitted: ‘We have to fight the evil of Communism, and to fight, you must have an army, and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you have to have money. In these mountains, the only money is opium.’
The army split up after prolonged fighting with the Burmese, worn out and abandoned by all sides (‘You can’t trust the Americans,’ says Lue in his only outburst of anger). In a UN-brokered deal, several thousand joined their KMT comrades in Taiwan. Another 4,000 trudged into northern Thailand in the early 1960s, Tuan setting up in Mae Salong a state-within-a-state, a secretive, regimented society whose residents were restricted to the area by Thai authorities.
The exiles and their hosts came to an arrangement of mutual benefit. The Thai government at the time was struggling against Communist guerrillas in the countryside, while parallel conflicts were occurring in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The veteran Cold War warriors, who detested Communism, were just what the Thais needed, and they were thrown into some of the bloodiest battles against the guerrillas.
Hill of peace
Today, an expansive compound houses a Taiwan-financed Chinese Martyrs’ Memorial Museum with a vast, austere central shrine that contains the memorial tablets of some 750 KMT soldiers who perished. Gilt dragons pull sentry duty on the orange-tiled roofs, held up by scarlet columns. Flanking halls narrate the KMT story in faded photographs, documents and sandbox displays of its battles in Burma and Thailand.
‘It was only after 1981 that life became calm and good,’ says the general, supple hands and fingers that had limned guns and gunfire finally coming to a rest at his side. The wars over, the KMT soldiers handed in their weapons and disbanded the military organisation as the Bangkok government began to grant them citizenship. The town’s name was even changed to Santikhiri – ‘Hill of Peace’ – although Mae Salong is still far more common.
Even earlier, the Chinese were beginning to turn swords into ploughshares. They experimented with plums, peaches, pears and other fruit trees as well as tea, much helped by Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who led an innovative effort to substitute such crops for the extensive opium fields.
With the strong links between Taiwan and Thailand through the KMT, Taiwanese experts came to Mae Salong to improve its tea production while its fledgling growers, such as Chamroen Cheewinchalermchot, visited the island republic, learning how handsome profits could be gleaned from even small plots of its superb Oolong (‘black dragon’ in Chinese) tea.
Chamroen belongs to the second generation of the KMT exiles. His father served as a colonel and his wife’s mother a captain on the long march out of China. Today, Chamroen’s plantation is among the three largest in town, its Emerald Thai Tea exported to China, France and even Taiwan, since its prices are lower and quality widely said to have surpassed the island-grown Oolong. The family also owns a hotel, the Mae Salong Villa.
‘The tea plantations are a kind of attraction for tourists. Before, people used to come and say, “What’s so special about Mae Salong? There are cherry trees, but they only blossom briefly once a year,”’ says Chamroen’s wife Ming, as she sips a cup of Oolong.
But what remains special about Mae Salong is its encapsulation of a place and era in China that has all but vanished there. ‘We still adhere to the old Chinese traditions and culture,’ Chamroen says. ‘We celebrate special days and perform rites that are already lost in China. Even the young people do.’
Retaining character
Along with the shared past and ethnic makeup, what keeps Mae Salong together and unique is a long-standing deal with the Thai government that outsiders can’t buy land in the town, and existing property can only be passed from local parents to their children. Hence, the absence of out-of-scale hotels and other inappropriate development by Thai and foreign outsiders that has blighted so much of the country.
How long Mae Salong’s character can remain intact depends much on the younger generation. The town’s youth has long been leaving for Taiwan for their education – both Ming and Chamroen studied there – and, increasingly, to Bangkok, where jobs are far more lucrative and plentiful.
Ming wonders about her own children, three of whom are now at university in the Thai capital. ‘I don’t know if they will come back,’ she says. ‘Children these days like to sit behind computers. They don’t want to work hard, and tea is hard work.’
Gone are the days, the general says, when the town was under military command and just about everything could be controlled, including the youth. Not more than 20 of the soldiers from that earliest time, from the first KMT generation, are still alive, often seen chatting together about yesteryear over bowls of Yunnanese noodles and black chicken soup. However, the general himself, the oldest among them, likes to look to the future.
Although officially invited back several times, he has returned only once to China, and his birthplace. ‘Everything has changed. All my family is gone. There is nothing for me there any more,’ he says, narrating a tragic family chronicle common to many. His father was killed and his mother died of starvation. One of his five brothers, a banker, was strung up and beaten to death by a mob during the Cultural Revolution. Another was accused of being a KMT spy and shot. A third died in prison.
The sun had now burned off the remnant mists, bringing the valley below into sharper focus: the neatly terraced tea gardens interlaced with fields of maize, rubber and fruit trees; steep hillsides dotted with the thatched huts of Akha tribals and scarlet pagodas with their upturned eaves. Wind soughs through the towering pines around the grave of Lue’s predecessor, General Tuan.
‘I have no friends in China. I am not a Chinese any more,’ the general says. ‘Although I was not born in Thailand, I love this land more than my life. And when I die, I want to be buried here.’
Co-ordinates: Thailand
When to go
Due to its altitude, Mae Salong has a cooler climate than the rest of Thailand. There are three distinct seasons: hot (March–May), rainy (June–October) and cool (November–February). During the hot season, temperatures normally hit 30°C; in the cooler months, the average temperature is 21°C and drops sharply in the evenings.
How to get there
Thai Airways (www.thaiair.com) offers daily flights from Heathrow to Chiang Rai via Bangkok Suvarnabhumi, priced from £579. Several other airlines fly direct from the UK to Bangkok, where internal flights to Chiang Rai depart from both Suvarnabhumi and Don Mueang airports. Alternatively, catch the bus: a journey from the capital to Chiang Rai takes 12 hours.
Further information
British passport holders arriving by air may enter Thailand for up to 30 days without obtaining a visa in advance of arrival. If you arrive overland, you will be given visa-free entry valid for 15 days. See the Tourism Authority of Thailand website (www.tourismthailand.org) for more information.
March 2009
‘Already, in my mother’s womb, I heard the sounds of gunfire,’ says Lue Yu Tian, the last warlord of China’s ‘Lost Army’, a robust relic of the Cold War. ‘I had to learn to shoot when still a youngster. I was not born at a fortunate time.’
Indeed, the timing could not have been worse. Fate slotted the general, now 92 years old and still parade-ground erect and highly articulate, right into the brutal Japanese invasion of his homeland, civil war and defeat at the hands of Mao Zedong’s Communists, a long inglorious retreat ending, finally, in permanent exile among these rugged slopes in northern Thailand.
Tea and tourism
It’s mid-morning. The silky mist begins to tatter, and a light monsoon rain patters on Lue’s hillside compound. Below lies Mae Salong, a town with a look, atmosphere and history unlike any spot in Thailand. It could well have been plucked right out of the countryside of Lue’s native Yunnan in southern China.
The town’s main road, which twists along a ridgeback like a dragon’s tail, is lined with picturesque tea shops serving ‘cha’ in delicate porcelain cups. There are neatly whitewashed one-storey houses with red lanterns swaying from the eaves and scrolls wishing guests good fortune in Chinese characters. Children playing in the streets chatter in the Yunnanese dialect.
And around this community of some 6,000, which includes a welter of ethnic minority groups as well as the exiles, the hillsides are carpeted with tea bushes thriving under ideal growing conditions – rich soil, cool nights, humid days and an altitude of 1,300 metres above sea level. Where once opium poppies bloomed, tea is now the crop of choice. Thanks to the universal brew and Chinese industriousness, Mae Salong scrabbled through difficult and unsavoury times, pulling itself up by its own bootstraps to emerge as the heart of Thailand’s ‘Tea Country’ and become a prosperous place by the country’s rural standards.
Along the way, the town began to attract tourists. Thais prefer to come during weekends in the cool season, from November through February, when temperatures can plunge low enough to dictate thick sweaters and jackets, allowing the tropical dwellers to pretend they have arrived in Switzerland. Western backpackers like the laidback, exotic feel of the town, not to mention cheap and charming places such as the Little Home Guesthouse or the Sweet Mae Salong Bakery, noted for its blueberry cheesecake and home-made bread. The Taiwanese, and increasingly Chinese, come to learn about their distant (and for the Chinese, once renegade) cousins, and imbibe, along with endless cups of tea, a time warp of a China that is no more.
The general was among the pioneers of both tea and tourism, and still spends several hours each day at a onetime military encampment that he converted into the Mae Salong Resort in 1985. Its garden, sprinkled with red and pink roses around a Chinese pavilion, was once the training field, and the hotel’s shops were soldiers’ barracks.
Sitting outside his Yu Tian Tea Plantation Shop, overlooking the flower beds, the white-haired general smiles at a clutch of bounding youngsters, including one doll-like girl. ‘How time flies,’ he says wistfully, gesturing toward the fourth generation of Chinese in Mae Salong before taking visitors to a small adjacent museum that depicts the exiles’ history.
‘We had no money, no food, no guns, and no country. We had nowhere to go,’ he says, recalling the bitter trek of the battered 93rd Division – later dubbed the Lost Army – as it wound its way out of Yunnan in 1949 while Mao sealed his victory over Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang: the KMT. ‘The past was a nightmare.’
Some 12,000 troops fled into the jungles of neighbouring Burma, and most never saw their parents and relatives again. From Burma, the fighters staged futile forays into their homeland with weapons airlifted for a time by the USA and Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek planted the KMT government after escaping from the mainland.
They proved unwelcome guests in Burma: in order to sustain its military organisation, the KMT built up a major drug trafficking operation, later expanding into the smuggling of jade, antiques and consumer goods. Lue denies such nefarious involvements, but the man he succeeded as head of the Mae Salong KMT, General Tuan Shi-wen, once admitted: ‘We have to fight the evil of Communism, and to fight, you must have an army, and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you have to have money. In these mountains, the only money is opium.’
The army split up after prolonged fighting with the Burmese, worn out and abandoned by all sides (‘You can’t trust the Americans,’ says Lue in his only outburst of anger). In a UN-brokered deal, several thousand joined their KMT comrades in Taiwan. Another 4,000 trudged into northern Thailand in the early 1960s, Tuan setting up in Mae Salong a state-within-a-state, a secretive, regimented society whose residents were restricted to the area by Thai authorities.
The exiles and their hosts came to an arrangement of mutual benefit. The Thai government at the time was struggling against Communist guerrillas in the countryside, while parallel conflicts were occurring in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The veteran Cold War warriors, who detested Communism, were just what the Thais needed, and they were thrown into some of the bloodiest battles against the guerrillas.
Start the slideshow (6 pictures)
Hill of peace
Today, an expansive compound houses a Taiwan-financed Chinese Martyrs’ Memorial Museum with a vast, austere central shrine that contains the memorial tablets of some 750 KMT soldiers who perished. Gilt dragons pull sentry duty on the orange-tiled roofs, held up by scarlet columns. Flanking halls narrate the KMT story in faded photographs, documents and sandbox displays of its battles in Burma and Thailand.
‘It was only after 1981 that life became calm and good,’ says the general, supple hands and fingers that had limned guns and gunfire finally coming to a rest at his side. The wars over, the KMT soldiers handed in their weapons and disbanded the military organisation as the Bangkok government began to grant them citizenship. The town’s name was even changed to Santikhiri – ‘Hill of Peace’ – although Mae Salong is still far more common.
Even earlier, the Chinese were beginning to turn swords into ploughshares. They experimented with plums, peaches, pears and other fruit trees as well as tea, much helped by Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who led an innovative effort to substitute such crops for the extensive opium fields.
With the strong links between Taiwan and Thailand through the KMT, Taiwanese experts came to Mae Salong to improve its tea production while its fledgling growers, such as Chamroen Cheewinchalermchot, visited the island republic, learning how handsome profits could be gleaned from even small plots of its superb Oolong (‘black dragon’ in Chinese) tea.
Chamroen belongs to the second generation of the KMT exiles. His father served as a colonel and his wife’s mother a captain on the long march out of China. Today, Chamroen’s plantation is among the three largest in town, its Emerald Thai Tea exported to China, France and even Taiwan, since its prices are lower and quality widely said to have surpassed the island-grown Oolong. The family also owns a hotel, the Mae Salong Villa.
‘The tea plantations are a kind of attraction for tourists. Before, people used to come and say, “What’s so special about Mae Salong? There are cherry trees, but they only blossom briefly once a year,”’ says Chamroen’s wife Ming, as she sips a cup of Oolong.
But what remains special about Mae Salong is its encapsulation of a place and era in China that has all but vanished there. ‘We still adhere to the old Chinese traditions and culture,’ Chamroen says. ‘We celebrate special days and perform rites that are already lost in China. Even the young people do.’
Retaining character
Along with the shared past and ethnic makeup, what keeps Mae Salong together and unique is a long-standing deal with the Thai government that outsiders can’t buy land in the town, and existing property can only be passed from local parents to their children. Hence, the absence of out-of-scale hotels and other inappropriate development by Thai and foreign outsiders that has blighted so much of the country.
How long Mae Salong’s character can remain intact depends much on the younger generation. The town’s youth has long been leaving for Taiwan for their education – both Ming and Chamroen studied there – and, increasingly, to Bangkok, where jobs are far more lucrative and plentiful.
Ming wonders about her own children, three of whom are now at university in the Thai capital. ‘I don’t know if they will come back,’ she says. ‘Children these days like to sit behind computers. They don’t want to work hard, and tea is hard work.’
Gone are the days, the general says, when the town was under military command and just about everything could be controlled, including the youth. Not more than 20 of the soldiers from that earliest time, from the first KMT generation, are still alive, often seen chatting together about yesteryear over bowls of Yunnanese noodles and black chicken soup. However, the general himself, the oldest among them, likes to look to the future.
Although officially invited back several times, he has returned only once to China, and his birthplace. ‘Everything has changed. All my family is gone. There is nothing for me there any more,’ he says, narrating a tragic family chronicle common to many. His father was killed and his mother died of starvation. One of his five brothers, a banker, was strung up and beaten to death by a mob during the Cultural Revolution. Another was accused of being a KMT spy and shot. A third died in prison.
The sun had now burned off the remnant mists, bringing the valley below into sharper focus: the neatly terraced tea gardens interlaced with fields of maize, rubber and fruit trees; steep hillsides dotted with the thatched huts of Akha tribals and scarlet pagodas with their upturned eaves. Wind soughs through the towering pines around the grave of Lue’s predecessor, General Tuan.
‘I have no friends in China. I am not a Chinese any more,’ the general says. ‘Although I was not born in Thailand, I love this land more than my life. And when I die, I want to be buried here.’
Co-ordinates: Thailand
When to go
Due to its altitude, Mae Salong has a cooler climate than the rest of Thailand. There are three distinct seasons: hot (March–May), rainy (June–October) and cool (November–February). During the hot season, temperatures normally hit 30°C; in the cooler months, the average temperature is 21°C and drops sharply in the evenings.
How to get there
Thai Airways (www.thaiair.com) offers daily flights from Heathrow to Chiang Rai via Bangkok Suvarnabhumi, priced from £579. Several other airlines fly direct from the UK to Bangkok, where internal flights to Chiang Rai depart from both Suvarnabhumi and Don Mueang airports. Alternatively, catch the bus: a journey from the capital to Chiang Rai takes 12 hours.
Further information
British passport holders arriving by air may enter Thailand for up to 30 days without obtaining a visa in advance of arrival. If you arrive overland, you will be given visa-free entry valid for 15 days. See the Tourism Authority of Thailand website (www.tourismthailand.org) for more information.
March 2009
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