The life and times of the Shan-Chinese drug lord criminal mastermind Khun Sa are placed in context.
Khun Sa is one of the most notorious drug lords of the modern world. He was born in 1933 in the Shan states of Burma, with a Chinese father and a Shan mother. The Shan people are related to the Tais of Thailand and Laos and represent a distinct ethnic minority in Burma. When the Burmese people were negotiating for independence from Britain, the Shans were promised their own state, largely because they had formed a significant source of help for the British Empire and there were significant fears of reprisals. However, the Shans did not receive their independent state amidst accusations of betrayal. One of the results was that the lands occupied by the Shans gave rise to a variety of different armed factions fighting for independence, suppression of revolt or just plain power. Khun Sa, who was born Zhang Qifu and subsequently changed his name to ‘Prince of Wealth,’ took to this life with a will and rose to power and his own private army. He fought on all sides, as it suited his personal interests and, to finance his operations, turned to opium farming and smuggling. Opium has been grown in northern mainland Southeast Asia for thousands of years and was accepted in society so long as people did not abuse it and used it only for medicinal purposes. It was the British Empire that converted opium use to the industrial level it subsequently reached. This was a deliberate policy to cause widespread addiction among Chinese people so that Chinese would purchase goods from Britain.
Khun Sa thrived in the area that came to be known as the Golden Triangle which, in the 1960s and 1970s, remained one of the wild places of the world. Thickly forested and mountainous, travel in the region was treacherous and it was not difficult to maintain opium poppy fields far from human gaze. Eventually, American air power was deployed to search out these fields and now they have been all but eradicated. The problem has not gone away, though, since those involved have switched production to methamphetamines, which can apparently be produced quite conveniently in a small factory.
In due course, Khun Sa was arrested by the Burmese government and held until a comrade seized Russian scientists and managed to get him released. Khun Sa then established a new stronghold in the northern Thai town of Ban Hin Taek and subsequently came to rule a swathe of land from Mae Sot to Mae Hong Son. He had been given Thai citizenship by one of Thailand’s many corrupt junta leaders. That he was able to remain there so long is a telling indictment of those in power.
