Word: opium
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...northern Thailand was considered one of the country's most vulnerable areas for Communist subversion. Inhabited by 250,000 primitive, fiercely independent tribesmen, the area lived almost completely outside the law of Bangkok, haunted by superstition, disease and ignorance and sustained only by its bumper crops of illegal opium. Today, Red terrorists are active both in the country's northeast and in the Moslem provinces of the south. But thanks to a civic-action program that is nipping Red subversion in its earlier stages, the north is relatively free of trouble. "Nation building is what...
...Opium War in 1841. Hong Kong. The plague. War junks. Tongs. China clippers sailing on the tide (and on nearly every page). May-may, a Chinese concubine who gargles baby urine. Gorth Brock, a bastardo degenerado. Wolfgang Mauss. Shevaun. The priapic painter Aristotle Quance. Redhaired, green-eyed, sharkproof Dirk Struan, Tai-Pan (Supreme Leader) of The Noble House, trader in poppies, mayhem...
...cars and gaily painted trucks, reach out into the countryside to draw off the surfeit of Thailand's bounty for world markets. Trains of wooden barges riding low in Bangkok's muddy Chao Phraya River carry rice, corn, copra, reams of incomparable Thai silk, jute-and illicit opium-to export. With the Thai annual growth rate of 7% a year, the baht (formerly called the tical and still worth a nickel), backed by gold and foreign-exchange reserves of nearly $650 million, is one of Asia's hardest currencies. The men who administer the Thai economy...
...standing on the world's best-dressed-women list. One recent visit required walking five miles each way to reach a remote village, where the couple presented gifts of food and medicine to the primitive, opium-growing hill people, frequent targets of Red subversion campaigns. Their tribal leaders value nothing more than the tiny silver medals distributed by the King, and increasingly these days refer to themselves, thanks to the King's and Queen's evangelism, as "the children of the Thai...
...Eboh had arbitrarily raised tariffs to protect his own private shoe factory, and for a price was willing to do the same for others. One Laotian general on a salary of $250 a month supported his family and 32 relatives in style-all in the same house-by letting opium smugglers use army trucks and planes to move the stuff. A record of sorts was set by Burma's first Minister of Commerce and Industry, whose industriousness at graft netted him $800,000 in government funds before independence was yet a year...