Word: shan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Thailand and Laos converge. This year the climate has been kind to the poppy growers and bad for the DEA: a bumper crop of 700 tons is expected, 100 tons more than last year. But the U.S. narcs are not very worried. The reason: in Burma's remote Shan state, where nearly 80% of the area's opium is grown, vicious fighting between the warlords who dominate the drug traffic has closed many of the traditional smuggling routes. Says a DEA official based in neighboring Thailand: "The situation is pure chaos. For once, the area's intrinsic...
...bandits, remnants of China's pre-1949 Nationalist army, and more than half a dozen "liberation armies" scramble for their share of the $800 million annual opium haul. Last February Thai armed forces ousted the region's biggest opium smuggler, Khun Sa, and his 3,000-member Shan United Army from their luxurious mountain aerie in the border town of Ban Hin Taek. Khun Sa fled back to Burma, and his departure created a power vacuum that lesser warlords are now fighting to occupy. In Burma, Khun Sa has tried to muscle his way into territory controlled...
...BLUE-EYED SHAN by Stephen Becker...
...American anthropologist named Greenwood spends several years with the Shan people in Pawlu, a tiny village near the border between China and Burma. He marries and fathers a daughter before news of World War II belatedly reaches him, driving him from his remote adopted home to join the U.S. Army and the larger struggle. In 1949, back in the U.S., he receives a letter from Yang Yulin, a wartime comrade who is now a general in the Chinese Nationalist army. Yang has got hold of an anthropological treasure, the bones of Peking Man. He will flee the advancing Communist troops...
...Greenwood and General Yang poses a threat to that secure isolation. Eventually, Pawlu is surrounded by a group of mutinous Chinese soldiers and a marauding band of headhunters. Greenwood must choose between defending the village or earning lasting fame as the rescuer of the Peking Man. The Blue-Eyed Shan completes a trilogy of novels set in the Orient that the author began with The Chinese Bandit (1975) and The Last Mandarin (1979). The new book stands on its own but also adds considerably to the vivid pageant of the East that Becker has been creating. Read together, all three...