Word: shan
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...visitors to Xiamen, the Chinese city across the water, can do more than stare at Taiwanese territory: they can sail over on organized tours. A two-day visit is a good bet for non-Chinese, too, but they'd be better off starting at Taipei's Song Shan airport, 260 km away. You would expect Kinmen to be a pockmarked moonscape - during 29 years of hostilities more than 940,000 shells were fired at the island - but as your plane descends you see the reassuring orderliness of small-scale agriculture among lush, tree-covered hills. Air-conditioned buses then take...
...Until very recently, it was just an insignificant village in a sparsely populated area of northeastern Burma. It owed its remarkable transformation?and its notoriety?to a Shan Chinese druglord called Lin Mingxian. Lin had been a field commander in the Communist Party of Burma, or CPB, a formidable insurgent group that once occupied a large swath of northeastern Shan state. When the CPB collapsed in 1989, Lin led a breakaway faction of over 3,500 soldiers, taking control of an opium-rich wilderness bordering China, Laos and Thailand...
...faux-tribal dress blowing wearily on a conch shell. All the exhibits in this museum were alive, of course, although there was a lot of cheating. The young woman in Akha tribal costume standing at the gate?the one playing the Game Boy?was a local Shan. So was the Lahu girl sitting on the motorbike next...
...were swept up on a wave of Chinese tourists and carried along a winding path that led past wooden huts occupied by various tribespeople. There were two old Shan women flogging herbal medicines, as well as a large contingent of Padaung or Kayan women?known as "giraffe women" or "long-necks" for the brass coils stacked high around their throats. We crowded into a round hut to watch them perform a traditional dance, which involved the flicking of colorful hankies...
...Burman? "Oh no. I'm Shan. All of us are from Mongla...