I GET MY JADE AT THE SOURCE
By Doug Fine
Putao, Kachin State, Burma
Getting permission to fly into Putao from Mandalay can fairly be described as a surreal administrative nightmare. It was only thanks to the confused and corrupt bureaucratic purgatory that is today’s Burma that I was able to slip through the cracks and shock the pilot with my dearth of melanin on what is undeniably one of the most dangerous airlines in the world (there are only two surviving planes out of five on this leg of the carrier called Myanmar Airways). I was given the seat of honor, Row 1 aisle, next to an Army officer with a briefcase who gave me a nervous look that said, “There’s no other way. There are no roads.” There were livestock in the aisles, and a lot of rice.
But after six days in this northernmost Kachin State near China, looking out over the Namtiyu river meandering through square rice fields at a place that had literally barley changed in a millennium, I wasn’t complaining.
I bade good morning this day to the gatekeeper at the gracefully decaying former British mansion which was my ad hoc “guest house”. He was a Gurkha who in his eighty years had fought for the Japanese and then the Americans and I could see in his scrunched brow he was struggling to collect his atrophied English phrases. It had been 32 years since the last Missourian Missionary in this region had been expelled as a CIA agent.
I had been very fortunate upon ending my backpack-toting hike from the Putao airstrip at the town tea shop to befriend a man I didn’t realize at the time was possibly the most well-connected fellow in this part of the Kachin State. Sipping whiskey and tea was a crowd which included various profiteers - this area being the Wild West of Burma and China - and the regional Forest Department honcho, unabashedly counting stacks of cash so thick, even in Burmese currency it was worth something.
It was after some well-timed gifts of American cigarettes and insect repellent that proprietor Bo Mee, a very small, happy-go-lucky man, invited me to see later in the week the jade mine so secret even the central military government in Rangoon didn’t know about it - yet. I found out later he had smoothed things over for me with the local military command. It was the insect repellent that did it, in this mosquito-infested forest area: DEET was like a magic wand to the Kachin Burmese. I still get letters requesting resupplies.
I’d call it a three-hour bike ride by dusty oxen road through tiny villages to the hamlet of Upper Shangon, namesake for the mountain in which the mine was nestled. Mt. Hkakabo Razi, the 19,296-foot Himalayan “foothill” peak, was visible to the north during a water break, the first time in my week in the region. I felt that sense of largeness and awe one gets in places like Western Alaska at the realization, after a week of clouds, that one is in the vicinity of True Wild-ness.
Bo Mee’s posse - everyone on bicycle as I saw not one non-military internal combustion engine in the Putao region - wanted to stop at a particular stilt-elevated house in Upper Shangon, where an ethnic Ruang hunter fed us rice inside a bamboo thatched room whose woven patterns were more tasteful than many a Stateside decorator’s. The Kachin region is home to three ethnic minorities, part of the reason it is the battleground for one of Burma’s many low level civil wars, and a good part of the explanation for lack of roads and train service into the northern part of the state. Kachin train lines are blown up all the time, and rail journeys across the region are rife with bumps - care of ad hoc repairs - which literally send one bouncing into the air.
While Bo Mee’s crew examined, haggled over, and declined to purchase a bowling-ball-sized chunk of raw jade the hunter had brought down from the mine, the hunter - whose name is unpronounceable - invited me to demonstrate the accuracy of the crossbow which is the Ruangs’ chief hunting weapon. Through a Ruang-speaking translator friend of Bo Mee’s I asked our host about the prevalence of tigers and other big cats in the area. While I missed a tree at twenty feet and sent village kids scattering, I was told that it was about five-miles on foot into the mountainside forest to the nearest known feline watering hole, a distance which, even here, decidedly off-the-grid, is increasing every year.
“When I was young, tigers attacked the village every year,” the hunter told me. “Now some children have never seen them.” I couldn’t tell from his tone - being unfamiliar with Ruang inflection - whether he thought this to be a good or a bad thing, but evidently the Mom and Pop, elephant-driven and largely sustainable logging operations I’d seen in the area were in the process of being subsumed by mechanized Chinese joint ventures which were clearing huge areas in this until-recently remote outpost region.
A powerful Asian cold I had been fighting nearly leveled me during the three-mile, steep hike through the forest up Shangon Peak. Despite a money lust which reminded me of Tolkeins’ dwarves, the crew was patient with me because I was generous with my trail mix. The walnuts, in particular, were a novelty. Several jokes were made about the size of my nuts. We arrived at the three-football-field-wide clearing at the heat of the day and rested in a miner’s makeshift shelter. His wife, whose neck was slashed from a Ruang healing ritual, wore a t-shirt which read, “Greenpeace” but which had an icon more like a Death Rock demon. You see these shirts all over developing world bazaars - it’s the English lettering that makes them chic. They seem to say to U.S. trade missions, “Just try and enforce your trademark regulations.”
A score or so people lived at the mine year round, and the inevitable community of prostitutes and children added spice to the scarred mountain scene, which is expanding. It was a pretty elaborate hand-made operation, with networks of bamboo tubes on the half shell irrigating from mountain springs the rock which had been split with hammers by the younger men. Light green veins in the rock are tell tale for pay dirt. The jade is smuggled back to the large southern Kachin State city of Myitkyina, where it is refined, polished and sold in market as coming from the more well-known and government-approved mine at Bhamo. (Jade from this area is among the highest quality in the world. I was told by a Department of Mines worker familiar with the renegade mine that the composition of Putao jade differs slightly from that of the famous top quality Burmese jade, but that it would take an expert to tell.)
It was hard to tell if any of my companions were getting rich, but they were certainly devoting a lot of time and energy to the project. Not all of them were young men. One of Bo Mee’s associates dressed in that polyester shirt-and-tie outfit that often signifies for the Asian would-be capitalist participation in the American Dream. I felt for the village men they hired to cart the hunks of rock back down the constantly land-sliding trail in stretcher contraptions. That rock was HEAVY. Jungle birds mocked us in the tree tops. Sometimes they used oxen.
It was nearly dusk when we returned to Upper Shangon. Bo Mee gave me some jade shards to stuff into my socks, but I had to prevail upon him to spare one of his crew to guide me back by bicycle along the 14-mile labyrinth of indistinguishable roads to Putao’s outskirts and the guest house. I had to get back, as, contingent upon pilot whim, my flight back to Myitkyina - for some reason I couldn’t book all the way to Mandalay in this direction - was the following day. The crew planned to stay in Shangon for a few more days. I don’t know what he thought I was going to do - sleep out there at the mine with the Ruang for a week? I had made my plans very clear to Bo Mee, even showing him my hand-scribbled “plane ticket”, but he had one of those omnipresent, conversation-stopping smiles that says, “It’s OK. Don’t worry. Everything’s OK.”
It was a harrowing ride without brakes on ancient Chinese no-speeder, holding a penlight “headlight”; a ride punctuated by potholes and spills which not only killed my reputation among the men in Putao when the story was repeated, but forced me not to appreciate one of the most perfect starry skies I’ve ever seen.
Exhausted after a spill in a tiny village about a mile outside of Putao proper, I grunted a “give me a minute” noise to my guide, stopped for a sip of water in the near dark, and slumped against the biggest landmark I could find: a sign by the road. Catching my breath, I took a gander at the sign, which read: “National League For Democracy: Kachin State Offices.” Here, in by any standards the backwaters of a backwaters country, 800 miles from where Nobel Laureate and democracy dissident Aung San Suu Kyi had recently been released from house arrest by military authorities, her supporters were bravely going public. The sign was new and freshly painted. Even the posts were stained to a fine polish.
Before returning my bike and hiking to the airstrip in the morning, I stopped by the tea shop and asked about the sign. Bo Mee’s friend Wan Naung - who had no interest in jade and had stayed behind - answered me simply: “Everyone in this room wants democracy.” (The Forest Department honcho was in his chair as well.) He said it in a way that told me, “This is the message for you to take from Putao.”
Doug Fine tends to make these trips, flee amidst gunfire, then report on Worldwide Weirdness and Synchronicity for the Washington Post, Spin, Sierra, the Discovery Channel Online and Wired.