History

The History of Doi Mae Salong

The origins of the Santikhiri community go back to the end of the Chinese Civil War. In October 1949, after Mao Zedong’s communist party victory in China, the defeated Kuomintang (KMT) armies led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan, except for the 3rd and 5th Regiment of the 93rd Division, which refused to surrender.^[3] Fighting between the communist and KMT troops continued in some remote parts of China, including Yunnan in the southwest. When the Communists marched into the provincial capital of Kunming in January 1950, 12,000 troops from the 3rd and 5th Regiment, commanded respectively by Generals Lee Wen-huan (Li Wenhuan) and Tuan Shi-wen, fought their way out of Yunnan and escaped into Burma’s jungles.^[4]

The soldiers’ war did not end after their own “Long March” from Yunnan to Möng Hsat in Burma’s Shan State. The Burmese soon discovered that a foreign army was camped on their soil and launched an offensive against them. The fighting continued for 12 years, and several thousands of the KMT soldiers were eventually evacuated to Taiwan. When China entered the Korean War, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had a desperate need for intelligence on China. The agency turned to the two KMT generals, who agreed to slip some soldiers back into China for intelligence-gathering missions. In return, the agency offered arms to equip the generals to retake China from their bases in the Shan State. The KMT army tried on no less than seven occasions between 1950 and 1952 to invade Yunnan, but was repeatedly driven back into the Shan State.^[5] The ending of the Korean War in 1953 was not the end of the KMT’s fight against the communist Chinese and Burmese armies, which continued on for many years, supported by Washington and Taiwan and subsequently funded by the KMT’s involvement in the Golden Triangle’s drug trade.^[6]

Refuge in Thailand

In 1961, Tuan led some 4,000 battle-weary KMT troops out of Burma to a mountainous sanctuary in Mae Salong in Thailand. In exchange for asylum, the Thai government allowed them to stay on the understanding that they would assist in policing the area against communist infiltration.^[7] As a result, most of the village’s inhabitants today are ethnic Chinese and direct descendants of those KMT soldiers. At the same time, General Lee of the 3rd Regiment established his headquarters at Tham Ngob, northwest of Chiang Mai.^[8] The KMT army was renamed Chinese Irregular Forces (CIF) and was placed directly under the control of a special task force, code-named “04″, under the Supreme Command in Bangkok.^[5]

After the soldiers reached Mae Salong, China and Thailand struck an agreement to transfer the administration of the group to the Thai government. The Provincial governor of southern Thailand, Pryath Samanmit, was reassigned as the governor of Chiang Rai, to oversee the KMT division, but upon taking up his position, Samanmit was killed by communist insurgents. Soon afterwards, the KMT division was ordered to assist the Thai government to counter the advancing armies on Thailand’s northern borders and the internal threat from the Communist Party of Thailand.^[9] Fierce battles were fought in the mountains of Doi Laung, Doi Yaw, Doi Phamon and Mae Aabb, and the communist uprising was successfully countered. The bloodiest operation was launched on 10 December 1970, a five-year long campaign that claimed over 1,000 lives, many from landmines. It was not until 1982 that the soldiers were able to give up their arms and were discharged to settle down to a normal life at Mae Salong. As a reward for their service, the Thai government gave citizenship to most of the KMT soldiers and their families.^[9]

Despite the Thai government’s attempts to integrate the KMT division and their families into the Thai nation, the inhabitants of Mae Salong preferred for many years to engage in the illegal opium trade, alongside the drug warlord Khun Sa of the Shan United Army.^[3] In 1967, Tuan said in an interview with a British journalist:

We have to continue to fight the evil of communism, and to fight you must have an army, and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains, the only money is opium.^[10]

—Gen Tuan Shi-wen, Weekend Telegraph (London), 10 March 1967

According to a CIA report in 1971, Mae Salong was then one of the largest heroin refineries in Southeast Asia.^[11] Only in the late 1980s, after Khun Sa’s army was finally routed and pushed over the border into Myanmar by the Thai military, was the Thai government able to make any headway in taming the region – part of which involved crop substitution plans and giving the area a new name. Santikhiri meaning “hill of peace” was introduced by the Thai government in an effort to disassociate the area from its former image as an established opium zone.^[12] King Bhumibol Adulyadej and other members of the royal family made regular visits as a sign of their support for the old soldiers who had fought against their own country for Thailand.^[9]