Helen Andrews, TAC Print Editor: If you browse WeChat posts from Wa State, the reclusive mountain enclave on the border between Burma and China, apparently it is full of pictures of modernist buildings with luxurious furnishings, fridges full of Lafite Rothschild, and other glamorous trappings of the drug kingpins’ high life. “They celebrate their investment victories with bear paw soup,” a source tells journalist Patrick Winn. “Then they post it to WeChat. It’s pangolins and stuff on there, all day long.”
Social media posts are the closest most outsiders will ever get to Wa State, which was notoriously insular even before the drug trade gave the inhabitants a reason to keep intruders out. Up until the 1960s, the Wa were headhunters, derided as savages by the lowland Burmese. Today, they have their own state within a state, including their own ministries of health and education and, of course, their own…
