Daniel Combs - Until the World Shatters: Truth, Lies, and the Looting of Myanmar

The train to Kachinland clacks thirty hours north from Mandalay on old colonial tracks. The heavy rhythm of the metal wheels beats a mantra for change as the train passes from one world to another: from the river valley to the mountains; from the center to the periphery; from the heart of state control to an invisible border world.

Along the way, the train stops in Shwebo, Hopin, Mogaung. Places with old names that hold memories and forgotten truths. When a column of British colonial soldiers passed this way in 1888 on a mission to subjugate the warrior hill tribes and secure the famed Kachin jade mines, Major Charles Adamson lamented the fact that locals kept so many secrets from the foreign military men. Of the road from Mogoung to the Jade mines little could be learnt, he reported. As those people who knew the road were almost invariably interested in keeping the knowledge from us.

Secrets have always held power in a place like Kachin, where the interests of governments, businessmen, and local militias have been colliding for over a century. The treacherous mountain geography and dangerous malarial jungles impede both invading armies and the flow of information. The land is secretive for a reason. Kachin State, in Myanmars far north, is home to unimaginable wealth. Every year, billions of dollars worth of jade spill down from the mountains that Adamsons men labored to find, driven by a ravenous, mystically attuned demand from China.

In the Kachin hills, locals and outsiders still battle for control over those resources, and for much more. In many ways, it is a fight for Myanmars soul.

I arrived in Myanmar in the beginning of September 2017, on a one-year fellowship to study Burmese and do research on the countrys civil war. The fellowship and the research were tied to the masters degree I was working toward at Columbia Universitywhere I was studying international security policybut the decision to come back to Myanmar was just as much personal as it was professional.

I first visited the country in 2012. It was easily the most complicated, interesting, and difficult place I had ever been, and I wanted to learn more. That first time, as a twenty-three-year-old traveler living out of a backpack, I had been fascinated by a country that seemed to have stepped sideways in time. After five decades spent isolated from the rest of the world under a series of authoritarian rulers, everything about Myanmar felt uniquethe people and their politics far more preoccupied with their own convoluted history than with what was happening outside their borders. There were no Western brands in Myanmar, no cell phones, no ATMs in the entire country. It felt like a story that hadnt finished telling itselfeven names werent settled. Was it Rangoon or Yangon, Burma or Myanmar? That sense of mystery and unsettled history was compelling.

I remember coming from Thailand with two thousand dollars hidden between the pages of different novels in my backpack, waiting to be changed into local currency at the black market money changers my friends had told me could be found around a pagoda in downtown Yangon. I remember walking through a Shan marketplace and encountering a psychedelic rainbow of fruit I had never seen or smelled or tasted. I remember making a phone call to a friend back home. Shut off from the global telecommunications boom, there were no SIM cards in Myanmar. So to dial out I had to stand on a street corner at a table run by an old lady, where twelve old rotary phones snaked together in a tangle of wires to plug into the telephone pole leaning out over the busy road. When I was done, a man passing by with a towering plate of desserts on his head handed me an orange cake and thanked me for visiting his country. I was hooked.