The Underworld Podcast - Kokang Cowboys: Burma’s Transgender Narco Royalty, a Secret Army, and a “Special Belt”

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Olive Yang—or Miss Hairy Legs, or Two-Gun Mulan, or any number of nicknames folks gave her—was the gunslinging princess of Kokang who bucked the royal yolk to become one of the Golden Triangle’s biggest narco traffickers. With DC’s backing she built an empire all over Asia, and did some pretty impressive spycraft on the side. Part one of this crazy two-parter tracks the rise of Olive and her “Boys,” the gangsters of the Kokang bush, a stint in prison, 999 dope and something Olive’s sister called, euphemistically, the “special belt.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This, listener, is how the legend of Olivierang begins. Or at least some of them. Tales of the mysterious, gun-slinging narco-princess of Kokang or Prince have diluted and morphed over time and distance. Details tweaked by campfire and gaslight by men in tents and shableness. or on caravans of mules and mopeds that have wound their way from Burma's rugged hinterlands, cradle of the world's opium production, into Thailand, the engine room of Asia's notorious golden triangle, and a launch pad for the global heroin trade.

It is, like all legends, contested and murky. But as stories about Yang tend to go, or Miss Hairy Legs, or Two Gun Moulin, or any number of nicknames history has lent her, You have to take whatever scant information you're fed and run with it. So here it goes. Sometime in the early 1940s, a teenage olive is at her family's royal court at Old Street Village, vaulted upon a hill in the wilds of Kokang, a Lebanon-sized, anvil-shaped strip of land, between Burma's Shan State and the Chinese province of Yunnan.

She'd already whipped up a fearsome rep as a child, wandering off and taming even the wildest of Yunnan ponies, a skill she'll employ years later as Kokang's very own calamity jang. The Yangs, seen in their daughter less a princess than a tear away, had sent her to a convent school in the Shan city of Lashio. But she'd raised hell, and the nuns weren't the only ones with habits. Olive loved tobacco and had a ponsion for pulling guns on those who'd pissed her off. Some say she'd even shot a classmate. Today, though, is another matter entirely. As is custom for the ethnic Chinese Yangs,

Olive's mother is preparing to bind her daughter's feet, a cruel ancient right that destroys its subject's mobility. Footbinding is already considered barbaric all over China at the time. There is absolutely zero chance then that Olive, short and cherub-faced, but with cropped hair and flint eyes, is about to let anybody mutilate her in the name of chauvinism. Cautier surround the young princess in her chamber.

She's ready for them. The first thing the guards hear outside is a symphony of shrieks. They're maids sprint into the yard. Olive's mother bandages gripped tightly in her hands, trailing close behind. When Olive emerges, moments later, there's a pistol in her hand

and a cigarette dangling from her lip. Olive raises the weapon, dirty Harry style, as she opens her mouth. I need my feet for riding, she says. And ride she will, not only from the strictures of royal life, marriage and even gender itself, but from Kokang's hilltop towns and villages into the Burmese outback, commanding the respect of thousands and the fear of many more,

forging ties with drug lords and warlords from Bangkok to Baltimore, and launching the career of a man Richard Nixon will later call the kingpin of heroin traffic in Southeast Asia. Uncle Olive, as she'll become known, has a hand in everything from the rise of Kansar to the formation of modern Myanmar, from Frank Lucas's black gangs of the East Coast to the tons of China white heroin

that make their way, with Washington's help, from the Golden Triangle to North Africa, Europe, and of course the United States. Even in the scam compounds of today's Southeast Asia, supercharged by Burma's booming narcotics trade, there are traces of Olive's hand everywhere. She's the heroin industry's Helen of Troy, the cheeky face that will launch a thousand ships, or rather shipping containers, across the world, feeding a global pandemic of crime, violence and addiction that's still going strong today.

But her story is nothing without Kokang, a craggy fiefdom that has, throughout the 20th century's hot and cold wars, resisted to communists and thwarted. fascist to keep on pumping out poppies and popping jays that have turned the golden triangle from a bucolic cultural melting pot into the most lucrative criminal marketplace on earth. Welcome to the underworld podcast. Hello everyone and welcome to the weekly show in which I get to drink too much coffee and write cold opens about criminals like I'm some modern-day Thomas Pinchin. And then I asked Danny Gold, my documentarian friend, to say,

how brilliant I am and how we're going to win a Grammy or a Tony or something like that. for all the amazing creative work that we do. Tony would be interesting, but yeah, you really do put way too much effort into these cold opens. The people just, they don't deserve it. It's either this or look after my family, so what are you going to do? I am, of course, Sean Williams in Wellington, New Zealand. Is it you on holiday skiing in Colorado this week, or do we have to pretend we spend all day living in our own excruent to get people to keep listening? It's a lovely, lovely picture of your painting.

Honestly, I'm so focused on going on a holiday in Japan right now, just because of how good Tokyo vices, if you guys aren't watching it. It's incredible TV. And I never got that. I never had that weird obsession with Japan that, like, you know, people get in their teens and 20s.

Like, I never watched anime and like that. But I might be, I might be getting it now. You know, I just want to go to Tokyo and, like, eat good food and get drunk, preferably with Yakuza. So if you have any Yakuza listeners, like, definitely hit us up. You know, it's worked with cartel guys

and Eastern European gangsters, so we might as well, you know, drop it here and see what works out. Yeah, it's taking you 40 years, but you're finally going to learn the sword. So it's good. Anyway, as usual, please do share all the socials, comment on any shilling we do on Instagram so we can get more paid stuff. I mean, we're making it very, very clear that what we do, we do for money and not love. So if you've got to connect with Lockheed Martin, Adel Monty or Trafigura, just hit us up.

The Underworld Podcast at gmail.com. Is there anything I'm missing? Yeah, the YouTube. definitely go follow us there and support our sponsors. So this is going to be the first of two parts on what I'm very cleverly calling our Cocang Cowboys episode. Jesus Christ, that was hard to say. Going from the early days of the region's opium trade to the Cold War, Vietnam Operation Paper, Robin Hoods and Ponietel gangsters, gay movie stars and the rise of Lowe Singh's

Han, the guy Nixon called the heroin trades number one, Kingpin. And then the following part, we will dive into the fall of communism, Peng Xia Sheng, model armies, casino crime towns, the four Chinese mafia families, all the way up to last year. And that is when the Chinese Communist Party finally decided to pull its finger out of its backside and break up the region's crazy criminal enterprises. And of course, I'll sprinkle a little bit of wire and yabber in there too, in case you didn't get your fill from Danny's recent episode with Patrick Wynne, which of course was really, really cool.

Yeah, people seem to like the wild world of Asian organized crime, and I think it's fascinating. So we're going to keep doing it because not many people will, not many other people are. Yeah, man, I mean, you can keep you a million Matthews stories. This stuff is, ah, this stuff is just amazing. And all of this stuff, right, all of this madness, it can be linked with Kokang, which is this small, I mean, yeah, it's not tiny. It's small, rugged slither of hills. It's around the size of Lebanon or Massachusetts that's lodged in the north eastern corner of Shan State, which is the easternmost part of Burma, a huge place.

and it backs on to Yunnan China. And because of that, of course, it's changed hands over time, a lot. From the mid-1300s to the late 1800s it is Chinese under the Ming and later Qing dynasties. But in 1897, it is ceded to, who else, Britain, Q, Rolbertania Musicdale, and it becomes part of British Burma, which is a colony, the red coats of one, and even more bloody fashion than most, over three separate wars across six. years in the region. Burma's also known as the Scottish colony because so many Scots are involved in its annexation.

I'm just saying that to give the English a sliver of respectability back for once. But Kokang, it hasn't really been Burmese ever. It's people aren't Burmese. They're Chinese. What about like Hilt tribes or other ethnicities, like indigenous ethnicities and stuff? Yeah, like the Lahoo and there are a few other kind of people, right? I think they're considered ethnic Chinese as well. If you are a Burmese historian, feel free to reach out.

So these people's cultural cues come from Yunnan, right? Not 500 miles south in the Burmese capital city of Rangoon, which of course now is Yangon. Now this is one of two reasons that the Yangs, a family who've built their power by allying with China since the 1730s, managed to carve out Kokang as a semi-autonomous state, a country in all but name. The other is opium. Kokang is a vertiginous place, crammed full of mountains, valleys, and hilltops. Every professional audio writer I've ever spoken to is like,

talk like a normal person, because your audience will enjoy it more, and we've got like Mr. Vertiginous Williams over here. All right, all right, hold on, hold on. I'll start again. Kokang has got mountains. It's up and down, and yeah, that'll do. Anyway, rice paddies are useless,

and tea is for the Yunnanese. it still is today, I think Yunnan's biggest tea export in the world. What does grow well in Kokang, though, are puppies, millions and millions of them. And anybody growing poppies in Kokang during the 1920s has to give a fifth of the raw opium they harvest as a tax to the Yangs, who are the only legal's wholesale agents in the land. Any merchant who wants to flog his gear on the market needs a stamp of the Yang family's imperial copper seal, backed by the Qing Dynasty court over in Beijing. Now these poppy merchants would trek to the Yang Stronghold at a place called Old Street Village,

which sounds like a really crap hipster covered market in London, but instead of a bunch of shipping containers full of burger bars and state-sanction graffiti, Kokang's Old Street Village is a stone court surrounded by a white perimeter wall, built on a hillock, with the only way in and out being a steep set of a hundred steps. Anybody making it up them would be greeted by heavily armed guards decked in red turbans, passing under an arch gate adorned with an inscription penned by Olive's grandfather, Yang Chun Yong. Quote, it is a shame to earn riches without good strategies.

I mean, I guess the Chinese version sounded better, but it's better than those Twitter rise and grind accounts anyway. By the way, a lot of today's episode is going to come from Gabrielle Pallook's excellent book about Olive called The Opium Queen, which is really forensic, especially about her early life, and unpacking the many mysteries surrounding it, which there are many. Another classic about this early opium trade is Merchards of Madness by Bertil Lindner, one of the true experts on Burmese history today, although he was really rude to me once,

so that's the last year going to hear about him on this particular show. He also wrote the book I always reference, what's it called, like insurgency and opium, the making of Burma or something like that, but it's an actual book. Is that one of his as well? Yeah, yeah, that's him. Yeah, yeah, damn. Back to the Yangs. Theirs is a hard one and fragile power.

Kokang and Shan more generally is a fearsome place, riddled with opium smugglers, warlords and gangsters, with myths of criminal escapades drifting over the poppy fields like sweet, sickly opium smoke. Ollie's father, by the way, is fond of a dope pipe, and she comes to associate the smell more than anything else with home. So basically just like your old apartment in Berlin. Yeah, I mean, that would be quite a nice.

nice smell compared to that place. But for outsiders, Koukang's best known smell is the stench of cry. And all of its legends, and of all of its legends, none are more fabled than Sunpei. The quote, Robin Hood of Burma, so you can sound the Robin Hood gangster Claxendale. And he goes on a rampage of robbery and violence. And it's said to have evaded a search by a thousand sepoys that is British Indian colonial troops. in the depths of the Burmese jungle, during which the suppliers find nothing but a diary detailing their target's crimes.

In October 1927, just four months after Olive's birth, Sunpe is sentenced to death for murdering a policeman and a lawyer, just like Robin Hood wasn't. Writes the New York Times that day, quote, Sunpay, whose exploits calls the authorities much trouble and expense, has been pictured in the movies and lauded, and came to be regarded by some people as gifted, with supernatural powers, including the ability to become invisible and defied sword cuts and bullets.

Danny, what would your number one superpower be and why? Remember that story from like 10 years ago about those cigarette smoking twin eight-year-olds in Burma that were supposed to have like all those superpowers and they were like these rebel leaders? Those kids ruled. I don't think it ended up working out too well for them, but that was a great story. I thought you were about to say smoking cigarettes without feeling a bit sick because that's about as much as I could hope for these days.

Anyway, this is the world, right? This is this universe that Yang Kinsu, Olive, I'm sorry, I'm going to obviously butcher the Chinese, is born into. A wild, rugged mess of drugs and crime and feudalism. And good news for her. She's a princess. The family caller by the nickname Erje,

Chinese for second sister. because it's custom to denote the gender and birth order of kids at the time, writes Gabriel Paluk, quote, wherever she went, people called her Urgea. She was reminded she was just a girl and came second. But even as a baby, Oliver's bucking the royal yoke. She's always wandering off and causing headaches for her folks and their dozen or so servants at Old Street Village.

Age five, she grabs a pistol and she almost shoots a visiting dignitary, which her father rewards by giving Olive a gun and a Yunnanese pony. Soon after, he packs her off. a hundred miles south to Catholic school in the Shan city of Lachio, lovely place, with a nuns name her olive after a virgin saint, not a virgin oil, who was exiled from Sicily to Tunisia,

then beheaded. And that's about as bad a case of nominative determinism as you're likely to get, not least because young Olive gives about as many shits for Catholicism as Martin Luther's dog. Jesus Christ. Bonjour, compadre. It's the...

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That was terrible, on it. She cuts her hair short like a boy and draws a guy. and draws a gun when a kid mocks her for it. The nun's expel her, and she's sent across the Yunnan border into Kunming, the province's biggest city, where the Yang's hope she'll get whipped in its royal shape. Back home, though, the Yang's world is about to be turned upside down. It's the 1930s and anti-colonialism is in the air, not least, just over the border in India. China itself is the scene of an epic struggle between the Red Army of Mao Zedong

and Chiang Kai Shik's comming. Tang Nationalists, the KMT. But you knew that, didn't you? Because I've done about a thousand episodes on this. At the same time, Imperial Japan is snatching land across Asia. In 1941, the US meant something called the Flying Tigers, a cracked team of daredevil pilots flying rickety old bioplanes out of Burma in an attempt to slow the tide of both communist China and Imperial Japan.

These are the four bears of Air America. The opium flying CIA operatives we dived into a few months back, so you can check that show out too. But the Flying Tigers are no match for their enemies. In 1942, Japan takes Burma. Its troops fan out across the country, killing, looting, and burning almost everything in their path, until, writes Pulip, quote,

they arrived at Kokang's southern boundary that May. A column of invaders marched north beyond the last paved road through the treacherous hills, then came and ransacked the family court as a warning before ensconcing themselves in a monastery. Oli's father responds by drafting around 1,500 locals into something he calls the Kokang's self-defense force, and even leads a KMT division on behalf of Generalisa Mo Chang. Kokang's preservation against the twin tides of communism and imperialism has suddenly become a U.S. interest. And so while greater Burma falls to the Japanese, they've installed a puppet kind of Vichy Burma in Rangoon that rejects the British

and Mao pushes the KMT out of Yunnan into the Shan Hills, American intelligence officials equipped the Yangs with a team of spies to win back their throne at Old Street Village. Writes Pollock, quote, The Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, created a first of its kind guerrilla detachment. The OSS 101 detachment was the game, gather intelligence behind enemy lines,

relying on cooperation with local tribal forces. Whether this is key or not. In 1945, the Japanese surrender and the British retake Burma. Hooray! I mean, I guess the nukes were probably a bit more decisive. Just before victory is announced, Olive, now almost 18, travels with her mother to the bank

to retrieve a treasure chest, filled with the family's gold and silver. They're assigned their own teller, a fair-skinned red-headed Scott called Jean. Olive falls immediately in love with the girl, who speaks fluent Chinese but has, like Olive, but her family's strict religious upbringing and completed school on her own. But however much Oliver's railed against norms her entire life at this point,

a lesbian affair is way beyond the pale. The Yangs marry her off instead to a local chieftain named Duan Chow Wen, a veteran of the Allied Wars against Japan, and their engagement ceremony involves something called Killing the Chicken, which is a weird example of saying that sounds like a dirty euphemism, but is in fact a very literal description of something that is way, way dirtier. Is there a name for that?

I don't know, like saying, lads, if you know what I mean tonight, we're going for a wink, wink, hide the penis in the vagina? I don't know. Only killing the chicken is way, way worse. I'll let Palook describe it, quote, The chicken was decapitated, and its eyes were pulled through its beak, so the geomancer could read their hexagrams.

Nice, I'm getting hot under the collar already. Quote, they set an auspicious date for the wedding ceremony several months out. Once the chicken was killed, the marriage contract legally bound one to produce an heir. An upsetting prospect for Olive, who abhorred the fault of sex with a man and dreaded pregnancy. But the families proceeded, and in a sense, Olive had no choice. I mean, it's like, it's killing a chicken, you know, it's not the end of the world. Like, relax. people cut the heads up chickens all the time.

Isn't that what they do? Yeah, I know. I don't know if they pull their eyes through their mouth. That's already dead. I guess so. And then read their hexagrams? I don't know what a hexagram is. Yeah, neither do I.

Sounds pretty sexy. Anyway, according to Kokang custom, if Olive breaks the marriage contract, the Yangs have to pay the duans nine times his dowry, which I'm guessing is quite a lot. So finally, exasperated. Olive's mom attempts to bribe her daughter into marital sex in a currency that only she will understand.

understand. How many guns will it takes? She asked. How many guns can you get? Oliver replies. You got to reread that and be like how many guns can you get? You know? Like for the... Isn't that a line from a movie? Like, what do you

got? Like, what is it? Something along those lines. I don't remember. It does sound like it. It's too good, isn't it? What do you got? I know. Maybe it's rebel. Am I thinking of rebel out of cause? Like, what do you rebel against? What do you got? I don't know, man. Yeah, that sounds right. It's a great line.

It's a great line. So apparently, it is a tradition for a woman to refuse her husband's advances for as long as possible, even with biting or scratching. Olive takes it several steps further, of course. When Duan finally does consummate the marriage, falsefully, and Guardsmen open their bedroom door, Duan is battered, partially clothed and soaked in urine, just like your mum. God damn it. I was going to say something like just like your dating life was in Berlin, but you beat me to

the punch. I got in there first. Yeah. I feel like we need a brief music. Paul Stahl, can you play some elevator music while we get a breath back? Because that was pretty nuts. Okay, thanks. So, the chicken's eyes have been pulled roundly through its beak, and Olive soon discovers to her horror that she is indeed pregnant with Duan's child.

She escapes before her belly grows visibly and names her boy Jeep. After an American vehicle, she brought on the black market in Kunming. She refused to breastfeed the boy, and she sends him away early. Then it seems she resolves not to be a princess at all, but a gangster. And not a female one either. She shaves her head and binds her breasts and she sets off on a journey to become a narco legend. In 1947, India shakes off its colonial shackles. A year later, Burma follows suit.

Kou Kang declares its own independence. But in his democratic zeal, Olu's father signs a deal promising to give up all hereditary titles in 10 years' time. In 1949, he dies, leaving the dynasty to Olive's eldest brother Edward, a dashing university graduate people called the quote Coakang Gregory Peck. Edward forges closer ties with the KMT

who are by now up to their eyeballs in the drug trade. Says one of their generals, quote, 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. Sound logic right there.

Sound logic, if not the tightest of quotes. Freedom ain't free, son. You can't spell democracy without dope, the peace signet of course. So now you've got the KMT commandeering the opium trade to finance his existential fight against Mal. And Mal has a new ally in the Communist Party of Burma, whose goons are also trying to take over the drug trade of the warlords of Shan and Kokan from Rang.

Gung. So Uncle Sam is offering spies, training, tech and guns to anybody who resist communism. And his coalescence of KMT lackeys and local warlords becomes the so-called secret army, a clandestine Cold War force aiming to invade Yunnan with Kokang right on the front line. In Narcotopia, our buddy Patrick Winn, we talked about this, but he really gets into this, so definitely buy his book. Oh yeah, for sure. It's like, this is so interesting and stuff. Anyway, Edward Yang, he's off in New York at the UN. He's arguing Co-Kang's case for independent over canopays and coffee.

Little Sister Olive, therefore, becomes Co-Kang Cowboy No. 1, leader of her father's Co-Kang self-defense force. And she'll quickly realize there's power to be won by Cozy and Upsi the Americans. President Truman has just approved $5 million to what he's calling Operation Paper, essentially enabling the Secret Army to buy selling Golden Triangle Opium via a CIA, front company in Bangkok. Again, we got into this a bit in the previous episode about America.

It's called Sea Supply, and it's fronted by a man known only as Mr Ho. More on him in a bit. By 1951, Operation Paper has swelled the ranks of the Secret Army such that they're poised to invade Yunnan, and their KMT chiefs believe draw on the support of oppressed locals

who will cheer their march all the way to Beijing. Big mistake. For one, The masses seem pretty chill with communism, when the ones who haven't already been murdered in their homes. Second, Mao has employed the fearsome war, an ethnic Chinese militia,

and they beat the living crap out of the secret army. KMT soldiers and even CIA advisors are killed in the doomed 50-day assault. I may be misremembering this, but I think what Wynn sort of gets into is that it wasn't like the entirety of the war, right? There was like a faction, like a communist faction that Mao got involved with. the majority of Wall wanted to maintain independence from both communism and the KMT because they're, you know, fiercely independent. And eventually they revolt against the communist faction and overthrow them.

But I'm not entirely sure about, you know what, I am. I'm almost entirely sure. So, you know, we'll go with that. Yeah, I mean, these, these guys are like flipping sides quicker than rap. Right. I think the one has two places as well, right? The Y has two enclaves, like one in the north and one in the south of Shan. No, the one, they only get the one in the Shan later on for, uh, in like,

I think the late 80s or 90s for trafficking purposes when they move against the Sean. So, TLDR, listen to all of our shows over and again until you get... You'll know more than we do because we forget everything because we're brain dead. Yeah. So what follows is something of a frozen conflict, right, with the remnants of the secret army clashing with red Chinese troops across the Yunnan Kokang border. The anti-communist side falls back on the opium trade even harder, and Olive's star rises.

The Cocang Self-Defense Force has grown into a potent guerrilla outfit with Olive on the ground and Edward at the UN. Most people now know them simply as Olive's boys. A visiting Taiwanese agent is so impressed by Olive that he writes a glowing couplet about her. Quote, The Queen of Old Street became like a celestial fairy, her smile spreading cheek to cheek. Gorillas bowed down. The beautiful woman from the mountaintop praised their feet. persistence. Yeah, I mean, I reckon the original Chinese was probably a bit punchier. Anyway,

in Kokang, Olive is top dog, and that does not go down well with some of her male relatives. An uncle tells her she's risking Kokang's future getting tangled with the secret army and says she shouldn't go around telling anybody she's a commander. It's embarrassing. Well, this sounds a lot like the sexist stuff she's dealt with before, and Olive bites back at him, quote, the communists are planning an invasion and we are the guardians of the frontier. To ram home her point, Olive pulls a knife and she slams it into the wall,

only she slips, and she accidentally sticks the blade into the leg of her uncle's daughter, who is a cousin, I think. I didn't mean it, she cries, horrified at the wound. I'm sorry. Still, apologies aside, it does little to hurt Olive's image as a hardened badass, an image she sculpts by drinking heavily,

smoking opium and wearing an American pilot's jacket. She tells her men to call her Uncle Olive and demands they use he-him pronouns in an early attempt to anger J.K. Rowling. I guess you could say she was trans, but we didn't really talk about it when she was living with us, says an old friend. Everybody just accepted it and let Uncle Olive be. Just let Uncle Olive be, guys.

Add Olive's brother Francis, quote, Olive is a real playboy. Any woman we did not dare to talk to, Olive will talk to. She's a better man than us. We'll get to some of that in a bit. So she's a player and a gangster. Olive's cocaine opium is renowned for its high quality and she gets deep into the bed with the Americans who use Kokang's Hills as a listening post into Yunnan. And they're working with her at the Secret Army's main trading post, military base and airstrip in the Shantown of Mongsat, which coincidentally is where I spent several days being screwed over by

meth gangs on my first trip to the country in 2018. Nice little market there. Not so nice mobsters. And you weren't there for work, right? You were there for recreational, you know, purposes, right? I was there very much for research purposes. I did a very tight job and absolutely did not get wasted on local beer. And methamphetamine.

Anyway, Olive is never too bold and she never rushes her product. So successful is she that gold bars begin to pile in trunks all round her house. That's not to say, though, that she's a soft touch. Some of the guys she runs with are out and out monsters. Take Fat Huang, for example. A local brigand who's rumoured to throw his foes into a snake pit out back of his home, and he keeps slaves.

He's also really thin, weirdly. But Olive is soon angered by the way the KMT treat ethnic Chinese in Kokang and Shan. In 1953, she colludes with the Burmese government to push up. pushed the KMT out of Kokang, and then she switches sides, and she works with the KMT to ship opium down to Thailand, working too as a double agent for the Americans, revealing Chinese military positions as she's moving her dope. Olith is such a committed anti-communist that she even cuts penicillin with laxatives for Maoist Chinese buyers at her markets, which I think Gen Zedda's call extra.

sudden change of allegiance, from Burma to the KMT, infuriates Burmese authorities in Rangoon. It also does no favours to the hopes of Oliver's brother Edward, who's still furiously plugging away with diplomats trying to get Rangoon to Greenlight Kokang independence. Remember, he's only got a few years until he's got abdicate, as per his father's deal. Time is running out. At one event, a diplomat pulls Edward aside. You think Kokang is made of steel, he says. Steel can rust, you know?

Is that stainless steel, like it's there by then, right? Would that, like I would have missed solid, solid comeback? Can stainless steel rust? Have you seen the video of the concrete of growing off trees guy in the UK? That is just incredible. I'll have to put that in the show notes. Oh my God, this reminds me of that. Anyway, yeah, very niche.

Around this time, Burma's own Communist Party is becoming stronger, including with Mao's Chinese. They've got their eyes on Burmese mining towns on the, border, and Olive suddenly goes all out against what she sees as a turncoat regime in Rangoon. She rages around Shan with her boys chanting slogans against Burma. They start a brawl when they see a Burmese tea shop owner harassing an ethnic Chinese punter. One of Olive's boys writes an editorial for a local newspaper, slagging off the locals for discriminating against ethnic Chinese. The gloves are off, basically. Although that's a little bit local newspaper stuff,

isn't it? And the Burmese were about to snap back big time. In 1953, they arrest Olive in Laschio, and they charge her with colluding with the KMT. They sent her to prison in Mandalay in the center of the country. While she's behind bars, journalists discover the truth about America's secret army in Burma, and the UN forces Washington to remove all its forces from Burmese soil. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a problem. partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and all birds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify

on your side, turn your big business idea into, sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means your probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home. With agents who close twice as many deals, when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at Redfin.com. Own the dream. The UN Security Council releases a report that singles out Olive by name. For a brief moment, she's one of the most of the most notorious criminals on earth.

You might assume prison to be tough for a trans princess turned enemy of the state, but then you might not have watched Orange's New Black. Olive is cut off from the crazy politics outside prison, surrounded by women, without a man in sight. She's in heaven. And according to her sister Judy, she even gets herself what we might say is to make a strap on. When she's released soon after,

Olive takes Judy to see Calamity Jane, An American Wild West movie about a woman who gallivants across the country, dressed in men's clothing and telling tall tales. She even names her new horse hurricane after the one in the film. Just for reference, how old are you? I'm 38. 38. And could you say strap on right now without giggling like a schoolgirl?

No, absolutely not. She had said in the book, a belt with an artificial penis, but, you know, that's kind of even funnier for my... Yeah, you should have said that instead, actually. That would have been better. Oh, God. Olive also begins an affair with Burma's most famous actress, Wawa Win Shea. The country's very own Liz Taylor, beautiful, with a uniform of large-framed specs, pearls, diamonds, and ruby rings.

Gene, Ollie's first love, introduces the pair when Wawa is just 15. I mean, if you're not contacting Gabrielle to buy the rights and turn this into a moment, movie right now. You're just, you're wasting your life. Yeah, yeah, I could exchange her details with the millions of producers that call me up for absolutely no reason. And Olive woo's Wawa by promising to be her

garden patron in the movie industry. You could call her the Zaddy of the Irrawaddy. At one point, Olive threatens a director into casting Wawa. It's very Mario Puzzo of her, you know? Very. Actually, wait, didn't that happen in real life with Frank Sinatra? allegedly, right?

Is that allegedly or is that real? Gene Kana or one of the Chicago? I don't remember the exact details, but You can probably find that in episode 283 somewhere. In another, she buys a yellow Chevrolet just so she could ferry the young actor to and from set. I'm guessing a yellow Chevy

stands out pretty wildly in Rangoon or Malay or whatever. Anyway, you were born to be a star, Olive tells her. Wah Wah Winshwe should know more about Olive's special belt, says Olive's sister duty. In 1955, Burmese communist forces reach Shan State. The local leader orders Olive to be exiled.

She flees south of Kokang, opening timber yards, and with them, new opium shipping routes into Thailand. Her stint and prison has won her new admirers, but it's also hardened her, and Olive is said to run her operations like a dictator. She's an insomniac, smokes heavily and gets into Marjong, which I'm not really sure how much of a red-flared Mar-Jean is, but I guess it's interesting. Anyway, Olive never kills anyone directly, despite her love of pistols, but she does get Fat Huang to shoot a sawmillan dead, then float his body downstream as a warning to anybody else thinking of crossing her. It's interesting how often

Narco groups or any illicit criminal org in these sort of places turn to illegal logging, right? It's like the real estate development of the third world. Yeah, who's the guy, the mastermind who Evan Ratliff did that amazing story about I think I did a show with him ages and ages ago. He got into logging in like Congo or something like this.

There's loads of it going in Indonesia. Mexico, too, I feel like. Oh, yeah, Mexico, yeah. I think. Oh, damn, what are we doing? Anyway, Olive's main contact in Thailand is Mr Ho. Remember him? The guy who'd been working as the CIA's point man in Bangkok.

But Mr. Ho isn't Thai at all. He's actually a Taiwanese agent with four separate identities, including one as a mining and gemstone shipping magnate. Each identity commanding huge black market enterprises fueling the regional drug trade. Olive loves her criminal ho, and he helps her ship huge quantities of opium from Thailand into Cairo, Egypt, where it sold onwards into Europe, with the help of course of Corsican mobsters.

Crucially, however, the entire business still begins with the cultivation of puppies in Kokang, which are then sent to a small illegal morphing processing pond in the Shan jungle. And it's not so different from today. Olive is an exile. So, she hands over operations to an underling named Lo Singh Han, a quiet, slender lackey, said to have followed Olive everywhere with a pack of ready cigarettes. He's also spry and clever. While Olive is away growing the business,

Lowe begins stamping their dope with a new brand name, 999. His star is about to rise as quickly as a payload of Agent Orange on a Cambodian paddy. Conflict is erupting in the region, and America is about to churn out wave upon wave of war-scarred dope-addicted veterans. And Olive Yang and 999 are about to become buywords for the world's most lucrative drug trade. What year are we in right now? I think we're in the late 50s by this point. Okay.

Yeah. So, yeah. Actually, no, mid-50s, like 56, 57. So, yeah, the war is about to get real bad. And, yeah, that is going to do us for part one of the Kokang Cowboys Epic. Coming up next show, we'll have the Fall of Kokang. Vietnam, of course, the rise of Loh Singh Han, the godfather of heroin, Penjia Sheng, Olive's second imprisonment, and later years, casino cities,

Chinese mafias, and slave compounds. Thanks for listening. As always, patreon.com slash underworld podcast. Spotify, you can get the bonuses, same thing with iTunes, YouTube, Instagram, all that. Search for us, comment, do all that stuff that we hate to ask you to do, but we need to survive. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion-dollar swings.

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