Ban Doi Mae Salong, the hub of a secret war

From Chiang Rai, the northeasternmost city of Thailand, travel 60 km along the rugged mountain road 1130, and you'll be amazed by what you find. Luxury hotels, restaurants, tea houses, and souvenir shops line the 2 km road on the mountain. 

The signs for stores and restaurants, and even the menus, are all written in Chinese. Yunnan-accented Chinese is heard in the air, and on one side, large tour buses discharge Chinese tourists. It feels like you're in Yunnan! Anyone who steps into this place is bound to be confused. 

If it weren’t for the three-story Thai Military Bank standing in the center of the village, Ban Doi Mae Salong, it would be indistinguishable from any other Yunnan village. The Thai Military Bank, located at the highest point in Thailand, symbolizes both the wealth of this place and its history.

Village chief Tawi proudly states that there are 23,000 residents and 200,000 tourists annually (before COVID-19). This is a dramatic increase from just 14,000 people in 2004. Ban Doi Mae Salong, in contrast to the rapidly depopulating trend of other mountain villages, is overflowing with jobs and money. It is rare to find a village in the mountains of Thailand with cars, satellite antennas, computers, and Wi-Fi in every home. 

The village’s main sources of income are tourism, tea, highland vegetables, and fruits. Above all, Doi Mae Salong is known for its tea. The village’s oolong tea, imported from Taiwan, is considered the best in Southeast Asia. The 200 tons of tea harvested each year from 32 square kilometers of fields has been a major cash crop for Ban Doi Mae Salong.

This transformation is remarkable compared to the early 1990s. Back then, the area was accessible only by an unpaved road that became impassable during the rainy season. 

“The only people coming and going from Ban Doi Mae Salong were soldiers and drug dealers,” says one village elder. Before 1970, the village had been little more than a secret army base with a few rice paddies. Those who lived there were a mix of mountain minorities and ethnic Chinese who had fled Burma after the secret war against the communist guerrillas.

This mysterious village of Ban Doi Mae Salong is a place with the same history of the remnants of the Kuomintang as the village of Thm Ngop, 100km to the west. The Kuomintang, who were driven out by the People’s Liberation Army of China across the Burmese border in the early 1950s, were pushed back by the Burmese troops and crossed the Thai border in the early 1960s. 

Among them, the 5th Army of the remnants led by Gen. Tuan Shi-wen set up headquarters around Doi Mae Salong in 1963. The 5th Army, along with Tham Ngop’s the 3rd Army, served as mercenaries inthe Thai government’s operation to eradicate the communists from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and in return received permission to settle in Ban Doi Mae Salong. And then the village, which started out as a military base, was a drug stronghold until the 1980s. 

The 5th and 3rd armies controlled 90 percent of the drug routes in the Golden Triangle, which included Thailand, Burma, and Laos, once the world’s largest opium producing region. In other words, the 3rd and 5th armies financed their wars with opium and their leaders amassed vast wealth. So the root of Ban Doi Mae Salong’s wealth today are wars and drugs.

However, the history of the 5th Army that established the village of Ban Doi Mae Salong is still shrouded in many secrets. One of them was their participation as secret mercenaries in the war that took place 3,000km away in Korea in the 1950s. 

“In 1951, two corps of our Yunnan Anti-Communist Salvation Army, the remnants of the Kuomintang, led by Gen. Li Mi invaded Yunnan through the Kokang Mountains of Burma and we captured Kengma in a week. 

At that time, a dozen CIA military advisers arrived on the scene by helicopter, and Gen. Li Mi ordered us saying, "We must help in the Korean War.” Gen. Lei Yu-tian, the deputy commander of the 5th Army who died in 2012, was the first to testify about the secret history of the second front of the Korean War, which had been left blank. Then, the testimony of former CIA agent Bill Young, who retired from Chiang Mai, and Gen. Xiu Zi-cheng, a Taiwanese diplomat who fought in the war as the commander of the 709th Regiment of the 8th Army of the Kuomintang, revealed that the remnants, supported by the CIA, attacked Yunnan at least seven times between August 1951 and May 1952. 

This was the CIA’s secret war called ‘Operation Paper’, which was approved by US President Harry Truman in order to disperse the Chinese PLA that crossed the Yalu River to help North Korea in the Korean War.

However, the US government’s attempts to seize strategically important Yunnan areas, including Menghai, and the popular uprising all ended in failure. Since then the Korean War’s second front was buried in history. Rather, the US only strengthened the remnants of the Kuomintang by supporting the Second Front of the Korean War, thereby shaking the security of the Indochina region. On the other hand, it was hit by the boomerang of the explosive expansion of the international drug market through the remnants of the Kuomintang. 

The failure of the Second Front of the Korean War was the biggest setback of the Korean War, resulting from the US government’s poor intelligence capabilities and romantic predictions.

After the Korean War, the 5th Army joined another CIA’s operation called ‘Secret War’ in Laos during the 1960s as mercenaries. Then continued participated anti-communist war in Thailand between 1970 and 1980s. Ultimately, the builders of the Ban Doi Mae Salong were recorded as the world’s s longest-serving warriors, having spent 50 years on the front lines from the 1940s to the 1980s. 

Fragments of that history remain in the mausoleum of Gen. Tuan Shi-wen, commander of the 5th Army, perched on Ban Doi Mae Salong Hill, and in the huge Heroes’ Memorial Hall erected at the entrance to the village. The place that used to be the 5th Army’s parade ground has been turned into a resort, testifying to the lingering history.

History does not answer those who do not ask questions. The Thai government changed the name of Ban Doi Mae Salong moved to Santi Khiri, a peaceful hill, in an attempt to erase the village’s notorious history. However, people still live with the name Ban Doi Mae Salong in their mouth.