“It was love at first sight, you know?” Nang Khan Sar giggles shyly as she cleaves a watermelon open with a single swing of her knife.At Nang Khan Sar’s roadside fruit stand outside of Ruili in Yunnan province, across the town of Muse, Myanmar, the border is an imaginary line in the fields—without fence or sign, but increasingly potent as the Chinese government seeks to control migration and trade in an ethnically diverse region.But the border was no match for love. “We met last year during the Water Pouring Festival,” Nang Khan Sar explains of meeting her husband Ai La Wen during the New Year festivities of the Dai people, who live across southwestern China and Southeast Asia. “Everyone goes from village to village dancing. That was when we saw each other.”Nang Khan Sar is a Myanmar citizen, Ai La Wen is a citizen of China; both are of the Dai ethnicity and grew up along the shores of the Ruili River that separates the two nations.Along the 503-kilometer border between China and Myanmar in the Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture, dozens of ethnic groups have thrived where “the sky is high and the emperor is far,” as the saying goes. For millennia, family clans have walked across this mountainous frontier freely for market days, marriages, and festivals.Compared to the main touristic hubs of Yunnan such as Dali or Lijiang, Ruili, one of several border towns in Dehong, is not known for its natural visas—its river is muddy, and its hills are distant. However, travelers willing to endure hours of winding mountain highways to reach the remote town are rewarded with Ruili’s border culture: Bustling jade markets, colorful festivals, and Burmese residents walking to-and-fro sporting thanaka, a yellow-white facial paste made from ground tree bark.
Rice farmers along the border often help with neighbor’s harvests on the other side
The city at first glance resembles most regional urban centers in China, with its malls, parks boisterously full of dancing aunties, massage parlors, and coffee shops. But look closer and you will find betel nut stains on the sidewalk, mohinga noodles on many corners, and even China’s first Myanmar-language cinema. Head even a few kilometers out of the city, and there are towns inhabited by people of the Dai, Jingpo, Lisu, and Deang ethnicities, where the cycles of life ruled by harvests and festivals remain largely untouched by Ruili’s sprawl.Ruili has always been a crossroads. It was once known as the Dai kingdom of Mong Mao, and the first ruler of modern-day Ruili can be traced back to 568 CE. The Dai are part of a larger group called the Tai-speaking peoples that includes some 93 million descendants today, including the Thai of Thailand, Lao of Laos, and Shan of Myanmar, many of whom migrated south from Yunnan due to political instability over 1,000 years ago.The Dai kings were conquered in 1259 by the Yuan dynasty (1206 – 1368), whose Mongol emperors, loathing the humid southern climate, happily let the Dai elite administer the region on their behalf. In 1388, however, the Ming dynasty led a military campaign that destroyed a Dai army of 100,000 soldiers and 100 elephants. The Dai were gradually incorporated into the Chinese empire, and the last Mong Mao kings were extinguished in the 1600s.
China and Myanmar drew up their 2,200-kilometer border in 1960
Today, a glowing vestige of the Mong Mao era is the Jiele Great Golden Pagoda, seven kilometers outside of Ruili. A Dai stupa of 17 golden conical towers, its main tower is nearly 40 meters high and paved in golden ceramic tiles. As for centuries, monks clad in orange robes host ceremonies on Theravada Buddhist holidays. Hundreds of bells tied at the top of the tower create a soundtrack of distant tinkling on a breezy day.A few kilometers south along the Ruili River, Han Sha, the 48-year-old chief of Nongdao village, has something to say of Ruili’s constant pace of change. Sitting in the yard of his traditional wooden Dai-style home, he explains that for much of his lifetime, the border has been relatively porous, with populations fleeing in both directions to escape political persecution.“In my parent’s generation, our side was messy. Now that side is messy.” Han Sha’s parents had fled from Ruili to Myanmar’s Shan state during the Cultural Revolution after being labeled as landlords. His elder sister was born there, but the family returned to Ruili in the 1970s.In the last decade, fighting in Myanmar has come within 10 kilometers of Han Sha’s home. Ruili sits at the edge of Shan and Kachin states, where pro-independence ethnic groups have been embroiled in decades-long conflicts with Myanmar’s armed forces. Artillery shells have flown across the Chinese border and damaged buildings, and the violence continues to send tens of thousands of people fleeing across to Ruili for shelter.
All images from VCG
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