Kokang Cowboys: Burma’s Transgender Narco Royalty, a Secret Army, and a “Special Belt”
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No more annoying trips to the grocery store or the butcher. It's going to save you time and save you money. Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to butcherbox.com slash underworld and use code underworld at checkout to get $30 off your first box. Again, that's butcherbox.com slash underworld and use code underworld. This, listener, is how the legend of Olive Young begins, or at least some of them.

Tales of the mysterious, gunslinging narco-princess of Koh Kang, or Prince, have diluted and morphed over time and distance. Details tweaked by campfire and gaslight, by men in tents and shacks 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 Mulan, 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 teenaged Olive is at her family's royal court at Old Street Village, vaulted upon a hill in the wilds of Koh Kang, 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 Koukang's very own calamity jang. The Yangs, seeing in their daughter less a princess than a tearaway, had sent her to a convent school in the Shan city of Lashio. But she'd raised Helm and the nuns weren't the only ones with habits.

Olive loved tobacco and had a penchant for pulling guns on those who 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 rite that destroys its subjects' 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. Courtiers surround the young princess in her chamber. She's ready for them.

The first thing the guards hear outside is a symphony of shrieks. Their 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 Kaukang'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 Khansar 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 communists and fascists to keep on pumping out poppies and poppin' 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. 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 Pynchon. And then I'll ask 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. A 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 excurrent to get people to keep listening? It's a lovely, lovely picture you're painting. Honestly, I'm so focused on going on a holiday in Japan right now just because of how good Tokyo Vice is. 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 people get in their teens and 20s. I never watched anime like that. But I might be getting it now. I just want to go to Tokyo and eat good food and get drunk, preferably with Yakuza. So if you have any...

Yakuza listeners, definitely hit us up. It's worked with cartel guys and Eastern European gangsters, so we might as well drop it here and see what works out.

Yeah, it's taken 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 or Del Monte 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 one very cleverly calling our cocaine 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 ponytail gangsters, gay movie stars and the rise of Lo Sing 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 Xiaoxian, 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 gonna we're gonna keep doing it because not many people not many other people are.

Yeah, man. I mean, you can keep your Millie and Matthew stories. This stuff is just amazing. And all of this stuff, right, all of this madness, it can be linked with Koh Kang, which is this small, I mean, yeah, it's not tiny. It's a small, rugged slither of hills. It's around the size of Lebanon or Massachusetts that's lodged in the northeastern corner of Shan State, which is the easternmost part of Burma, a huge place, and it backs onto 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. Cue Royal Britannia music, Dale. And it becomes part of British Burma, which is a colony the redcoats have won in even more bloody fashion than most over three separate wars across 60 years in the region.

Burma is also known as the Scottish colony because so many Scots were involved in its annexation. I'm just saying that to give the English a sliver of respectability back for once. But Koh Kang, it hasn't really been Burmese ever. Its people aren't Burmese. They're Chinese. What about like Hilt tribes or other ethnicities, like indigenous ethnicities and stuff?

Yeah, like the Lahu and there are a few other kind of people, right? I think they're considered ethnic Chinese as well. But 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.

This is one of two reasons that the Yangs, a family who have built their power by allying with China since the 1730s, managed to carve out Koukang 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 was 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. And it still is today. I think Yunnan is biggest tea export in the world. What does grow well in Kokang, though, are poppies, millions and millions of them.

and anybody growing poppies in Koukang 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 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 sanctioned 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 100 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 Palook's excellent recent 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 Merchants 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 you're 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. Yeah, 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.

Koh Kang, 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. Olu'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 smell compared to that place. But for outsiders, cocaine's best known smell is the stench of crime. Of crime. Of crime.

And of all of its legends, none are more fabled than Sun Pei, the quote Robin Hood of Burma, so you can sound the Robin Hood gangster klaxon, Dale. And he goes on a rampage of robbery and violence and is 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 Sepoys find nothing but a diary detailing their target's crimes.

In October 1927, just four months after Olive's birth, Sunpei 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, Sunpei, whose exploits caused 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 28 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 call her by the nickname Erge, Chinese for second sister, because it's custom to denote the gender and birth order of kids at the time. Writes Gabrielle Pellug, quote, wherever she went, people called her Erge. She was reminded she was just a girl and came second.

But even as a baby, Olive is 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. Aged five, she grabs a pistol and she almost shoots a visiting dignitary, which her father rewards by giving Olive a gun and a Unanese pony.

Soon after, he packs her off a hundred miles south to Catholic school in the Shan city of Lascio, lovely place, where the 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. Yeah, sorry about that. That was terrible, wasn't it? She cuts her hair short like a boy and draws a gun when a kid mocks her for it. The nuns expel her and she's sent across the Yunnan border into Kunming, the province's biggest city, where the Yangs hope she'll get whipped into 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-shek's Kuomintang 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 minced something called the Flying Tigers, a crack team of daredevil pilots flying rickety old biplanes out of Burma in an attempt to slow the tide of both communist China and imperial Japan. These are the forebears 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 Palluk, 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. Olu's father responds by drafting around 1,500 locals into something he calls the Koukang Self-Defense Force and even leads a KMT division on behalf of Generalissimo Chang.

Koukang's preservation against the twin tides of communism and imperialism has suddenly become a US interest. And so while greater Burma falls to the Japanese, who install 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 equip 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 to 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 Scot called Jean.

Olive falls immediately in love with the girl, who speaks fluent Chinese but has, like Olive, bucked her family's strict religious upbringing and completed school on her own. But however much Olive has 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 Chao 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, then 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 thought 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 their heads off 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 Koukang 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 Duans.

Olive's mom attempts to bribe her daughter into marital sex, an occurrence that only she will understand. How many guns will it take, she asks. How many guns can you get, Olive replies. You gotta reread that and be like, how many guns can you get? Isn't that a line from a movie?

Is it? Like, what do you got? Like, what does it take? Something along those lines. I don't remember. Yeah, it does sound like it. It's too good, isn't it? What do you got? Oh, no, maybe it's rebel. Am I thinking of rebel without a cause? Like, what are you rebelling against? What do you got? I don't know, man. Yeah, that sounds right. 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, forcefully, 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 just like your dating life was in Berlin, but you beat me to the punch. I got in there first, yeah. Anyway, I feel like we need a brief music pause. Dale, can you play some elevator music while we get our 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 refuses 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.

Koukang declares its own independence. But in his democratic zeal, Olive'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 Koukang 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 sign, of course. So now you've got the KMT commandeering the opium trade to finance this existential fight against Mao. And Mao 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 Kocan from Rangoon.

So Uncle Sam is offering spies, training, tech, and guns to anybody who resists 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. And Narcotopia, our buddy Patrick Nguyen, 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 stuff. Anyway, Edward Yang, he's off in New York at the UN. He's arguing Koukang's case for independent over canapes and coffee. Little sister Olive, therefore, becomes Koukang cowboy number one, leader of her father's Koukang self-defense force. And she'll quickly realize there's power to be won by cozying up to 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 armies 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, and the ones who haven't already been murdered in their homes. Second, Mao's employed the fearsome Hua, 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 wall, right? There was like a faction, like a communist faction that Mao got involved with.

The majority of Wa wanted to maintain independence from both communism and the KMT because they're 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 we'll go with that. Yeah, I mean these guys are like flipping sides quicker than rat race. Right. They're more mercenary. I think the Wa has two places as well, right? The Wa has two enclaves, one in the north and one in the south.

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 when they move against the shan but um, so tldr listen to all of our shows over and again until you'll know more than we do because we forget everything because we're brain dead. Sure

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 Kokang 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 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 Koukang's future getting entangled with the secret army and says she shouldn't go around telling anybody she's a commander. It's embarrassing. But 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 her 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. Adds 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 cocaine'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 Shan town 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 around 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 Koh Kang and Shan. In 1953, she colludes with the Burmese government to push the KMT out of Koh Kang

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.

Olive is such a committed anti-communist that she even cuts penicillin with laxatives for Maoist Chinese buyers at her markets, which I think Gen Zers call extra. This sudden change of allegiance, from Burma to the KMT, infuriates Burmese authorities in Rangoon. It also does no favours to the hopes of Olive's brother Edward, who's still furiously plugging away with diplomats trying to get Rangoon's green-light Kocang 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, is stainless steel, like it's there by then, right? Would that, like that would have been a solid comeback. Can stainless steel rust? Have you seen the video of the concrete 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 Sham 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 are about to snap back big time. In 1953, they arrest Olive in Lascio and they charge her with colluding with the KMT. They send her to prison in Mandalay, in the centre 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.

The UN Security Council releases a report that singles out Olive by name. For a brief moment, she's one 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 is the 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 what they call a strap-on. Ha ha ha!

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. I think she had said in the book a belt with an artificial penis. But, you know, that's that's kind of even funnier for me. 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 Winshay. The country's very own Liz Taylor. Beautiful with a uniform of large frame specs, pearls, diamonds and ruby rings.

Jean, Olive'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 movie right now, you're just you're wasting your your life. Yeah, yeah. I could exchange details with the millions of producers that call me up for absolutely no reason. And Olive woos 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 Puzo of her, you know? Very. Actually, wait, didn't that happen in real life with Frank Sinatra? Allegedly, right? Was it allegedly? Gene Kana or one of the Chicago guys? 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. I'm guessing a yellow Chevy stands out pretty wildly in Rangoon or Malay or wherever. Anyway, you were born to be a star, Olive tells her. Wawa Winshwe should know more about Olive's special belt, says Olive's sister, Judy.

In 1955, Burmese communist forces reach Shan State.

The local leader orders Olive to be exiled. She flees south of Koh Kang, opening timber yards and with them new opium shipping routes into Thailand. Her stint in 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 mahjong, which I'm not really sure how much of a red flag mahjong 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 sawmill owner dead, then float his body downstream as a warning to anybody else thinking of crossing her. It's interesting how often like narco groups or any, 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 was 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 on in Indonesia. Yeah. Mexico too, I feel like. Oh yeah, Mexico. I think. 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 hoe, and he helps her ship huge quantities of opium from Thailand into Cairo, Egypt, where it's 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 Koh Kang, which are then sent to a small illegal morphine processing plant in the Shan jungle. It's not so different from today. Olive is in exile, so she hands over operations to an underling named Lo Sing 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 Young and 999 are about to become bywords 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 Koukang Cowboys epic. Coming up next show, we'll have the fall of Koukang, Vietnam, of course, the rise of Lo Sing Han, the godfather of heroin, Pen Jiao 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.

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