Piang Luang: The reality of a border

No.09 - 7/2007
14 July 2007
Culture

Piang Luang: The reality of a border
By Christa Thorpe

 
The Thai-Burma border in most places besides the official crossing points symbolizes the strange reality of how modern boundaries have come to hold such significance in lands that were once as politically fluid as the mountain ranges that blanket both Chiang Mai and Shan State. In Piangluang, the Shan village in Wiang Haeng district of northern Chiangmai province, one can rest her eyes on two identically beautiful hills, and realize that one is a “Thai” mountain, while the one next to it belongs to Burma.
 
To call one hill Thailand and the other Burma initially invokes a feeling that such a definition is as arbitrary as the fact that at any given moment one hill in a mountain range stands veiled in a soft grey rain-cloud, while the one next to it absorbs the sun’s glorious rays into its dense green forest canopy. They are just two hills, are they not? They host the same clouds, face the same seasons, and can bring forth the same crops. 
 

^{Wat Fa Wiang Inn}

There is a temple on the border, Wat Fa Wiang Inn, which is perhaps even technically bisected by the invisible line, but of course the monks and villagers here refuse to argue the political boundaries of a sacred place. There are Buddhists both in Thailand and in Burma. Having this temple on the border makes the lines of two nations again seem as un-definable as deciding to whom the rain-clouds belong.
 
However the man-made reality and importance of the boundaries forever looms over citizens on either side. Even in this continuous landscape where grass and trees cross freely, the forest floor is lined with landmines, a dangerous reminder to helpless mortals of the indisputable authority of this border.
 
The SPDC base sits above the Wat to the West on the hill, and a Thai-army guarded check-point is plopped down on the narrow dirt road next to the temple, leading from this relatively free land, to a place that still guards a million tragic secrets of silenced victims.
 
Beyond the base where on most days SPDC soldiers lounge in a peaceful, though undoubtedly tension-wrought setting, the next hill over hosts a community of Shan refugees who have been stripped of every human right, and driven from their homes with no allowance of dignity by the SPDC. They arrived with nothing, most of them having been forced to run from the increased conflicts of 2002 in Shan State.
 
Just south of the military controlled Burma, behind the peaceful Wat, and the poverty of the refugee camp, is another reminder of the firm reality of the Thai-Burma border. The village of Piang Luang houses over six hundred families of Shan exiles, who for over thirty years have been living and working in Thailand, in walking distance from their rightful home of Shan State.
 
They had crossed this border, unaccepted by the land they left behind, hardly noticed by the country to which they came.
 
Though many Shan have left been forced to cross the border saying goodbye to their homes and loved ones, what they do not leave behind in that war-torn state is the fervent hope and determined desire to gain back what they have lost. To continue the worthy fight for freedom.