How former opium-producing towns in Thailand’s Golden Triangle are cashing in on their troubled past via museums and more

In the Thai part of the Golden Triangle, which straddles the borders with Myanmar and Laos, museums dedicated to the area’s opium-producing past have opened

One has ‘the largest collection in Asia’ of opium paraphernalia. Further into Thailand stands a monument dedicated to the ‘world’s most notorious drug lord’

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A display depicting an opium smoker at the House of Opium, in the Thai part of the Golden Triangle. The region’s drug-producing past is remembered here through museums, tours and memorials dedicated to the military leaders who fought an “opium war” in 1967. Photo: David Frazier

Published: 5:15pm, 19 Apr 2024

The confluence of the Ruak and Mekong rivers sits in a sleepy, broad plain that runs through a historically lawless section of highland Southeast Asia.

It marks the three-way border between Thailand, Myanmar and Laos, and the virtual centre point of one of the world’s main opium-producing regions, an area that America’s Drug Enforcement Administration in 1971 dubbed “the Golden Triangle”.

Phatcharee Srimathayakun, a 70-year-old native of the Thai village poised on this riverbank, at Chiang Saen, remembers as a 14-year-old girl witnessing one of the most blatant episodes of drug warlordism the region has ever seen, a battle involving more than 2,000 soldiers that raged for over a week on the other side of the Mekong River, in Laos.

“The villagers would sit on the hilltop and watch,” she recalls. “We could see dead soldiers floating down the Mekong. Then we saw the aeroplanes flying over, dropping bombs.

A sign at the border of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand in The Golden Triangle. Photo: David Frazier

“From the flags the different armies carried, we thought it was a battle between the Green Yunnanese and the Red Yunnanese. It was only much later that I learned what really happened.”

The battle, now remembered as the 1967 opium war, was fought between the armies of a Burmese warlord and a Lao general, and a renegade division of Chinese Nationalist, or Kuomintang (KMT), soldiers, who faced off over a 16-ton shipment of opium that had come by mule train from the Burmese highlands.