Dragon Mountain. Daniel Reid

      Ching Wei was right. It was good that I had another brandy while I had the chance. For the next six weeks I ate nothing but rice and barley with fiery curries that burned twice—once going down, and once again coming out. The natives were all devout Buddhists or hopeless opium addicts, or both, so they didn't touch booze. Some of Ching Wei's white hostages distilled their own arack from millet or palm, but that stuff burned even worse than the curries.

      There seemed to be lots of white men around, but I rarely saw more than two or three together in the same place. Each went about his own business as if he were walking down Main Street, USA. Some had gone native, with local wives and children, and lived in their own native huts. Others remained perpetual guests of their hapless hosts and flatly refused to conform to local customs. To the great disgust of the natives, most of the unmarried white men stayed stone drunk much of the time, occasionally abusing their hosts as well as each other in drunken brawls. But the villagers had strict standing orders from Ching Wei to make his "guests" feel at home there, so no one dared protest the behavior of these drunken louts. The first phrase I learned in the local lingo was, "Liquor is as natural to the white man as milk is to babies."

      One of Ching Wei's whims, to which he devoted increasing attention over the years, was to collect a sort of menagerie of white captives to amuse him. This hobby he pursued with great enthusiasm. When I arrived, he had about fifty men in his collection; by now there are at least three hundred fifty. Each captive lives in the household of his assigned host and receives everything he needs without having to do a lick of work for it. Those with special skills—like me—lived in the main village near the mountain, where Ching Wei could beckon us at will. But basically we were free to do anything we pleased—except leave.

      One of our main functions was simply to amuse Ching Wei, like a collection of exotic pets. Whenever the mood struck him, he would invite a bunch of us up to his place for a huge feast and lavish entertainment. The more drunk and disorderly his guests became, the more he seemed to enjoy their company. He himself rarely drank more than a glass or two of champagne or cognac, but it was clear from his glazed eyes and manic grin that he had something a lot stronger than booze coursing through his veins.

      White men were not his only whim. He also collected exotic animals from all over the world—mostly predators—and these he kept in a zoo within the palace walls. The animals were tended by an English veterinarian specifically selected and kidnapped for that purpose. When he felt particularly perverse, he'd sometimes pit one of his pet predators, such as a tiger, against a guest or native who'd broken one of his rules.

      Ching Wei also collected guns and orchids. I saw his gun room several times over the years, and I doubt there's a single type of firearm produced in the last hundred years of which he doesn't own at least one sample. That's where One-Eye got the Uzi he used to nab me.

      Ching Wei's orchid collection contained over five hundred varieties. He kept an elaborate, fully automated greenhouse tended by a French orchid cultivator named Moreau, whom he also kidnapped expressly for the job. Ching Wei once explained to me the source of his endless fascination with orchids. He said the blossoms reminded him of the intricate, delicately convoluted folds of the female genitalia, each breed displaying its own unique shape, size, and colors, each blossom exuding its own individual fragrance. "Everything about the orchid is designed to arouse sexual excitement in the roving butterfly or passing bee," he'd often say while sniffing lovingly at a bloom. When you think about it, he's right.

      Except for the foreign luxuries brought in from Bangkok, Dragon Mountain was entirely self-sufficient. The Shan tribes-men grew food in great abundance, with staples of rice, millet, and barley, and all sorts of fruits and vegetables for variety. For meat, Shan hunters stalked their prey throughout the surrounding mountains and valleys with vintage carbines, bringing back monkey, small deer, wild boar, water rats, civet cats, and snakes. The only domestic animals they ate were dogs and pigs, and those only on special occasions. The natives observed a strict taboo against eating beef, for the cow and buffalo were sacred animals to them, but because their white guests preferred beef above all other food, the locals were forced to butcher cattle for them. I soon learned another native term for the white man, always muttered in a tone of deep disgust: "The Beefeaters."