Taiwan Today

The delegation soon left Bangkok for Chiangmai in northern Thailand, where they were to be granted an audi­ence and to be feted by the King. On ar­rival, they were warmly welcomed once more, this time by both representatives of the royal house and members of the overseas Chinese community, and then driven off to the city's most luxurious hotel in a motorcade of Mercedes.

At 7 a.m., the Mercedes column pro­ceeded to the palace, perched on top of a hill a half hour's distance. The highway zigzagged sharply, and the cars moved rapidly. I, for one, braced myself inside the car, afraid of a sudden traffic emergency. I needn't have bothered, be­cause there was no traffic at all in the opposite direction. The way was wholly open for the visitors.

The party arrived at the royal compound to the welcoming sight of bank upon bank of flowers in multitude colors. We walked up a red-carpeted flight to a terrace and transited at least three halls, each covered with a deeper-red carpet. In a hall where visitors waited their audiences with the King, I recall two round teak tables, each escorted by four exquisite teak chairs. In one corner a white piano stood beside a huge painting of a fairy, dancing in the woods. Like all other paintings in the hall, it was in blue tones. Guests kept arriving, most of them professors and other experts participating in the Royal Highland Agricultural Development Project—a brainchild of His Majesty.

We exchanged pleasantries with Thai guests as round after round of various drinks were served. Then, we learned the King was delayed on a field inspection. The talking became louder.

A ceremonial master invited us to look over the King's audience chamber, and we then moved from our outer hall through another hall, and then into a hall connecting to the chamber. In this hall, a long table was decked in an array of big silver pots and other utensils, containing steaming foods, and surrounding it were a number of square tables with chairs. I reckoned we would be treated here to a buffet dinner—Thai style.

In an innermost hall, there were a big round table and two long tables arranged like a big medal with two ribbons. Close to the wall here, was another long table displaying gifts presented on the oc­casion to the royal house. Those from the Republic of China included bamboo handicrafts, a personal computer complete with a copy of BASIC and of LOGO, several crates of Taiwan oranges and apples, and, perhaps of most interest to the King, a piece of Paulownia log about 10 cm in diameter, whose growth rings clearly indicated a five-year lifespan.

At 9 p.m., we formed a long line and moved into the audience chamber, each of us shaking hand with the King, the Queen, and the princesses.

Sharing the table later with the King and Queen in a separate dining room were Gen. Cheng, the guest of honor; Shen Ke-chin, the ROC representative in Thailand, two ROC agricultural ex­perts, Prince Bhisatej, and the president of a Thai agricultural university. As the dinner proceeded, the King discussed agricultural Questions with the two ROC experts-whether it was feasible to grow paddy rice 700 meters above sea level, methods to control forest fires... The food—which included gourmet Chinese dishes—was, literally, fit for a king.

The King entertained the ROC agricultural delegation in so generous a manner for reasons that go back to the late 1960s, when Thailand was being at­tacked in the United Nations as one of the nations poisoning the world with opium. The King reacted quickly, sum­moning the ambassadors of leading nations to his palace and facing them with this question: "What can you do to help Thailand to get rid of the poppy crop and still keep the half-a-million tribespeople alive?"

Several nations responded with pro­posed crop replacements. Korea donated apple saplings. Japan shipped peach trees. But these trees bore fruit which, season by season, became smaller and smaller. Dr. Shen Chang-huan, then ambassador of the Republic of China, of­fered to send ROC agricultural experts to the mountains of northern Thailand to do field studies as a basis for more feasible projects—the beginning of the Royal Highland Agricultural Develop­ment Project.

The Republic of China sent Sung Ching-yun, then deputy chief of the retired servicemen's Fushoushan Ranch at Lishan in Taiwan. Sung was renowned on the island for his success in producing apples, pears, and peaches in the Central Mountains, enriching the area's aborigi­nal inhabitants. This experience was to prove very valuable to northern Thailand.

In Thailand, Sung first of all inspect­ed the Korean and Japanese apples and peaches, planted in the vicinity of the Chiangmai palace alongside banana trees. He shook his head and remarked to accompanying Thai officials that deciduous trees and bananas could no more live together than could Commu­ nists and those dedicated to democracy. Prince Bhisatej asked Sung to find a proper location to carryon the experi­ment.

Sung Ching-yun was born in the mainland province of Shantung, where large Quantities of apples and peaches were grown. He was intimately aware of the effect on deciduous fruits of humidity and temperature. Apples and peaches are normally grown in the temperate zone, but they also may be grown in cool high mountains in warmer climates. Sung began the planting of selected apple and peach varieties in Taiwan orchards, with great success.

Actually, when he put together the project, he was opposed by leading Taiwan horticulturists, who stressed that no one had ever succeeded in growing such deciduous fruits in so hot a climate zone as Thailand. The dispute carried to Chiang Ching-kuo, then chairman of the Vocational Assistance Commission for Retired Servicemen, now ROC Presi­dent, who ruled that nobody should be allowed to determine what might be possible or impossible before an experiment had actually been carried out. Sung was given a green light, and went on to seek in Thailand an area similar to the Lishan area of Taiwan. The Thai authori­ties provided him with a helicopter, and he crisscrossed the northern Thai moun­tains for weeks. In the end, he settled on Angkhang, just two or three kilometers on the Thai side of the mysterious Thai-Burmese border, a region inhabited by hill tribes who cultivated opium poppies.

When Sung surveyed the area, he saw vast areas of poppy crops. And when he started work there, he could not com­municate with the tribespeople, and was in constant danger of being harmed. But he carried on, spending four hours every day just on travel from his abode to the new hill farm.

Though alititudes at the new location ranged from 1,700 meters to 2,100 meters above sea level, comparable to those of the Lishan area of the Central Mountains of Taiwan, he was concerned over the fact that the latitudes of the two places are far apart. Accordingly, he made careful studies of the distributions of altitude and temperature sensitive plant varieties at Angkhang and compared his finding with the situation in Taiwan's mountains. When he found the distribution of Angkhang to be similar to that of the Wushe and Kukuan areas of Taiwan, he decided to use fruit tree stock from Wushe and Kukuan, rather than Lishan, for the Angkhang experi­ment.

Following initial success, Sung shipped 10,000 saplings from Taiwan for distribution to the local Thai tribespeo­ple. The avuncular Chinese horticulturist became so popular and respected in northern Thailand in time, that he was given the nickname "Papa Sung." Later, not only tribespeople, but Prince Bhisatej called him Papa Sung, and even King Bhumibol refers to him as Papa Sung.

Today, the locale selected by Papa Sung has become an area of international agricultural competition, shared by projects of Japan, the United States, Israel, and Canada. But only the Republic of China actually stations horticulturalists and foresters in the rugged area—six now, all enduring the hardships of primi­tive living, together with the tribes­people.

The ROC success also had rewarding political effect: The locale used to be part of a gray zone of disputed unmarked border between Thailand and Burma. Now, the neat rows of fruit trees plus well managed gardens make it immediately identifiable as an indisputable part of Thailand.

On February 23, after the royal dinner at Chiangmai, King Bhumibol and Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn helicoptered to Angkhang on an inspection tour and were greeted by Gen. Cheng and his retinue, who had coptered in an hour earlier. The King looked over two Taiwan-made agricultural transports donated to Thailand and, of course, the orchards, where he was especially taken with a stand of experimental paulownia trees-then over five meters tall only 10 months after planting. He took pictures of the trees and asked the ROC agricul­tural experts to send more cuttings for experiments with the trees on the plains and in the Chiangmai palace area.

Before taking the trip, I had planned to take pictures of the poppy crop. But I now could detect only small patches of suspect poppy fields from the helicopter, all of this on the slopes of mountains dividing Thailand and Burma. When we landed at Angkhang, a cute native girl came to me to sell me a poppy as a souvenir. She advised me through an interpret­er that poppy seeds are as delicious as sesame. "You better buy some for making cakes, no second chance," she said. I resisted the temptation for, living alone in Bangkok, no one would make cakes for me.

"Opium," "remnant Free Chinese forces," and "Golden Triangle" have been synonyms in Communist propaganda, carried forward in careless newspaper reports to the outer world. Even I, hailing from the ROC, gave them some cre­dence before I had this opportunity to penetrate deep into the mountains of northern Thailand. As we helicoptered to two border villages, 100 minutes per each round trip, we saw patches of poppy only on the border mountains.

In the villages were neatly grown litchi and other fruit trees. One of the vil­lages was called Yellow Fruit Garden, and I asked a villager the reason for the name. Oranges, he told me, were called there "yellow fruit." But the oranges have now been replaced by more valua­ble fruits, including litchi nuts and strawberries, which they produce with the guidance of ag-experts from the Republic of China.

Before our helicopter trips, the northern Thailand military authorities benefited us with a briefing. They told us there were 12 refugee villages along the border inhabited by 10,544 Chinese (whom they referred to as "Chinese free­dom fighters") and their dependents. These people chose to settle down in Thailand when the ROC government of­fered to repatriate Free Chinese main­land refugees to Taiwan. Since the opium poppy is banned, and the so-called Free Chinese or Kuomintang "ele­ments" are even counted one by one by the Thai military authorities, poppy growing by these ex-soldiers is not possible.

And even if the growing of poppies were legal in Thailand, these former Free Chinese soldiers would not pursue that trade because the poppy is also the least profitable crop available to them. It is a crop from which the grower makes little... and the middlemen get rich.

According to Paul Liou, agricultural extension & production adviser of the UN Food & Agriculture Organiza­tion (FAO), who is stationed at Chiang-mai, even potatoes yield more profit for the grower than poppies. A rai (1/6 hectare) of land, he said, can produce pota­toes worth 5,400 Baht (Thai currency) but only 3,000 Baht if planted to poppies.

"Then why do people grow poppies, instead of potatoes?"

"Because the tribespeople do not know how to grow other crops."

The tribespeople just open up a piece of land on a mountain slope, sow the seed, and then come back to scratch the mature poppies for their jelly in the night. And that is all it takes. The next year, they find another fertile location for the same crop.

The Chinese are sedentary farmers who would not travel to faraway moun­tain slopes for small gains. They prefer to grow fruits, vegetables, and other economic crops which take more time, but earn more profits.

One example was cited by Chang Kou-chee, a former Chinese soldier from Yunnan Province. When the King and the Princess were inspecting Ang­khang, Chang put on a Western suit and drove his wife and son over, so they could see the royal family. He told me that he earned more than two million Baht (US$100,000) growing litchi and vegetables last year, and he felt indebted to the King and to the agricultural workers involved in the Angkhang project.

The FAO rep added that a family growing 1,000 coffee plants can harvest 500 kilograms of coffee every year, once the plants are three years old. Calculated on the basis of the market price of 60 Baht a kilogram, this amounts to 30,000 Baht. And, said Liou, "marketing coffee is far easier than peddling opium. Singa­pore alone requires 6,000 tons of coffee beans, far more than Thailand can supply."

According to U.N. reports, opium production in Thailand once reached 100 tons a year. That amount was halved by last year. And this year, it will be reduced to 35 tons.

Said Liou: "We have found a number of profitable crops to replace poppies. The present question is educa­tion—to teach the tribesmen to cultivate other crops." He echoed the views of Papa Sung.