New Mandala

There has been a recent effort to discourage the purchase of jade from Burma.  The United States has even made a special set of sanctions to target parts of the trade.  And the Olympics has now been drawn into the picture.  A long report outlining the dire conditions of jade miners in Burma, and titled Blood Jade: [...]

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Sometimes I’m afraid that we might focus too much on doom and gloom, and cut and thrust, here on New Mandala.  But no matter how much we devote ourselves to issues in mainland Southeast Asia we all still need to eat.  And on a day when Gordon Brown is telling those of us in Britain to stop wasting food it seems [...]

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It was the first time Meisun sae Chao, a descendant of a Chinese soldier in the Kuomintang army, had felt true happiness.
The woman, who was born and lives on the mountain of Doi Mae Salong, had just become a Thai under the government’s naturalisation scheme.
Sharing the happiness in a ceremony to take an oath of [...]

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[One fascinating aspect of the latest wave of commercialization in the borderlands of China and southeast Asia is the dramatic revival in popularity of Yunnan's Puer tea. Jinghong Zhang is a PhD student at the Australian National University who is studying the production, marketing and consumption of Puer tea. She has provided this brief report [...]

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A chinese boat unloading apples in Chiang Saen in 1994

Timothy Hamlin of the Stimson Center has written this update on commercial navigation on the upper-Mekong.  It seems that the environmentally dubious project of blasting the Mekong rapids between southern China and northern Thailand is now all but complete, making the way for a greater influx [...]

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A scientific team, consisting of members of the Gibbon Conservation Alliance based at Zurich University and the Kunming Institute of Zoology, as well as staff members of the Nangunhe National Nature Reserve, carried out a survey in all Chinese forests reported to support white-handed gibbons (Hylobates lar) during the last 20 years.
The species was last [...]

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There are reliable reports circulating via email that the major International Congress on Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences to be held in July in Kunming has been postponed. At present the website for the conference does not have any mention of this. As one colleage commented, perhaps the conference - in which ethnic minority issues would, no doubt, feature [...]

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Prompted by the question from long-time contributor Roger Casas I thought I should put up some pictures of roads in the eastern Shan State.  These shots are all, unfortunately, a bit dated (they were taken between 2002 and 2005) but should give readers a bit more of a feel for road infrastructure in the wedge of Shan territory between Thailand [...]

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Over the past couple of weeks the world has been trying to watch what is going on in Tibet.  It was the biggest global “guns on streets” story of the month of March.Â
And now, in a footnote to the Chinese government’s wide-ranging crackdown on dissidents, the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) has handed two Tibetan activists back to [...]

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Here is a nice little video from The International Herald Tribune’s Thomas Fuller on road links from Kunming down into Southeast Asia.  Thanks to long-time reader Paul for pointing it out.

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