The Yunnanese from southwestern China have
for millennia traded throughout upland Southeast Asia. Burma in
particular has served as a "back door" to Yunnan, providing a sanctuary
for political refugees and economic opportunities for trade explorers.
Since the Chinese Communist takeover in 1949 and subsequent political
upheavals in China, an unprecedented number of Yunnanese refugees have
fled to Burma. Through a personal narrative approach, Beyond Borders
is the first ethnography to focus on the migration history and
transnational trading experiences of contemporary Yunnanese Chinese
migrants (composed of both Yunnanese Han and Muslims) who reside in
Burma and those who have moved from Burma and resettled in Thailand,
Taiwan, and China.
Since the 1960s, Yunnanese Chinese migrants of
Burma have dominated the transnational trade in opium, jade, and daily
consumption goods. Wen-Chin Chang writes with deep knowledge of this
trade's organization from the 1960s of mule-driven caravans to the use
of modern transportation, and she reconstructs trading routes while
examining embedded sociocultural meanings. These Yunnanese migrants’
mobility attests to the prevalence of travel not only by the privileged
but also by different kinds of people. Their narratives disclose
individual life processes as well as networks of connections, modes of
transportation, and differences between the experiences of men and
women. Through traveling they have carried on the mobile livelihoods of
their predecessors, expanding overland trade beyond its historical
borderlands between Yunnan and upland Southeast Asia to journeys further
afield by land, sea, and air.
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