Chinese drug dealer
The CIA warlord princess who flooded the west with heroin
Olive Yang Jinxiu amidst her fighters.
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Fine smile and mutilated feet – Olive Yang Jinxiu rejected the life of a Chinese princess. Rather, she led a militia in the Golden Triangle, becoming an architect of the modern drug trade.
This is the story of a woman who can rightfully be called the “Real Bad-Ass”: Olive Yang Jinxiu.
Olive Yang made history
When Olive Yang died six months ago at the age of 90, she could claim Story to have written. She led an army with thousands of fighters in the so-called Golden Triangle and was one of the biggest drug dealers of her time.
But her story is far more complex, as Olive Yang was not just a Chinese woman from the first half of the 20th century. Her family traced her descent to being around the emperors of the Ming dynasty. This is the last “pure” dynasty supplanted by the foreign Manchu.
The Yang clan was among the most determined supporters of the Ming. After the final defeat of their imperial family, they retreated to the impassable border regions of today’s Myanmar, where they ruled over the Han Chinese of the Kokang tribe. A hundred years later, Yang Jinxiu was born there in 1927 as a princess of the Kokang. She herself preferred the British name Olive.
Trigger-happy girl
Olive Yang Jinxiu was destined to be a princess. Beautiful and educated, she should marry a suitable man. This turned out to be more difficult than expected because Olive was a wild girl. The family chronicle says that she had problems at school because she took her revolver to class. She is described as trigger-happy.
She didn’t have her feet tied and mutilated, and she didn’t care about other beauty norms either. Olive Yang wore men’s clothes and was nicknamed “Miss Hairy Legs” by relatives. She also began to seduce her brothers’ wives and girlfriends.
After World War II she had to agree to an arranged marriage. She was divorced again because her husband “was afraid of her,” according to her sister Judy. However, during this time she gave birth to her only child, a son. But instead of playing the mother, Olive Yang engaged in the Chinese Civil War with her own militia of 300 kokang. After the communists won the war in China in 1949, the nationalist troops of the 93rd Division under General Li Mi had to go to Myanmar.
Birth of the modern drug trade
It was there that the international drug trade was born with the help of a relatively young intelligence agency, the CIA. The CIA wanted to harm the communists. General Li Mi’s troops wanted to fight, but they needed money to do so. Money that the drug trade was supposed to provide.
Under President Truman, the United States began supplying combatants with modern weapons. This paved the way for fragmentation, lawlessness and the corrosive effects of drugs in the region – problems that have led to perpetual civil war. The kokang are still fighting today.
Olive Yang turned out to be the logistics genius of the drug trade. She modernized transportation and created trade routes from the jungle to the world that were used for decades.
Final role as peacemaker
Her brother Edward was the ruler of the Kokang, but when he tried to find a peaceful solution and threatened an agreement with the central government, the militant sister staged a coup. She was loved by her soldiers and so she became the actual commander in place of her brother, who formally continued to rule. At the same time, she maintained sensational love affairs with famous actresses, and there she also competed with her brother.
Complicated alliances in Myanmar’s civil wars meant that tribal leaders and drug dealers were given almost unlimited access to the so-called Golden Triangle in the 1970s. Under the aegis of Olive Yang Jinxiu, the Golden Triangle became the world’s largest supplier of opium and heroin. The worldwide wave of drug deaths in the 1960s and 1970s can be traced back to the deal between the CIA and the Kokang rulers.
The “Warlady” played her last major role in 1989 when she played a kind of armistice mediated between the tribal forces and the central government – this peace lasted almost 20 years. For several years there has been fighting again.
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