BURMA ROAD NOW SMUGGLER'S ROUTE

LASHIO, Myanmar - In the early years of World War II, the dusty
outpost of Lashio was a key junction on the Burma Road, the
intravenous drip that fed Allied supplies to the beleaguered
government of China.

The mountainous route in northeastern Myanmar retains a whiff of
danger and mystery, but these days it's because the old road is one of
the world's biggest smuggling routes.

The cargo moving up and down treacherous switchbacks and over rickety
bridges in smoke-belching trucks is a lifeline for the bankrupt
military regime of Myanmar, as Burma is now known. But it also is
fanning ethnic tensions and feeding the world's drug habit.

``The border is completely wide open now,'' says Sterling Seagrave,
who endured Japanese bombing raids five decades ago as a boy living
along the road, when Burma was a British colony. ``It's become like
the border between Texas and Mexico. There's a tremendous amount of
people coming across. They're going to change Burma very quickly.''

Myanmar is one of Asia's poorest nations and commerce is badly needed.
The country has been hammered by the region's economic crisis, which
has choked off investment from its neighbors, and by Western sanctions
supporting Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's persecuted
pro-democracy opposition.

But the traffic also includes heroin and amphetamines from Southeast
Asia's Golden Triangle region. It goes to China's Yunnan province,
where drug use has mushroomed in recent years, and elsewhere for
transshipment to the United States and Europe.

From overpopulated China come illegal immigrants seeking cheap land
and opportunity in a relatively empty country. Many are settling in
Mandalay, Myanmar's second-largest city, and alarmed citizens fear
northeastern Myanmar will become a Chinese colony.

More innocuous traffic includes gems, teak, farm produce and raw
materials heading to China and electrical goods, fuel and auto parts
coming out.

This has never been an ordinary road.

Hacked out of the mountains by Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang
Kai-shek's forces in the late 1930s, it connected besieged China with
a rail network and seaport in Rangoon after China's ports fell into
Japanese hands.

The main junctions - Rangoon, Mandalay, Lashio - were taken by the
Japanese in their steamroller victories after Pearl Harbor. Reopening
a land route to China became America's objective for the rest of the
war so Chiang could pin down a large part of the Japanese army.

Seagrave, a Myanmar expert and author who writes about Asia's power
structures, is the son of a missionary doctor whose wartime border
hospital treated the Allied wounded and the road laborers.

``The joke was that the road was two lanes wide - one for each
wheel,'' Seagrave says. ``You had to be careful. The drivers coming
from China would turn off their engines to save gas and ride their
brakes to slow down.

``The brakes would give out, of course, and you'd drive by these
curves where they didn't make it and see the wrecks in the ravine.
Sometimes, the wheels were still spinning.''

Today's trucks are mostly rugged Japanese Hinos that don't look much
different from models a half century ago - big-fendered, low-geared,
goods piled above the cab and held down by a tarp. A dozen or more
passengers might ride on top.

Trucks still miss turns, rolling into a ravine or teetering
precariously on a cliff edge, front wheels hanging in space.

Wartime Americans described the road as a trail of corruption, where
bribe-hungry officials would hold up convoys for weeks. A modern
trucker, Wang Lee, says only the goods have changed.

Heading to Mandalay from the frontier, Wang, a border Chinese, is
stopped at one of four customs checkpoints along the route. His Nissan
diesel awaits inspection while he sips a soda outside a dusty gas
station where hill-tribe girls sell freshly cut fruit.

Wang asks a Westerner - a rarity in Lashio - if he is with Myanmar
military intelligence, the omnipresent branch of the regime that has
ruled through fear and bloodshed since 1962.

Convinced that isn't the case, Wang begins talking about how bribery
and smuggling are the way of life on the road. In confirmation, the
owner of the station slips him a payment for four drums of smuggled
gasoline.

``This is a trafficking road,'' Wang says. ``I've been doing this kind of
work for 15 years and I have only one truck. If I was engaged in other
kinds of activities - narcotics, or people - I'd have 10 or 20 trucks and
be rich.''