A Rebel Army Is Building a Rare-Earth Empire on China’s Border

Along Myanmar’s 1,300-mile border with China, a town called Pangwa sits in a small valley, surrounded by forested peaks that are occasionally dusted with snow. For years, this hardscrabble outpost was controlled by an aging warlord, an ally of Myanmar’s brutal military junta, who ran his fiefdom largely according to his own whims. Loggers felled precious hardwoods and spirited them over the border. Farmers were permitted to grow opium poppies, as long as they paid steep taxes.

Then, in the mid-2010s, workers began arriving from southern China in search of a precious resource: rare earths, metallic elements with exceptional magnetic and conductive properties that are crucial to dozens of modern technologies. They carved collection pools into the terraced slopes, which soon filled with a milky, turquoise-tinted stew of chemicals, soil and water. Gambling and drug use flourished, the vices of a frontier boomtown.