"A classic origin story told and retold among the Wa of China and Myanmar is about their flight from Keng Tung: in the long‐ago past, the Wa ruled over the Shan in the great city of Keng Tung.1 But they were tricked by the Shan, who came with an army of elephants and expelled them from the city. Those who went ahead broke plantain leaves along their path so that those coming behind would find the way. But plantains grow back very fast, and the latecomers got lost and had to stay in the plains: the Wa pioneers entered the mountains where they are until today, and the others are the ‘left‐behind Wa’, the Wa Git, or the ‘Hill Thai’, Tai Loi. From then on, every time a new Sawbwa was installed in Keng Tung, some left‐behind Wa were feasted at the palace and then ritually expelled (Enriquez 1918: 33; Mangrai 1981: 230). Today, the Shan of Kengtung recognise their Burmese overlords and have no Sawbwa anymore, but the Tai Loi, the descendants of the Wa, still play an important part in the rituals of Songkran, the Thai New Year Festival, specifically by carrying and playing drums. Even though the rituals imply mutual interdependence, it is clear that the Tai Loi subordinate themselves to the Tai Khuen, the Shan majority group in today’s Keng Tung, thus annually repeating the humiliation of their expulsion centuries ago (Karlsson 2013). Yet, about 100 km to the North of Keng Tung, in Pang Hsang, the capital of the Wa State, we can observe an inversion of the ritual of expulsion. Each year at the Songkran of Pang Hsang, Wa rulers receive gifts from local Shan villagers. Similar to the Shan princes of the past, representatives of the Wa central authorities sit in elevated thrones, while the Shan villagers squat in front of them. During the rituals, the Shan villagers pay their honours to the Wa, deliver presents to them, including fruits, sweets and sticky rice, and in turn receive red envelopes with money from the Wa officials. Most of the leaders of the Wa State are from villages in the hills to the North of Pang Hsang and can easily be distinguished from their Shan subordinates: dark‐skinned and in army fatigues, followed by an entourage of soldiers, no one would mistake them for a Shan villager. The core leaders of the Wa State are relatives and associates of Tax Pang, also known by his Chinese name Bao Youxiang. Tax Pang, and his brothers Tax Rang and Tax Jiet, were born in the village of Taoh Mie in the 1940s and 50s. When they were children, neighbouring armies had just started to move into the Wa hills, and as teenagers they still took part in raids and headhunting rituals. They rose through the ranks of the guerrilla armies of the Communist Party of Burma during the 1970s and 80s, founded the United Wa State Army (UWSA) in 1989, and have been presiding over its de‐facto state since. Like Tax Pang and his brothers, most members of the central committee and politburo of the Wa State are veterans of the Communist Party of Burma. All of them have accumulated substantial personal wealth – bureaucracy and administration is relatively weak, and most infrastructure construction in the Wa State is paid for directly by the elites. The trade in drugs played an important role in the emergence of this elite, but already in the 1990s, they started to diversify into other industries, including mining and food, as well as large‐scale investments in China, Thailand and Myanmar (where they own, for instance, one minor airline). Ordinary villagers and Chinese traders often tell stories about the unimaginable wealth of the Wa commanders: for instance, one commander had so much cash stored in his warehouses that it got mouldy and had to be taken out. His servants dried truckloads of 100‐Yuan batches in the huge courtyard for several days, just like other people would dry corn cobs or tea leaves. Wa villagers who have served in the army or at the house of a commander commonly know that a normal 50 kg rice‐bag can carry three million Chinese yuan (the equivalent of € 380,000). In the warehouse of one Wa commander I have seen two Bentleys, and in one of Pang Hsang’s large garages, a monster truck imported from Thailand that is said to be worth exactly one rice bag full of Chinese money. The elites of the Wa State have effectively turned around the old story of the Wa’s expulsion from the highlands and have re‐conquered the lowlands. During the 1970s and 80s, when they fought with the Communist Party of Burma, Wa soldiers entered the plains of Pang Hsang, Meng Pok and Meng Yawn – traditionally settlements of their Shan neighbours. Since then, the Wa have established a de facto state the size of Belgium, and the core leaders of this state are tightly connected through kinship and business ties. Most of them have grown up in villages at the Chinese border. In their lifetime, they saw huge changes: they have conquered the surrounding valleys and since then have also overseen huge changes to the villages in the hills, where they had grown up. They started off, quite literally, as pioneers, that is, foot soldiers,2 in the Communist Party of Burma. Even though the first generation of Wa leaders rose through the ranks of the army and have become agrarian capitalists, they still define themselves by a pioneering ethos that will become apparent. They have been pioneers in many ways, but here I want to focus on the plantation economies that they have established in the Wa State. Using their income from elsewhere, the elites of the Wa State have invested in new forms of commercial and large‐ scale agriculture. The rubber and tea plantations they have opened rely on the new technologies of transport, communication and production that in the Wa hills were introduced for military purposes. The plantations also required large‐scale forced resettlements, which took place especially during the 1990s but continue until the present day. The plantation economy requires a lot of investment, it often incurs losses (especially rubber, in recent years) and is generally not very profitable. But even so, it is an essential part of the de facto sovereignty of the Wa State, not least because it is a core institution of the military state and its ‘garrison‐entrepôts’ (Roitman 2005): plantations provide radical means to control populations, and thus offer a core nexus between the elites of the Wa State and ordinary villagers – as well as with animals and plants..."