What is Golden Triangle?

The Golden Triangle is the area where the borders of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar meet at the confluence of the Ruak and Mekong Rivers. The name "Golden Triangle"—coined by the CIA—is commonly used more broadly to refer to an area of approximately 950,000 square kilometers (367,000 sq mi) that overlaps the mountains of the three adjacent countries.

Along with Afghanistan in the Golden Crescent, it has been one of the most extensive opium-producing areas of Asia, and of the world, since the 1950s. Most of the world's heroin came from the Golden Triangle until the early 21st century when Afghanistan became the world's largest producer.

As the Chinese Communist Party gained power, they ordered ten million addicts into compulsory treatment, had dealers executed, and opium-producing regions planted with new crops. Consequently, opium production shifted south of the Chinese border into the Golden Triangle region.

The US-supported anti-communist Chinese resistance troops of the Kuomintang in Burma were, in effect, the forebears of the private narcotic armies operating in the "Golden Triangle." Almost all the KMT opium was sent south to Thailand. Prior to the arrival of the KMT, the opium trade had already developed as a local opium economy under British colonial rule. The KMT-controlled territories made up Burma's major opium-producing region, and the shift in KMT policy allowed them to expand their control over the region's opium trade. Furthermore, Communist China's forced eradication of illicit opium cultivation in Yunnan by the early 1950s effectively handed the opium monopoly to the KMT army in the Shan states. The main consumers of the drug were the local ethnic Chinese and those across the border in Yunnan and the rest of Southeast Asia. The KMT coerced the local villagers for recruits, food, and money, and exacted a heavy tax on the opium farmers. This forced the farmers to increase their production to make ends meet. One American missionary to the Lahu tribesmen of Kengtung State even testifies that the KMT tortured the Lahu for failing to comply with their regulations.

Annual production increased twenty-fold, from 30 tons at the time of Burmese independence to 600 tons in the mid-1950s.

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