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In the Mountains Under the Clouds

Southern Yunnan Province should be an economic powerhouse. A funnel for Vietnam and Burma, industry and immigrants find their pathways through the region into and out of China. Agriculture is booming; rice, bananas, tea, and other crops dominate the region's economy and the produce is exported internationally. But the region, from the rice terraces of Yuanyang County southward and in the west where Xishuangbanna has arisen as one of the country's and world's primary tea suppliers, is a maze of impenetrable mountains latticed with bumpy dirt roads that turn hours-long trips into days-long affairs. All that's about to change, as Tong Guo Tao told me in the courtyard behind his modest breakfast cafe in Xinjie, a tiny agricultural and transportation hub near the Vietnam border. Tong Guo Tao moved to the region about a decade ago, coming from frozen Harbin in China's north, chasing economic opportunity. Over the past 3 years, he's watched a multi-lane freeway being built almost directly above his shop. The freeway, part of a massive recent effort to modernize Yunnan Province, will completely bypass most of the southern part of the province. The trip between the provincial capital of Kunming and Vietnam will be cut in half, but in so doing, the myriad villages benefiting from passing traffic, will dry up. © M.SCOTT BRAUER

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