Knight’s research would later reveal that as far as the international community was concerned, the city of Mong La didn’t exist. During the 1980s, the area now known as Special Region 4 had been the top opium-producing region in the Golden Triangle, ruled by a Shan warlord named Sai Leun, who lived at the center of an eighteen-hole golf course he had carved out of the jungle. Sai Leun’s army and the Burmese government had been at war for some time, and the two sides eventually arrived at a stalemate. To save face, the Burmese government agreed to let Sai Leun have his own autonomous region with its own police force and army, as long as he continued to fly a Burmese flag in his new de facto narco nation.

No longer in Myanmar’s sovereign territory, Sai Leun faced increasing pressure from the United States to shut down his opium production, lest the DEA come in and give him the Pablo Escobar treatment. Conveniently for Sai Leun, Mong La, the capital of Special Region 4, also shared a border with China. So rather than fight Uncle Sam, Sai Leun burned the opium fields and turned his little geopolitical black hole into a playground for China’s elites. Eight massive casinos were erected on the outskirts of Mong La virtually overnight, but because Sai Leun had no experience running casinos, he needed to bring in some outside help. And as fate would have it, the triads who had been running the gambling operations in Macau had just been pushed out and needed a new place to set up shop. That was where Sky Dragon came in.

Knight’s driver took him past the ladyboy discos and the casinos and dropped him off right in the center of town. All the writing on the buildings was in Chinese, and everyone except the vendors who worked in the shops was Chinese as well.

The driver directed Knight to go to the end of the street, and before he could press for more specific instructions, the Audi was gone.

As Knight perused the luxury stores along the sidewalk, he was stunned to discover they were not selling Gucci and Cartier like the shops in Macau and Hong Kong. Everything in these shops was related to the trafficking of endangered species: ivory carvings, bear paws, leopard pelts, rhino-horn bead bracelets, swatches of elephant skin, lion teeth, tiger teeth and fur, jars of bear bile, and wine with every variety of exotic creature rotting in it.

Welcome to Extinction City.