A thin mist broke over pale green rice fields in a wet hill-wrapped bowl in the Shan Highlands of northern Burma. An ox chewed its cud. Smoke rose from bamboo huts on the fringes, and longyi-clad men swung slow-motion sickles in garden plots. From over the next hill came the plaintive cry of the train from Mandalay, winding laboriously from village to village, overloaded with...