The French daily “Le Monde” devoted its Southeast Asian letter to the new city built on the banks of the Mekong by Chinese gaming magnate Zhao Wei. We are publishing an extract and recommend that you read and subscribe to Le Monde.
In Laos, in the “capital” of the Golden Triangle, drops of legality in an ocean of crime
The worst stories are circulating about this new city, along the Mekong, granted in 2007 for ninety-nine years to a Chinese gaming magnate named Zhao Wei.
On the banks of the Mekong, in Laos, facing Thailand, we only see it: the Kings Romans casino, a golden colossus whose points rise up in a corolla towards the sky. Two Rolls-Royces are on display in the entrance. The lawns are impeccably maintained. A yellow Lamborghini backfires. During the day in the gaming rooms, we recognize little Chinese bosses on the loose, with tattooed arms and close-cropped hair. It's smoking, it's chic, the impassive Laotian croupiers are dressed in impeccable dresses: we are here in a Macao of the borders, the aptly named “special economic zone of the Golden Triangle”, a piece of communist Laos conceded in 2007 for four twenty-nineteen years to a Chinese gaming tycoon named Zhao Wei.
If it bears this name, it is because the famous Golden Triangle, this vast territory divided between Burma, Laos and Thailand which became the world epicenter of opium trafficking in the 1960s and 1970s, has its center of gravity a stone's throw from the casino, in the middle of the Mekong, at the intersection of the borders between these three countries.
On the Thai side, tourists treat themselves to a mini-cruise in a canoe on these lawless waters to give themselves the thrills, or visit the “opium museum”. In the evening, they dine on the terrace, along the river, facing the “city of vice” – “capital” and largest city in the region – which shines in all its lights.
The Golden Triangle is booming: not only has Burma once again become in 2023, thanks to the civil war, the world's leading producer of opium, but it supplies the majority of synthetic drugs consumed throughout the world. Asia. As for the dirty money flowing through casinos hastily built for decades in these poorly regulated border areas, it now flows freely, in the form of cryptocurrencies, thanks to online games and cyber-fraud operations. orchestrated by Chinese mafias in Southeast Asia…
The article can be read in full here.
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