The Road to Mogok

Ten hours, ten beers, a few sips of Burmese whisky, one hotel called the Golden Butterfly, and a man named Jordan who didn't remember us.

The drive from Mandalay to Mogok is, on a map, about 200 kilometres. Google will tell you three hours. Google has not driven the road.

It's red iron dirt for most of it — the colour you'd get if rust had a country — and it climbs out of the central plain into the Shan hills through switchbacks and washouts and military checkpoints that may or may not be operating that day, depending on what the army has decided about who's allowed to be where. Keith and I did the drive about fifteen years ago, just after the country reopened to foreigners and Mogok had just been added to the list of places you could go if you bought the right secondary visa. Separate document, separate fee, separate stamp, conducted in an office in Yangon by a man who took our money, made us tea, and told us the trip should not be discussed loudly in public places. We agreed. We discussed it loudly in private places — mostly the truck, mostly with beer.

About the truck. Our driver was a man whose name I have lost and whose face I haven't, because for ten hours he did not change expression and I memorised it. He drove fast where it was safe and slow where it wasn't, which was most of the time, and he had a system: Myanmar Beer for staying awake, Grand Royal Whisky — the local whisky, sweet, fierce, surprisingly drinkable — for sleeping later. We adopted it. We had no choice. It was 35°C in the truck, the AC was theoretical, the road was bouncing my kidneys against my ribs, and the alternative to a beer at 11am was sitting with my own thoughts about whether the front axle was going to make it. I picked the beer. Keith picked the beer. The driver picked the beer.

Sidenote: The suicide seat. Most cars in Myanmar are imported, used from Thailand. Thailand drives on the left, so the steering wheel is on the right. Myanmar drives on the right. Do the math: the front passenger is sitting where the driver should be, staring directly at oncoming traffic with nothing between them and a head-on but the dashboard. We call it the suicide seat. We took turns.

We pulled into Mogok at dusk, dust on everything, and checked into the Golden Butterfly Hotel.

The Golden Butterfly had two grades of room. The clerk explained them in careful English. There was nice and not nice. We asked the difference. He said “nice” had hot water, sometimes. We chose nice. We paid the surcharge. The hot water was, as advertised, sometimes. The lightbulb in the bathroom was a bare 40W on a wire. The mosquito net had two holes I could see and probably more I couldn't. On the wall hung a small framed picture of a butterfly — either a moth or a butterfly drawn by someone who had never seen one. I have thought about that picture more often than I should.

We dropped our bags. We went to the restaurant downstairs. Whisky.

This is where the Chinese dealers came in.

Three of them at a corner table, in golf shirts, with the haircuts of men who have just enough money to look prosperous and not so much that they need to look discreet. They had driven to Mogok. Driven. From Yunnan, over the border, through routes that no Western buyer was using and that I'm not entirely sure were legal under any of the relevant jurisdictions. Two new SUVs in the Golden Butterfly's gravel parking lot, cleaner than anything in a hundred-kilometre radius — which told you everything about the kind of week they were planning.

They saw us. We saw them. The small mutual nod gem people give each other in unexpected places — the oh, you too nod — and within ten minutes we were at their table and someone had ordered another bottle of Grand Royal. We were doing what the trade has done in border towns for centuries: drinking with the people you came to compete with, so tomorrow's competition has some shape to it.

They were buying ruby. So were we. They had cash in volume and relationships in Mogok going back a decade. We had less cash, a referral letter, and a guesthouse-printed list of dealers we were supposed to see. The honest assessment by the second whisky was that they were going to outbid us on anything we both wanted, and the trip would consist of finding parcels they hadn't seen yet or didn't want. Fine. The Chinese buyers have been the elephant in every Asian gem market for two decades — you work around them or you go home. We weren't going home. We had paid for the secondary visa.

By the third whisky, the one who spoke the best English — mid-forties, I'll call him Mr. Wei because that is not his name — was telling us about a parcel he'd seen the day before that he hadn't bought. Too expensive, he said. Beautiful stones, but the dealer was being unreasonable. He named the dealer. He smiled when he named the dealer. Keith smiled back. I smiled. We all knew exactly what was happening. Mr. Wei was telling us about a parcel he wanted us to buy at the price he had refused, so the dealer would learn the price was unreasonable, so the next parcel would be priced more sensibly when Mr. Wei came back. We were being used as a pricing message. We accepted the role — the parcel was beautiful, and being used as a pricing message in Mogok by a Chinese buyer with an SUV is, frankly, an honour. We bought the parcel the next day.

That's not even what I started this story to tell you about.

What I started to tell you about was Jordan.

Jordan was the tallest man in Mogok. I mean that literally. North of six and a half feet, in a town where the average male height is closer to five-five, and he stood out the way a cathedral stands out in a village. He was, and presumably still is, a particular kind of gem dealer. The kind who handles the parcels the regular dealers don't quite know what to do with. Strange stones. Big stones. Stones with stories. He worked out of his house, a wooden two-storey building up a side street from the main market. You went there by appointment, after you had been vouched for by someone he trusted. You took your shoes off at the door. You sat on the floor of the front room. His wife brought tea. You waited.

When the parcels came out, they came out in cloth, slowly, and the room went quiet the way rooms do when something serious is about to happen. Jordan had a way of laying a stone down that felt almost liturgical — not showy, deliberate, like placing something on an altar. He didn't say much. He let the stone do it. He watched your face. If your face did the right thing, he showed you the next stone. If it didn't, the parcel went back into the cloth and he poured more tea.

We bought rubies from him. Real ones. Mogok material with the silk and the calcite inclusions and the soft red glow under window light that doesn't exist anywhere else on Earth.

Cut to a couple of years ago. Bangkok gem fair. I'm walking the floor and I see a very tall man at a booth. I do a double take and think no, it can't be. I walk closer. It absolutely is. Jordan, fifteen years older, still six-six, still quiet, still unmistakable.

I went up to him. I said his name. I said mine. I said Keith's. I said we'd been to his house in Mogok in the year we were there and we'd bought rubies from him.

Jordan looked at me with the polite, slightly puzzled expression of a man who has had ten thousand foreign buyers in his house and remembers approximately none of them. He did not remember us. Of course he didn't. We were one Tuesday in 2010 in a career that has spanned forty years and tens of thousands of stones. The asymmetry is total. You remember the dealer because the dealer is the centre of your trip. The dealer does not remember you because you are one of fifty people who came through his front room that month. He was gracious about it. He nodded. He smiled. He said yes, of course, of course, in the way that meant he had no memory of us and was too polite to say so. We talked for a few minutes. He gave me his card. I gave him mine. We agreed to be in touch. We have not been in touch.

But for a moment, in a fluorescent-lit hall in Bangkok twenty-three hundred kilometres from the room where we had actually met, the line between then and now closed. The man whose floor I had sat on, whose tea I had drunk, whose stones had become objects in the lives of people I would never meet, was standing in front of me. And I was standing in front of him. The only thing that had changed was that I had carried the memory and he hadn't. Which is fine. The dealer is the constant. The buyer is the variable.

The Mogok we visited then doesn't exist now in quite the same form. The country closed again — the way Myanmar does — after the 2021 coup. The road from Mandalay is harder. The secondary visas are harder. The Chinese dealers are still there; more of them, with bigger SUVs. The Golden Butterfly is, I assume, still there, with its picture of the moth-butterfly and its sometimes-hot water and its bottle of Grand Royal at the bar. The market at Pan Chan still opens at dawn. The dealers still sit at low tables. Jordan, presumably, still has his house up the side street, and people still take their shoes off at the door, and the parcels still come out in cloth.

We will go back, eventually, when the country lets us. The trip will take ten hours. The hotel will have two grades of room. We will choose nice. We will drink Grand Royal because there is nothing else to drink and because by the time you have driven that road, there is nothing else you want. We will buy what we can buy. We will be priced out of what the Chinese dealers want. And we will sit on a wooden floor somewhere, drinking tea, waiting for the cloth to open.

The rubies will glow the way only Mogok rubies glow, and the trip will be worth it the way it has always been worth it. We will come home with stones that will become rings, which will be worn for forty years by people who will never know what the road was like.

Which is, again, the deal. The story is in the stone. They don't have to know. We do.