Pangwa

Along Myanmar’s 1,300-mile border with China, a town called Pangwa sits in a small valley, surrounded by forested peaks that are occasionally dusted with snow. For years, this hardscrabble outpost was controlled by an aging warlord, an ally of Myanmar’s brutal military junta, who ran his fiefdom largely according to his own whims.

2025 July 18, Timothy McLaughlin, “A Rebel Army Is Building a Rare-Earth Empire on China's Border. The Kachin Independence Organization fought for decades in obscurity. Now it's supplying essential minerals to manufacturers around the world”, in Bloomberg Businessweek, archived from the original on 18 Jul 2025