Good afternoon everybody, Lauslo Montgomery here once again. Welcome to the China History Podcast.

Sorry about all those ads and PSAs. There's always the CHP premium route if you'd like to

skip the line and help yours truly out with a prescription. Just to prove to all of you that it

pays to contact me with CHP Topic Ideas at Lauslo at teacup.media. This one I have for you today

was recommended recently by my longtime Patreon supporter and regular mate Shorty out in the

Shire of Hepburn, the state of Victoria, and the great nation of Australia. He suggested

Olive Young to me, and after re-equainting myself with her story, well, I couldn't resist.

I don't put Olive Young Jean-Show in the same category as most of the other historic people featured

in the CHP, but her bigger story and the history surrounding her life, I thought,

had all the markings of a memorable CHP episode. Shorty thought so, and he's a pretty wise and

old man. The tale of Olive Young has all kinds of great elements, royalty, the shan state of Burma

that borders Yunnan, the CIA, narcotics, and drug lords, the Ming Dynasty, the Chinese Civil War,

the Burmese Hunta, and the KMT Remnant Army operating along the China Burma border. Can't go

wrong with all that. Olive Young is kind of like a Jungiso kind of character. You know, the Pirate

Queen I covered in an old episode, and again when I interviewed Arthur Larry Fein for his novel,

The Flower Boat Girl. I say this only because her story is told in a number of well-worn anecdotes

that seem to take on a life of their own, and appear in a number of websites, podcasts, and

in Baidu, and Wikipedia, and repeated one last time in her obituary. It's hard to tell what's truth,

and what's fiction, and how much more there was to all these stories repeated about Olive's life.

When she passed on July 13, 2017, at the age of 90, a couple of the titles from her obituary's

red quote, the royal turned warlord and opium pioneer of the Golden Triangle dies at 90, and

quote, Olive Young, cross-dressing warlord and Burmese opium trafficker dies at 90.

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