This listener is how the legend of oliv Yang begins, or at least some of them.

Tales of the mysterious gun-slinging narco-princet of Cocang, or prince, have diluted and morphed over time and distance.

Details tweaked by campfire and gaslight, by men in tents and shacks or on caravans of mules and

mopeds that have wound their way from Burma's rugged

hinterlands, cradle of the world's opium production, into Thailand, the engine room of Asia's

notorious golden triangle and a launch pad for the global heroin trade.

It is, like all legends, contested and murky. But the stories about Yangteng to go, or Miss Hary Legs, or Two-Gun-Mulan, or any number of nicknames history has lent her,

you have to take whatever scant information you fed and run with it.

So here it goes.

Sometime in the early 1940s, a teenage olive is at a family's royal court at Old Street Village.

Vaulted upon a hill in the wild of Cocang, a Lebanon-sized anvil-shaped strip of land

between Burma's Shan State and the Chinese province of Yunnan.

She'd already whips up a fearsome rep as a child,

wandering off and taming even the wildest of Yunnan ponies,

a skill she'll employ years later as

Kolkang's very own calamity Jane. The Yangs, seeing in their daughter

a lesser princess than a tearaway, had sent her to a convent school in the Shan city of Lacheo.

But she'd raised help and the nuns weren't the only ones with habits.

Olive loved tobacco and had a poncheon for pulling guns on those who pissed her off.

Some say she'd even shot a classmate.

Today though is another matter entirely.

As is custom for the ethnic Chinese yangs,

...