"Every Morning, a pack of Burmese vendors gather their wares and approach the fence separating Muse, a border town in Myanmar’s Northern Shan State, from China’s Yunnan Province. Sheltered by Palm Trees, they slip snacks, herbal medicine and boxes of cigarettes through small holes in the fence not much larger than milk cartons as Chinese border guards lazily observe the fracas. If an item is too large, they wait patiently until nobody’s watching and toss it over the border. Footsteps away, packed jade markets bustle as travelling buyers scrupulously examine the wares with magnifying glasses and consult with partners on WeChat video calls before breaking out into rapid-fire rounds of negotiation. Trade is the beating heart of Ruili, the notorious final frontier of Yunnan as it meets Myanmar. Once famous for sex, drugs, and gambling, the city is hard at work burying its seedier side under a meteoric spree of development. While illicit KTVs and “massage parlours” still line the border fence, and shadier cross-border entrepreneurs deal in illegal timber and human trafficking, the two countries are preparing to make the area into a hub for China’s Belt & Road Initiative..."