History
The origins of the Santikhiri community go back to the end of the Chinese Civil War. In October 1949, after Mao Zedong's communist party victory in China, the defeated Kuomintang (KMT) armies led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan, except for the 3rd and 5th Regiment of the 93rd Division, which refused to surrender. Fighting between the communist and KMT troops continued in some remote parts of China, including Yunnan in the southwest. When the Communists marched into the provincial capital of Kunming in January 1950, 12,000 troops from the 3rd and 5th Regiment, commanded respectively by Generals Lee Wen-huan (Li Wenhuan) and Tuan Shi-wen, fought their way out of Yunnan and escaped into Burma's jungles.
The soldiers' war did not end after their own "Long March" from Yunnan to Möng Hsat in Burma's Shan State. The Burmese soon discovered that a foreign army was camped on their soil, and launched an offensive. The fighting continued for 12 years, and several thousand KMT soldiers were eventually evacuated to Taiwan. When China entered the Korean War, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had a desperate need for intelligence on China. The agency turned to the two KMT generals, who agreed to slip some soldiers back into China for intelligence-gathering missions. In return, the agency offered arms to equip the generals to retake China from their bases in the Shan State. The KMT army tried on no less than seven occasions between 1950 and 1952 to invade Yunnan, but was repeatedly driven back into the Shan State. The ending of the Korean War in 1953 was not the end of the KMT's fight against the communist Chinese and Burmese armies, which continued on for many years, supported by Washington and Taiwan and subsequently funded by the KMT's involvement in the Golden Triangle's drug trade.
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