Ruby Poker

Carol Clark (formerly of Jewel Siam--Oct/Nov 1993) writes:

How to play the game
If you want to enter the rough and tumble world of the rough stone business, you had better learn the rules and study the competition

The rough ruby and sapphire business is tougher than most. It is highly erratic, loaded with booby traps, entirely unregulated and inevitably linked with shady deals and inhospitable locales. It attracts a different sort than your run-of-the-mill businessman.

Wanchai "Rung" Luanratana is archtypical. No sign advertises his company, Prestige Gems. It is located in an unmarked shop house, fronted by black-tinted glass, in the warren of gem and jewelry businesses around Mahaesak Rd. The bottom floor is filled with ornately carved, wooden Chinese furniture draped with the relaxed forms of at least a dozen Thai workers. On the second floor landing you pass more dark, heavy Chinese furniture, accented with pale blue satin pillows, huge vases sprouting mulit-colored sprays of artificial flowers and the skin of an enormous tiger, his glass eyes and fanged mouth frozen open in a expression of shock and rage. Next to the tiger is a leopard in a similarly flattened state. On the third floor you find the skins of yet more endangered species but you hardly notice them because at this point your senses become overwhelmed. You step into the office of Wanchai himself and descend to somewhere deep beneath the sea, as you are enveloped by shiny black walls set with massive, built-in aquariums containing fish so large that one of them could feed a family of five with leftovers.

"I love to gamble. I started when I was 12."

The glugging sound of the air pumps and the shadowy movements of the sea creatures are hypnotic. A maid brings a Coke and sets it down on the marble coffee table next to the skin of some kind of rodent--a squirrel, perhaps.

Wanchai sits behind a large desk on the opposite side of the long room, next to the only window, where he is engrossed in examining stones. Notably absent are the live, wild animals, which used to entertain visitors while they waited. Wanchai raised them from cubs. His favorites included "Mee-ow Joe," a lioness, "Lai" a Thai lynx, and "Dam," a bad-tempered black panther too dangerous to let out of her cage. They have all been sent to the zoo.

Also absent is Prisna, Wanchai's wife, a former beauty queen who bore him two children and worked alongside him for years. She appeared in a sensational photo on the front page of Thailand's most popular newspaper recently, displaying ghastly bruises that she claims Wanchai inflicted on her with the blunt edge of a samurai sword.

After a few minutes Wanchai calls me over to his desk. He has wavy, dark hair, a thin moustache, and small, hooded eyes. At 50 he shows some of the strain of the years of hard work and partying. But he still retains a hint of the dash that earned him the nickname "playboy hero" form one Thai magazine that profiled him in his prime. He dresses elegantly, in clothes that were obviously not made in Thailand, and wears heavy, gold Italian jewelry.

I have come to talk about Mong Hsu rubies, of which there are plenty in evidence. Glittering piles of them, all cut and polished at his own factory and ranging size from melee to two carats, are spread out on the desk.

Mong Hsu—a new mine in the heart of opium war lord Khun Sa's territory in upper Burma—is the hot new source of ruby. And Wanchai, who is always on the front line of any important corundum find, is one of the biggest single buyers of Mong Hsu rough, taking in between US$1 and $2 million of it per month. A year ago, when Mong Hsu rubies first began pouring into Thailand, Wanchai was buying up to $4 million per month of the material.

He pulls a ten carat, heart-shaped Mong Hsu ruby from the safe behind his desk. It is impressively large, but dark and sleepy, like much of the Mong Hsu stones. Wanchai says it is worth $10,000 per carat. "If it was bright it would sell for $30,000 a carat," he insists.

The ruby market is flat—in fact, dismal. I ask Wanchai if he's having trouble selling all this stuff.
"No," he says, then concedes: "The price is 30 percent down for medium quality ruby, but for gem quality it is the same price because there is very little of it available.
"Who's buying?" I ask.
"Everyone," he answers.
"The buyers are from what countries?"
“Every country," he says.
I decide to change the subject.
"Do you visit your cats in the zoo?"
"Yes, often," he says. "I miss them but I had to give them away because they got bigger than me. I was afraid."

I conclude the interview by asking Wanchai if he has any good contacts for me in Mae Sai, Thailand's northern most point on the Burma border, and the main market for MongnHsu ruby rough. Wanchai maintains an office in Mae Sai and makes weekly buying trips to the town.
"Why don't you come with me? I'm going Friday," he offers.

It sure beats the thought of wandering around the Mae Sai gem market by myself, asking a lot of foolish questions and getting laughed at by the locals.

Wanchai appears at he airport dressed all in black, wearing sunglasses and carrying a single piece of luggage—a suede attache case stuffed with cash. He takes my economy ticket and offers to upgrade it to business class so we can sit together and talk. I eagerly accept, although it is only a 90-minute flight from Bangkok to Chiang Rai.

Business class on Thai International has these wonderful seats that allow you to pivot back into an almost fully prone position. This is demonstrated soon after takeoff when the balding heads of the two European businessmen in front of us drop practically into our laps.

"Why don't we move back a row so that we don't disturb these gentlemen?" Wanchai suggests, revealing an admirable flair for tact and diplomacy.

Over a lunch of chicken pasta Wanchai tells me about his background. He comes from Chantaburi—the font of Thailand's gem industry. Siamese rubies were once plentiful in this eastern province, but have become scarce after years of intensive mining.

Chantaburi remains the hub of ruby and sapphire dealing, however, due to the expertise of its residents in rough gem buying, cutting, and—most importantly—heat treatment, or "burning."
Wanchai's family is Thai-Chinese, mixed with Spanish blood from his paternal grandfather. His father left the family when he was eight and Wanchai's brother, Sia Daeng, who is 15 years older, taught him the gem business. Sia Daeng built an impressive empire and reigned as one of Chantaburi's most powerful gem dealers for many years, although he is semi-retired today.

"By the time I was 14 years old I was the best cutter in my brother's factory of 100 people," Wanchai says. "Every day when I came back from school they told me I had to cut for one hour.

I cried, 'No, no!' I didn't know why they made me do this. Now I know. If you can cut, you can buy the rough stones. If you don't know how to cut you only know about 50 percent of the business of buying."

Even with knowledge of cutting, buying rough gemstones is a risky business. Each purchase is a gamble. "Yes," Wanchai readily agrees. "I love to gamble. I started when I was 12, in Black Jack games."

In 1969, while in his mid-twenties, Wanchai made buying trips to Australia. It was around this time that the Chantaburi Thais developed the color enhancing heat treatment that made the dark sapphires of Inverell in New South Wales and Anakie Fields in Queensland commercially viable.

"You are lovely, lovely. I'll give you 150,000 baht if you give me the stones now."

Wanchai recalls his trips to Australia as some of the most exciting times of his career. "Australia was the best," he says. "I didn't start buying until 8am but the brokers came to queue at 11pm the night before. Sometimes there would be fighting in the queue."

By the mid - 1970's Wanchai's attention shifted to Sri Lanka and the geuda sapphire. It was years before the Sri Lankans caught on that Thai buyers were transforming their worthless geuda—which they sold dirt cheap--into expensive gems through heat treatment.

Vietnam was the next hot spot, and Wanchai was once again in the forefront of Thai rough buyers who poured into the country in the late 1980's, offering big money for rubies from new mines in Luc Yen and Nghe An provinces. Some of the most impressive rubies to come out of Vietnam, including a 17 carat stone, were bought in their rough state by Wanchai, who cut, polished and, in most cases, burned them before re-selling them to buyers in Europe, the US and the Middle East.

Vietnamese production slowed down significantly after a few years. Thai ruby mines in the Khmer Rouge-held territory of Pailin, Cambodia helped fill the void for a while, but a volatile political situation combined with heavy investments in equipment and mining leases made Cambodia less attractive to the Thais. Then Burma's Mong Hsu rubies began flooding across the border into Mae sai. Now Wanchai can deal on his own turf for a change.

Wanchai's brother-in-law, Worasart Sarakosest, picks us up the tiny Chiang Rai airport in a beautiful, cream-colored French sports car, a Citroen CX 2200. We sink into the plush leather seats and begin the one-hour drive to Mae Sai, through the glistening green hills and misty skies of Thailand's north in the rainy season.

Worasart, better known as "Wor," runs Wanchai's office in Mae Sai. He is a dark, stocky man of 45 with a big moustache. He is impeccably groomed but casual, in a cotton workshirt, blue jeans and an oversized silver belt buckle engraved with asteer's head.

"Don't think of Mae Sai as a small district," Wor says. "It has seven banks." He tells me the region is famous for its rice, which is considered the most delicious in Thailand, and enjoys a healthy tourism business. Garlic farming is another major industry. And then there is the illicit border trade with Burma—timber, opium, jade and precious stones flow into northern Thailand and medicine, gold, and spare parts for machinery and automobiles go into Burma.

Most border towns have a seedy, mysterious quality about them. Mae Sai has this atmosphere in spades since it lies in the heart of the Golden Triangle, the infamous opium and heroin trading zone where Thailand, Burma and Laos, meet. The muddy waters of a creek divide Mae Sai from the small trading post of Tachilek, Burma. Hundreds of Thais and Burmese cross a bridge over the creek daily, and, lately, other nationalities are allowed to pass freely as well. No visa is necessary—you simply fill out a form, pay a small fee, and pass through the Thai and Burmese checkpoints.

Since the discovery of Mong Hsu rubies, more traffic than usual has been crossing the bridge. No one knows for sure exactly how much the Mong Hsu rough ruby trade amounts to in Mae Sai, but, if you ask around, the figure $8 million a month keeps coming up. An American buyer recently popped into town and spent $500,000 on rough stones, and a few Japanese have also bought large orders, but virtually all of the buyers are Thai.

At least 200 gem traders from Chantaburi and Borai have poured into the town during the past year to vie for the stones. They pay B3000 ($120) per month for a small table in Soi Phak Maa (Dog's Mouth Lane), a rowdy, open-air ruby market jam-packed with buyers and sellers. Just two blocks away, an enterprising developer created the slightly more upscale Mae Sai Gems Center—a conclave of more than 50 hastily built shop houses which rent out for B50000 ($2,000) down, plus B3,000 per month.

Wanchai's office is much more private, taking up an entire building not too far from Dog's Mouth Lane. The Citroen grinds to a halt in front of the building. The sportscar's gleaming, convex surfaces seem out of place amid the tangle of battered motorcycles parked nearby and the passing parade of vendor carts hawking fresh coconut juice, hot noodle dishes and deep-fried grasshoppers.

In the garage-like entranceway of Wanchai's building are several tables where the staff screens customers. Wanchai works in a dismal, inner room with sickly, pale green walls. A window looks out onto a courtyard piled high with truck tires. Even with the door shut and the air conditioner tuned on the room reverberates with the sound of construction—the incessant symphony of every Southeast Asian boom town, made up of the dull clang of a pile driver, the grinding riffs of a bulldozer and the bone rattling rhythm of a concrete mixer.

As soon as Wanchai sits down at a large desk and switches on the desk lamp, his first customers appear: three ethnic Chinese from Burma. They have dark, tough-looking faces. Their business is "transport." They own 28 trucks, which ship black market goods of every type between Thailand and Burma. Mong Hsu ruby is just one more commodity that happens to fall along their route. It takes Wanchai several minutes to unwrap their heavily taped parcels of rough rubies. There are hundreds of stones, most of them in the one to two carat range, some waterworn and others sharply prismatic. They are a flat, dull red, embedded with the blue to black core that distinguishes Mong Hsu rubies.

Wanchai's pale, delicate hands take on the dexterity of a concert pianist as he whisks over the red crystals, spreading them out in their separate lots and sifting rapidly through them. He unfolds his right pinkie like the blade of a pen knife and, with deft movements, separates a few stones from the piles. When he picks up an individual stone and holds it between his forefinger and thumb, the top joints of his fingers arch back in the same contorted gesture of a Thai court dancer. The three Chinese tell Wanchai the prices in crudely spoken Thai. Among themselves they speak Burmese—a low-pitched, murmuring language that sounds like water moving rapidly over stones. One of them keeps making calls on cellular telephone. I notice that all four of the bottom knuckles on his right hand are scarred. The Chinese lean forward intently as Wanchai continues to pore over the stones. The tension mounts. Wanchai says nothing. Instead, he reaches into the top drawer of his desk and pulls out a deck of cards. He places them between himself and the three Chinese and gestures for one of them to cut the deck. Everyone in the room seems to breathe a collective sigh of relief. They sit back and relax as Wanchai deals a hand of Bridge Poker.

At first I think they are playing for the stones, but then the stacks of Thai baht notes come out--freshly minted ones, still wrapped in seals from the bank, in 500 and 1,000 baht denominations. The piles of rubies are left on he table amid the money and the cards. After 20 minutes of play, a thick cloud of smoke from 555 brand cigarettes hangs over the desk and Wanchai is down B30000 (US$ 1,200). He smiles, unperturbed, and keeps playing. In 20 more minutes he has won back B40000. The cards disappear back into the desk drawer and everyone's attention turns once again to the stones.

Wanchai picks out six stones from one lot and places them on his electronic scale where they register 6.4 grams, or more than 30 carats. As he examines the stones he tells me that they are not the ideal shape, they are too deep, and will lose 70 - 80 percent of their weight during cutting. The maximum yield he can hope for is 35 percent. He asks the Chinese the price. One million baht(US$40,000), they tell him. Wanchai counters with B50,000. After ten minutes of intense discussion, the sale is finalized at B600,000. Another three stones totalling 15 carats are priced at B100000 by the Chinese. Wanchai offers B90,000. The negotiations are deadlocked until one of the Chinese hits on the idea of spinning the flat, metal gem scoop that lays on the desk - ruby roulette. If the scoop points at Wanchai, the price is B90000, if it points at the Chinese, it's B100000. Wanchai laughs at the idea and agrees. He laughs even lounder when he wins. At least purchase is a lot of 437 carats of alluvial, waterworn stones in sizes of one to two carats, for which Wanchai pays B70000.

As the three Chinese leave the office the next customer enters. She is a teenaged Thai broker, a frail little wisp of a girl in blue jeans and a red shirt. The only big thing about her is her smile. She lays ten stones of about one-half gram each on the desk and tells Wanchai the price is B450000.

"Everything for B170,000", Wanchai says.

Mai dai -cannot-she coos.

"Are you married yet?" Wanchai asks. "Why not? You're very beautiful. I'm not asking for myself, it's for my cousin. He's looking for a wife."

She smiles and offers a counter price of B250000.

"You are lovely, lovely. I'll give you B150000 if you give me the stones now," Wanchai say. "If the owner says it's not okay, you can come back and I'll return the stones."

Mai dai, she says softly, still smiling.

"Why not?" Wanchai asks. "It's more convenient than if you have to go ask him and then come back again."

She insists that she must ask the owner before accepting the money and she leaves the office with her stones.

The next customer is a young, clean-cut Burmese man, dressed with the casual elegance of any big city to Wanchai as he unwraps a lot totaling 10.5 grams, for which he is asking B2 million.
Wanchai selects a single 2.4 gram stone from the lot and holds it under the light. It is clean, without cracks and has a good, flat side on it. Wanchai offers B300000 for this stone.

The Burmese man says no way—he paid B400000 for it.

"Okay, B400000" Wanchai says.

The Burmese smiles and rejects the offer.

"Okay, long time no buy from you—B450000," Wanchai says.

Again, the offer is rejected.

Someone from the staff comes in with a bag of ice cream bars that are passed around. The teenage broker comes back and says the owner will let Wanchai have the stones for B170000. Wanchai takes obvious delight in this purchase and snickers like a mischievous child as he slips the stones into his desk drawer.

The Burmese man remains standing by Wanchai as more people crowd into the office. A chubby, cheery oiled, alluvial stones on his desk. A Burmese army officer, dressed in jungle fatigues, enters, says hello to Wanchai, circles the room a couple of times and leaves. A spry, elderly man wearing a USS Missouri cap, and a t-shirt printed with "Greenworld Private Golf Land" apprears grinning before the desk.

"This is the jade Man also has some rubies which he unwraps and adds to the confusion on Wanchai's desk. Like a kid in a candy store, Wanchai seems both happy and overwhelmed by the goods laid before him. He waves his strawberry ice cream bar in uncontrolled glee and accidently knocks the 2.4 gram ruby off his desk.

The clean-cut Burmese dealer, still patiently standing by picks up his stone and hands it back to Wanchai.

"Okay," Wanchai says, "B500000. That's it.. It’s too much but you're an old customer. I have to buy."

The dealer wants to think about it for one day.

No problem. Wachai tears off some tissue from the roll of toilet paper on his desk and wraps the stone snugly. He tapes the parcel in back and then uses a black pen to make an elaborate scrawl on the front--a cross between a Chinese Character and his initials.

"Otherwise he will go around and say, 'Mr Wanchai offered B500000. Do you want it for B510000?" Wanchai explains. In other words, if the Burmese dealer unwraps the ruby he risks not making a sale.

Wanchai suddenly realizes the time: he has to make it to the Chiang Rai airport in 45 minutes to get on the evening flight back to Bangkok. Wor is summoned with the Citroen and Wanchai climbs into the passenger seat for what should be an exciting ride, since it normally takes at least one hour.

I will stay in Mae Sai two more days, so I head for the town's newly-built three-star hotel, the Wong Tong (Golden Palace). It is an easy walk, since the whole town consists of only two main roads of a few blocks each. The Wong Tong lobby is the epitome of Thai-Chinese extravagance. Above the marble reception desk, which is at least 20 feet long, stretches a gigantic mural of topless Asian mermaids frolicking in a lily pond. Above the mural there is a row of 15 large clocks showing the times in major cities around the world. In addition to these timepieces, I count six elaborate lacquer and mother-of-pearl inlaid grandfather clocks around the lobby. As if you could possibly still have any doubts about the time, there is also an ornate, golden, Louis IVX style clock the size of a small car hunkering against one wall, near an equally large model of an ancient sailing ship, which has strings of blinking white fairy lights woven throughout its mast and riggings.

The marble floor fronting the reception desk is covered with an Oriental carpet in pastel patterns. Rising from the center of the carpet is a massive urn containing five-foot high stalks of artificial flowers—lavender, sky blue, and pink—made out of shiny, translucent plastic sprinkled with gold glitter. As you circle around the urn you are confronted with two large, Chinese-style lions carved from jade. All this for the special rate of B600 (US$24 a night), a reduction from the usual $50 because I am a guest of Wanchai. I register for a room on the fifth floor. Wor has warned me to stay above the third floor or risk interruptions from gem brokers who knock on the room doors day and night and ask if you want to buy some stone. They are members of the hotel's "gem dealers club." For B300 a broker can obtain a club ID card and the right to prowl the halls of the hotel's lower floors to hawk his wares. In contrast, the fifth floor hall is deathly quiet. My room is comfortable, anonymously furnished and almost plush. I turn the television on to MTV. For a minute, I feel transported to the clinical monotony of one of those big hotel chains that advertise "no surprises." Then I switch on the bathroom light and the fluorescent bulb explodes with a loud pop and the sickly sweet smell of burnt electrical wiring fills the room

I venture out onto the balcony. The Wong Tong Hotel is typical of the current craze in Thai architecture—a sort of neo-Greco-Roman nightmare with white plaster columns and ornate balconies affixed all around like the flourishes on a wedding cake. From my little white columned perch I can see the darkening hills of Burma as the evening descends. The town of Mae Sai becomes a rolling pattern of white lights sprinkled with the multi-colored Christmas lights that adorn both the hilltop temples and the ramshackle brothels lining the back alleys. A fountain of yellow sparks suddenly shoots up 30 feet from a dark hillside. It blazes for a few minutes, then subsides, and suddenly shoots up again, like Old Faithful. Watching a Buddhist cremation ceremony seems as good a way as any to end a day in Mae Sai. The things are much slower at the office the next morning since Wanchai has returned to Bangkok, but a trickle of customers is still coming in. Anyone with a larger stone is ushered to the inner office where Kwanmuang Bumrungpanichtarworn takes a close look.

Kwanmuang is a Chinese-Thai from chantaburi who specializes in burning stones. He wears jeans and is a huge, tough-looking man who goes by the nickname of "Gow," Chinese for "dog." But in spite of outward appearances, he is soft-spoken, polite and helpful. When he opens his wallet to take out his business card, "Australia was the best. I didn't start buying until 8am but the brokers came to queue at 11 the night before." You see a snapshot of his wife and baby in the clear plastic holder where one normally puts a driver's license.

Before the Mong Hsu ruby rush, Gow was involved in sapphire mining venture in Laos. He takes off the gold Buddha amulet he wears around his neck and shows me a lovely, conflower blue, three-carat sapphire set in the thick gold chain just above the Buddha. It required no burning or other treatment, he said, and is typical of the stones you can find in Laos. The only problem was the fickle Laotian officials.

"The government of Laos is sometimes good, sometimes not good," Gow says. "First you sign a contract and the terms are okay. They said I could mine 10,000 acres. I was happy. Then I started to dig and I found a lot of stones. Big stones. And they told me to stop. They said I had to pay a lot of money to buy the land. They changed everything in the contract and I had to stop. It was a big headache."

Since he entered the Mong Hsu rough stone business with Wanchai, Gow flies up to Mae Sai once a week from Bangkok to help buy the larger stones. He is staying a few extra days this trip because rumors are going around that some exceptionally large stones will be coming to Mae Sai from Mong Hsu in the coming week. Not long after I arrive, a woman walks in with a six carat rough stone. She is obviously eager to sell, hovering expectantly over Gow the ruby using a jewerler's visor and a flashlight rigged with a cone-like apparatus to funnel the beam. She wants B5000 for it. Gow points out a small, horizontal crack and offers B30000. They settle at B39000 and the woman walks out happily with the cash. Gow is also happy. "This is a good stone," he says.

It has only one obvious color flaw—a blue-black mark shaped like a spear running down one side of it, close to the surface. This type of color zoning will burn out completely, Gow says confidently. He takes me upstairs where there is a cutting wheel and I watch as he rough shapes the stone. "it will be a heart shape of about three carats, worth about B200000," he says, as he holds it up to the light.

After a few more hours of viewing the trade of rough rubies, red dots swimming before my eyes, I leave the office to walk over to the town of Tachilek, on the Burma side of the border. On the way to the checkpoint I pass through a gauntlet of Thai "gem" sellers. One woman offers me a tray of 20 carat, eye-clean, cut "rubies" from Burma. The price: $100 each. I wonder how many tourists fall for it. Thai passport holders pay only B10, about 50US cents, to cross the bridge to Burma, but everyone else must pay US$10. The equivalent in Thai baht will not do—the Burmese officials want US currency.

Tachilek is a market town, catering to tourists, and not really worth the price of admission—unless you are shopping for fake jade Buddha statues, lacquer ware, peacock feather fans, pillow-sized bags stuffed with dried, mouse ear mushrooms, or tiger and leopard skins. The hide of one tiger stretches at least nine feet from nose to tail. I'm torn between marveling at the remains of what must have been a magnificent creature and the sick feeling that comes from seeing it nailed to the front of a tacky shop in a tawdry town. As I snap a picture, the shop owner runs out and demands money.

I am not getting a favorable impression of Tachilek, but then, I am only scratching surface. I can't comment on the state of the state of the popular opium dens or the famous "Flower Garden," the local house of pleasure, where Burmese gem sellers frequently entertain their Thai customers. Straying away from the market onto a muddy back lane, I see a sign in both Burmese and English, which reads: "Money Lake." It sounds interesting, so I follow the arrow down a narrow path, which ends at a putrid swamp. I find another trail heading up a large hill, the highest point in town. Thinking I'm in store for a good view I start up the trail only to be confronted by a line of Burmese soldiers, wielding machine guns and shouting at me. Although I don't speak Burmese, I sense that they are ordering me to go away. May be it just is the gray sky and drizzle of the rainy season, but I am beginning to feel depressed. I get back to the main lane where a procession of sarong-clad civilians, led by four men carrying an ablong box on their shoulders, shuffles towards me. As they pass by it becomes clear form the size and shape of the box that it is the coffin of a child.

Back in the market, as I am purchasing a bunch of Burmese cheroots—a pungent cigar often seen clamped in the jaws of toothless old village women—I am startled by a deep voice behind me. "You smoke those things?" Horrified to be busted for such a vice I turn to see Wor.
"Those will kill you," he says.

Wor has come looking for me to invite me to dinner at his favorite restaurant, right on the Mekong River, at the epicenter of the Golden Triangle where Laos, Thailand, and Burma meet. He will pick me up at the Wong Tong in two hours. The Citroen awaits under the Grecian-style portico fo the hotel. I climb in and as Wor starts the engine there is a "whoosh" of air and the sensation of the front end of the car slowly lifting, like a magic carpet taking flight.
"It's a hydraulic system, " Wor explains. "I'm sorry I didn't take you to dinner last night but I was fighting with this damn car. It broke down in Chiang Rai and it's not easy to get it repaired. I hate this car. But Wanchai wants it because he likes to go fast. If I drive slow he yells at me, "Faster! Faster!"

As we drive past the edge of town, Wor nods at a street corner and casually remarks: "A guy was shot to death there last week. He stepped on somebody's toes."

The rough ruby and sapphire business is not the safest occupation, but Wor says that he feels comfortable here on his own turf. "There is no problem as long as everyone stays happy," he says. He keeps a gun, however, just in case. "I'm used to it," he says with a shrug. "I've carried one since I was young."

Wor also comes from Chantaburi, but he has spent very little of his adult life there. He is Wanchai's point man—the one who runs the foreign operations and maintains customer so that Wanchai can fly in on short buying trips. He recalls many occasions when he raced through the Australian outback in a Holden, driving all night to get Wanchai form the airport to the sapphire fields.

While Wanchai enjoys the glamour of specializing in large stones, Wor handles the more tedious taks of buying the melee and small sizes. Just because he married Wanchai's sister does not mean he receives special treatment. Everything he knows about the business he learned the hard way.

"Wanchai doesn't tell me anything," Wor says. "Gem people don't like to talk too much and I don't ask a lot of quesitons. I just watch everything he does. And remember. To be successful in this business you have to have a system. Wanchai has a good system."

"Wanchai doesn't tell me anything and I don't ask a lot of questions. I just watch everything he does."

After Australia, Wor ran the office in Sri Lanka, buying rough geuda sapphire for heat treatment in Chantaburi. When the Sri Lankans finally caught on and raised the price of the stones, Wor set off on an odyssey to find Sri Lankan geuda at small jewelry shops throughout Asia. Many small shop owners had bought massive quantities of gueda to set in cheap jewelry, and had no knowledge of the price hike of the material.

"I found a shoebox full of gueda at a shop in Bali," Wor recalls. "I didn't dare bargain with the owner. I just paid him the first price he asked and walked out of there fast."

Next, Wor spent five years in Ho Chi Minh city, where he faced the headache of trying to sort out all the synthetics from the genuine rough rubies that came through the buying office.

Mae Sai and the Mong Hsu material offers a different set of problems. "The market is slow and there is too much ruby available but you have to keep buying, otherwise you lose your customers, "Wor says. "You're competing with 200 other buyers and you have to keep the connection. The trick is to pay the price you want." As an example, he cites the lot of 437 carats that Wanchai bought for B70000 from the Chinese poker players. "There was one stone in that lot of nearly 2.5 carats. That stone alone will cover almost half of the price. Let's say you get just 120 carats for B70000—you can't go wrong. It was highway robbery. Those people wanted to sell." Such good deals do not happen every day, he adds. "In this business ou have to make a good profit because you lose a lot, too. We paid 1,010,000 rupees for one sapphire in Sri Lanka. It didn't burn well and we only got 10,000 rupees back."

The Burmese are predicting that the Mong Hsu mines can produce ruby for at least the next ten years, a prediction Wor is continuing on. If the supply holds out in Mae Sai, he can continue to work and live in his own country, in one of its most scenic, cool, and peaceful areas. The royal family of Thailand maintains a hilltop palace not far from Mae Sai, surrounded by exquisitely landscaped gardens that are open to the public. Wor visits this royal garden often, to contemplate his plans to build his own hilltop home and garden in the province.

It is easy to understand his attachment to the place as we drive through the green rice fields and gently rolling hills, past the idyllic huts of farmers and the jog-walled estates of some of the most powerful people in Thailand, including high-ranking police officers. The road is brand new—one of the widest and smoothest I have seen in Thialand—and yet it seems to lead to nowhere.

"They just finished this road," Wor says. "Eventually, it will connect with roads in Burma and Laos and go all the way up into China."

The restaurant sits right on the edge of the Mekong River, a muddy, vast expanse of powerfully sweeping current. The dark wilderness of Laos can be seen on the opposite bank, and Burma is only a few hundred yards up the river. The sound of rushing water mingles with the whir of jungle insects.

We sit Thai style, knees folded on cushion, before our table. A screen is all that separates us from the jungle outside and a swarm of mosquitoes—gigantic, jet-black ones, almost the size of wasps—beats violently against it. Our waiter is what is known in Thailand as a "lady boy." He is tall, beautiful, slender and moves with effortless grace. But instead of the exaggerated prissiness characteristic of lady boys, he projects a hard-edged masculinity from his kohl-lined eyes. It is an eerie combination.

I try not to stare at him as he kneels to serve us our drinks—J&B and soda. We settle into a luxurious meal of shitake mushrooms steamed with garlic and ginger, spicy prawn soup and rice crackers covered with a delectable sauce made from the roe of a giant catfish found only in the Mekong.

I ask Wor about his family. He says his two grown daughters live in Bangkok, but he prefers to stay in the more peaceful north and let them come visit him. Neither of his daughters works in the gem business. In spite of the experience and connections he could offer them, Wor discouraged them from becoming involved with gems. "It's not a good business if you have a family, "he says." "The rewards can be good financially, but your family life…I was lucky if I was home 60 days out of the year."

I ask him if he enjoys his work: the quick gains and losses, the late nights entertaining customers, the strains of dealing with foreign cultures in strange lands, the hassles of bargaining for thousands of dollars worth of stones under pressure, the racing around to get Wanchai to and from airports, the maintenance of finicky sportscars in remote locales, combined with all the complications of greasing the wheels of the rough corundum business in general. Wor thinks a minute, then looks at me with a dead serious gaze and says: "Somebody's got to do it."