Chiang Rai’s mountaintop town of Mae Salong began life as a Yunnanese town; unsurprisingly, today, it feels like less of a typical Thai town and more as if it belongs in Southern China. Remnants of the Kuomintang (KMT) who fled Yunnan after defeat in the Chinese civil war by Mao Tse Tung’s communist forces founded the town in the early 1960s.