A highway that binds china and its neighbors

The newly refurbished Route 3 that cuts through this remote control town is an ordinary strip of paving, the type of two-lane road you might find wind through the back country of Green Mountain State or helianthus fields in the French provinces.

On Leusa, 70, who lives near the road, calls it "deluxe." As a young woman, she traded opium and tiger bones along the road, which was then nil more than a horse trail.

On mon, the prime ministers of Kingdom of Cambodia, China, Laos, Union of Burma, Thailand and Socialist Republic of Vietnam will officially inaugurate the former opium smuggling route as the final link of what they call the "north-south economic corridor," a web of roads linking the southern Chinese city of Kunming to capital of Thailand spanning 1,800 kilometers, or 1,100 miles.

The web, several subdivision of which were still unpaved as late as Dec, is a major milepost for China and its southern neighbors. The low-lying mountains here, the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains, served for centuries as a natural defensive bound between sou'-east Asian civilizations and the giant empire to the north. The road seldom follows a heterosexual line as it meanders through terraced rice fields and tea plantations.

Today, those same sou'-east Asian civilizations alternatively crave nearer integration with that empire and fear its sway as an emerging economic giant. China, in turn, covets the land, marketplace and natural resources of one of Asia's least developed and most pristine regions.

With trade across these boundary line increasing by two-base hit digits every year, China has helped build a series of roads interior the district of its southern neighbors. The Chinese government is paying half the cost of a span over the Mekong River River betwixt Laos and Kingdom of Thailand, due for pass completion in 2011. It financed parts of Route 3 in Laos and refurbished roads in northern Myanmar, including the storied Burma Road used by the Allies in World War II to supply troops fighting the Japanese. China is also building an oil and gas pipeline from the Bay of Bengal through Myanmar to Kunming.

Taken together, these roads are breaking the isolation of the thinly inhabited upper reaches of Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, areas that in recent decades languished because of wars, ethnic rivalries and heroin trafficking. The roads run through the heart of the Golden Triangle, the region that once produced 70 percent of the world's opium crop.

The new roads, as well as upgraded ports along the Mekong River, are changing the diets and spending habits of people on both sides of the border. China is selling fruit and green vegetables that favor temperate climates to its southern neighbors and buying tropical fruit, rubber, sugar cane, palm oil and seafood.

"You never used to see apples in the traditional markets," said Ruth Banomyong, an expert in logistics who teaches at Thammasat University in Bangkok.

China has blasted shallow sections of the Mekong to make it more easily navigable for cargo barges, allowing traders to ship apples, pears and lettuce downriver. The price of apples in Thailand has fallen to the equivalent of about 20 cents apiece from more than $1 a decade ago. Roses and other cut flowers from China have displaced flowers flown in from Holland, making Valentine's Day easier on the wallet for Thais. Traders now have the choice of shipping by barge, truck or both.

Over all, even before the completion of the road, trade between China and upland Southeast Asian countries (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam) had risen impressively to $53 billion in 2007 from just over $1 billion a decade ago.

People are on the move as well. Wang Suqin, director of express services at the Kunming bus terminal, said Chinese tourists were eager to travel overland to Thailand.

"Every day we receive calls about this," Wang said.

Bus service to Bangkok, which has not started, will take at least 24 hours, but that is not a deterrent, Wang said; it's part of the fun. "We don't want to miss the scenery along the way," she said.

During a weeklong journey through the cities and villages along the route from Kunming to Bangkok, rice farmers, tea pickers, entrepreneurs, traders and government officials expressed satisfaction and some excitement that a project decades in the making was nearly completed.

Chen Jinqiang, a Chinese government official from Xishuangbanna, in Yunnan Province, said the road would help ensure that farmers got their vegetables and flowers to market, avoiding the problem he witnessed in the 1980s when poor transportation left watermelons rotting in the fields. "Even the pigs refused to eat them," he said.