Mong-La, The Real Life “Sin City”

Mong-La is a small city, a special place directly on Myanmar’s border with neighboring China where gamblers, sex tourists and substance abusers unite to indulge their worst vices.

Also known by Burmese government as “Special Unit Number Four”, the area is overrun with illegal activities, ranging from prostitution to the sale of poached animals. Mong La is considered to be Myanmar’s version of Las Vegas, or the Tijuana of China, after rising from a small village several decades ago.

Hotel rooms advertise “newly arrived virgins” and “mother-daughter combos”.

Everywhere you go in the city centre, scantily dressed girls – some as young as 13 – sit like dolls on display in shop-front brothels. Brochures in hotels advertise sex with 14-year-old Vietnamese virgins.

Prostitution is just as ubiquitous as gambling here—scantily clad women openly solicit sex on the street, and in grubby hotels room a Chinese-language advertisement offer “Girls with good personality who are cheerful and nice,” as well as a “mom and daughter combo, [or] older and younger sister combo.”

At night, on the streets next to Mong La’s market, young Chinese prostitutes wait on plastic chairs in shopfront brothels. They don’t bother to hide behind massage parlors without a single drop of massage oil or hair salons without a single pair of scissors.

A hub for prostitution, gambling and general debauchery, Myanmar’s “Wild East” has found itself the subject of considerable international attention recently, with a string of reports from TIME, the BBC and The New York Times painting a sordid picture of a lawless “vice city” and “Burmese Las Vegas”. In other words, the kind of place where you might want a copy of your passport.

Run by the former rebel army known as the National Democratic Alliance Army-Eastern Shan State (NDAA), Mong La has existed entirely outside the control of the Myanmar government for more than 25 years. It has its own police force, though the rules, if they exist at all, remain unclear. “I am afraid in Mong La. There is no security. If people have money, they can do everything what they want,” if the general sentiment.

When darkness falls, gambling and prostitution take place against a soundtrack of karaoke halls and Thai lady-boy shows. On every corner, girls in skimpy outfits wait, smoking, these are Mong La’s “cheap serving girls.”

Over-25s charge around 100 yuan ($18) for their services, with 15-year-olds-fetching double this price. “You want younger, you pay more,” will be often heard.