Mandalay
Myanmar's second city anchored half the country's China border trade — the 2021 coup triggered a trophic cascade that severed the corridor and collapsed the jade economy.
Half of Myanmar's recorded border trade with China once flowed through a single road that starts in Mandalay. That road is now a war zone. Mandalay, Myanmar's second city with roughly 1.2 million people, sits at the junction of the Irrawaddy River and the overland corridor to China — the Mandalay-Lashio-Muse highway, locally called 'the pearl necklace.' Wikipedia leads with the last Burmese royal capital and Buddhist monasteries. What it undersells is that this city is the economic keystone of a country in the process of fragmenting.
Before the 2021 military coup, the Mandalay-Muse corridor carried approximately half of Myanmar's official border trade. Jade from Kachin State's Hpakant mines — the richest deposits in the world — flowed south through Mandalay to markets and across the border to Ruili, where annual jade transactions exceeded ¥10 billion ($1.37 billion). Rare earth exports, worth an estimated $1.4 billion in 2023, followed similar routes. The corridor was the economic spine of the country.
The coup triggered a trophic cascade. Four years later, the military controls only 21% of Myanmar's territory. Rebel forces captured Lashio — the corridor's midpoint and the Tatmadaw's Northeastern Regional Command — in August 2024. Border trade plummeted: the first two months of fiscal year 2024-25 recorded $417 million versus $640 million the prior year, a 35% collapse. Over three million civilians have been displaced and seventy-five thousand killed. Resistance forces now encroach on Mandalay itself, and Beijing — which brokered multiple failed ceasefires — watches its Belt and Road investments and rare earth supply lines fray.
The biological parallel is the trophic cascade. When wolves were removed from Yellowstone, the entire ecosystem restructured: elk populations exploded, willows disappeared, rivers changed course. The 2021 coup removed the fragile governing structure that held Myanmar's trade networks together, and every subsequent link in the chain has been transforming ever since — jade markets collapsed, border towns emptied, and a trade corridor that sustained half the country's commerce has been severed segment by segment.