"Isn't it illegal?'' I ask. A nationwide crackdown on gambling has been in place since January.

"Casinos here are closed. We have a convenient path to go to the other side. Burma!'' he winks. "You won't have to pay for a border pass or even transport. We'll take you there.''

He introduces himself as Yang and hands me a piece of paper with his mobile phone number scribbled on it. I just have to call and he will arrange everything, he says.

I have arrived at Jiegang Road in the center of Ruili, Yunnan province. During the day this is just a sleepy tree-lined street sporting a few hotels, shops and restaurants; most are closed and shuttered.

Only the pawn shops seem to be open and there are few customers. The only people moving about are casino touts like Yang.

But as soon as night falls, Jiegang comes alive. Neon lights announce discos and sauna parlors. Loud music screeches out of karaoke bars.

The action begins at a roundabout centered on three giant banyan trees and a statue of a girl stroking a peacock. A massive neon sign says: "China Ruili, Wild People's Dancing Club.'' A blonde, swimsuit-clad girl holding a bottle of Budweiser graces an adjacent billboard.

Welcome to Ruili, a city of 110,000 souls on the border with Burma. The government identifies the city as the "Pearl of Border Trade,'' "China's Excellent Tourism City'' and "Home to Peacocks.''

The name Ruili means auspicious and beautiful in Putonghua. But as you walk from the roundabout down Jiegang Road, the scene is neither auspicious nor beautiful. Ruili is the underside of China's boom, a gathering place for gamblers, prostitutes, drug addicts and smugglers. Here on the frontier, lawlessness rules.

Jiegang Road is swarming with heroin dealers and hookers - Rose Tang

Small groups of ghost-like figures loiter under street lamps and trees, their faces bathed in eerie green light.

One of them is Bo Saung, a petite young woman slouching against a tree. Her pale face has been made up carelessly, her cheeks covered in patches of thanaka, the yellowish powder worn as a cosmetic by Burmese women, and her eyebrows lie flat like two dead worms. She clutches bony hands over a pink jacket to cover her protruding sarong-wrapped belly.

"Wan bu wan [You wanna play]?'' she says in Yunnan dialect to a middle-aged man in a golf T-shirt and synthetic pants. Bo Saung is five months pregnant, so she's selling her body at rock-bottom prices: Five yuan per session. She needs money for heroin, food and rent. The 30-year-old Burmese has been here for 11 years.

A few steps away, young boys and girls squat around a light box that says: "Ruili Police Station, 50 meters.'' Among them are two little girls with big, pretty eyes. They're offering a local delicacy: Heroin, or Number Four, as the Yunnanese call it.

They're sisters, perhaps the youngest dealers in town. The one wearing knee-high stiletto boots is 13. Her younger sister is 11. The girls, from a dirt-poor village in Shan state across the border, were sold here a year ago.

And they've been Number Four addicts since. "We help our boss sell [heroin],'' says the elder one.

Under a street lamp, a skinny woman, her hairless head covered with a small towel, pulls up her trousers to show bystanders the open sores on her leg.

"She has AIDS,'' says a Burmese man, adding that she used to be a prostitute.

Jiegang is the heart of Ruili's sex, drugs and gambling district and as such it is also ``One street, two countries.'' I'm on the Burmese side. Loitering across the road are the Chinese junkies, hookers and dealers. They're more expensive and less friendly, the Burmese say. The two groups don't mix.

This place is China's cesspool, a depressing Mecca for the wild, wanton and weird. A major conduit for drug trafficking, it's also the birthplace of China's AIDS epidemic.

In 1989, China admitted to its first mass outbreak of HIV/AIDS - 146 cases were found in a few villages to the west of Ruili. They constituted 75 percent of all reported cases in the country at the time. Most infections were among intravenous drug users.

That was just one year after the border trade formally opened between China and Burma, making official what had existed for as long as anyone can remember.

The step was important for Burma, which was - and is - deeply isolated, its military government a pariah. In September 1988, thousands were massacred in the streets of Rangoon after a junta took power and soldiers opened fire on democracy protesters.

The Burmese are hungry for Chinese goods and everything ranging from fertilizers to motorbikes, home appliances and clothing floods into the Burmese town of Muse, then on to Mandalay and elsewhere. Gem stones, jade, and fast-disappearing teak from Burma is trucked to China through Ruili to pay for the bounty.

The Web site of the Dehong government that oversees Ruili boasts that at the height of border trade in 1995, annual bilateral trade in the area reached 3.15 billion yuan (HK$2.97 billion). Ruili had 600 trading companies. But border trade plunged in the 1997 financial crisis. Since then, Ruili seems to have barely recovered.

Ruili's Jewelry Street, a market near Jiegang Road for Burmese gem stones and jade, is quiet and customers are scarce. It's equally depressing in Jiegao, a border trade zone set up in 2000 across from Muse.

A government billboard near the border crossing features a hand holding a condom. ``Use condoms to prevent AIDS, make your sex life healthy and happy,'' says its slogan.

Along Zhongmian Street, or China-Burma Street, shops touting second-hand computers and appliances for the Burma trade these days seldom see visitors. Owners laze about playing cards or smoking cigarettes from big aluminum bongs.

Standing alone in a square near the border gate is a tall building without glass in the windows, giving it a bombed-out appearance. Construction stopped a few years ago after investors from a Sichuan steel company were arrested for embezzlement. Not far from the skyscraper is another unfinished building, abandoned by a Guangdong company.

Driving with a local businessman in his BMW, I find the new six-lane highway lined with palm trees sleek and impressive, except that it's almost empty.

Even tourists have stopped coming here. Locals blame Beijing's border casino clampdown. Since January, most of Ruili's illegal casinos have been shut - with only one or two open and under the protection of local crime bosses. One is known to be at the three-star Jin Cheng Hotel, where it is hidden away from public view, catering to a few of the well-connected.

The Burmese government has bowed to Chinese pressure and closed betting parlors just across the border in Burma.

But that hasn't stopped gamblers. In Jiegao, a few iron bars of the border fence have been removed to allow people like Yang to take gamblers through to casinos further afield.

They don't even need to climb through the fence. A few hundred meters down the Ruili River the border fence becomes a low wall. In broad daylight, smugglers drive their trucks here to drop off goods which are carried by Burmese laborers to the other side. No border patrols are in sight and one can just stroll into Burma.

The border is so ill-defined that in places one village is in two countries. Dai and Jingpo ethnic minority groups live on both sides of the border and traverse it freely. Very few speak Putonghua or the Yunnan dialect, which makes it hard to conduct AIDS education among these vulnerable populations.

Despite the economic downturn, the drug trade continues to flourish. The long and loosely controlled border makes Ruili one of the seven major drug trafficking routes into China, linking Muse and Kunming.

But, at least according to official media, drug busts are frequent and AIDS education prevalent.

In late March, the Dehong Unity newspaper celebrated completion of phase two of a large drug and AIDS prevention campaign in precise terms: ``The 359 teams with 1,693 members went to villages and conducted thorough and detailed research. They submitted 2,154 reports,'' it says.

No wonder Ruili officials are unavailable for interviews. They're obviously busy.

On top of its preoccupation with such campaigns, the Yunnan government in early March imposed a media blackout, demanding all reporters, domestic and overseas, channel all interview requests through the provincial propaganda department.

But the problems here are not denied. Last year, the Ruili Center for Disease Control admitted that the AIDS epidemic had spread to all counties and towns by 2002. Dehong Unity carried a front page report in late March featuring a young orphan who became addicted to heroin at the age of eight. His grandparents and parents died of AIDS and his brothers are detained for drug abuse.

Meanwhile, drugs from Burma continue to flow through Ruili, then to Kunming and on to other parts of China.

A recent report on CCTV described the arrest of a Harbin woman who ran a drug trafficking network between Yunnan and Harbin involving most of her family members. Other media re-ports featured drug traffickers caught hiding heroin inside their bodies.

International organizations such as Save the Children, World Vision and the Australian Red Cross have moved in. Save the Children, the largest NGO in Ruili, conducts AIDS prevention campaigns and assisted the government in setting up the Ruili Women and Children Development Center with a clinic and AIDS education workshops for prostitutes.

Social workers at Save the Children say when the organization kicked off in 2001, local ethnic minority officials were reluctant to co-operate, worrying that the campaigns would damage Ruili's image as a good-time destination.

Now NGOs are involved in shaping government policies on drugs and AIDS prevention.

The Yunnan government has declared a three-year ``People's War on Drugs.'' Banners and billboards promoting AIDS and drug prevention are ubiquitous. Needle exchange centers in Dai and Jingpo villages encourage addicts to use clean needles.

But while officials are busy with their campaigns, it's business as usual in Jiegang Road, for the dealers, the prostitutes, and the casino escorts.

I ask Yang to take me to a Burmese casino. We hop in a cab and are soon winding through hilly roads and sugarcane fields.

Then I think: Nobody knows where I am. Anything could happen. I get scared and ask Yang to return to Ruili.

``[The casino's] only 40 kilometers away. It's Shan state, we've bought off the Shan army,'' he says solemnly. ``What are you afraid of? Everybody in the casino is Chinese. I can find you a job there. A lot of Sichuanese girls like you are there. You can earn 1,200 yuan a month.''

That's all I need, I think, fearing that if I cross the border I won't return. I persuade Yang to turn back after promising to bring more friends along the next day.

Later, local contacts tell me I'm lucky to get away and warn me not to follow touts across the border.

It's time for me to leave Ruili. The three-hour bus ride to another town en route to Kunming stretches to 13 hours as we are stopped by soldiers at two checkpoints. They search the bus meticulously.

They dismantle airconditioners, lance seat cushions with spikes and crawl under the bus. In the end, a Uighur man has his fake ID card confiscated but no drugs are found.

Finally, we're allowed to leave the Ruili area. The bus drives through a yellow-tiled arch reminiscent of Dai architecture. An inscription that flanks it says: ``Peacocks spread their tails, wishing for your return.''