Even the briefest description of this remote Chiang Rai Province mountaintop town will go to lengths to point out that Mae Salong isn’t a typical Thai town and feels more as if it belongs in Southern China—or words to that effect. That’s because it did begin life as a Yunnanese settlement founded in the 1960s by remnants of the Kuomintang (KMT) army who fled Yunnan after defeat by Mao Tse Tung’s forces in the Chinese civil war.