Myanmar farmers choose silkworms over poppies - with help from China

TANGYAN, Myanmar - Zhou Xing Ci's family has farmed poppies for as long as anyone remembers, scraping the flowers' sticky brown sap to produce opium.

Along with many other farmers in the hills of eastern Myanmar, the crop - much of which ends up as heroin sold on foreign streets - has in recent years put Myanmar as one of the world's leading sources of opium.

"That tradition stops with me," said Zhou, 42, at his sturdy new timber house in Tangyan township, in the north of Shan State.