Here in Thayet, a township caked in dust about seven hours north of Rangoon, the oil rush began in 1989 after a farmer found crude near his land. Soon thousands of people had flooded the village, including students whose classes were cut short after the 1988 uprising. Those who have remained here since – along with a handful of wives and a fair few children – clamber under wooden derricks fashioned from bamboo and rope, the drills between them squelching out crude oil that runs into large open pits lined with tarpaulin.

Everywhere one looks, there is oil: in the fumes floating up in the midday heat, in the black rivulets snaking down the hillside, in the old barrels littering the land. But this is not the biggest "oil town", says Aung Win: just a few hours away, roughly 20,000 drillers dig for crude at Su Win, and another 10,000 are in the neighbouring Khing Taung village.