BAN RAK THAI, Thailand — At night, traditional Chinese red lanterns illuminate the hotels, shop fronts and Yunnanese-style restaurants lining the main road in this highland village of just over 1,000 people. On one recent evening, as the mist rose off a nearby reservoir, the mellifluous voice of the popular Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng could be heard wafting out from one of the village’s several tea shops.

But this sleepy Chinese village is nestled in the lush backcountry of northwestern Thailand, one of several dozen such outposts, a quirk of the region’s tumultuous human and political history.

“I may have a Thai ID, but I’m Chinese,” said Liang Zhengde, 47, a manager for his family’s fruit farms. “My family is Chinese, and no matter where we go, we’re still Chinese.”

The Liangs, like some 200 other families here, are the veterans or descendants of what is known as China’s Lost Army, a unit of the Kuomintang’s Nationalist Army, which lost to the Red Army of Mao Zedong in 1949. As most Nationalist soldiers fled east to Taiwan in the face of Communist advances, the Kuomintang’s 93rd Division retreated west from the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan into Myanmar, then known as Burma.