In the early 20th century, outlaws became local heros in the countryside near the border between the northern Malaysian state of Kedah and Siam. Cheah Boon Kheng's account of peasant banditry and the society where it flourished draws on colonial records, literary sources and interviews to examine the circumstances that led the Governor to call the border area "one of the most lawless and insecure districts” in British Malaya during the 1920s.