They were CIA-backed Chinese rebels. Now you’re invited to their once-secret hideaway.

Oct. 1 will mark 70 years since Chairman Mao Zedong declared victory over his anti-communist enemies and founded the modern Chinese nation.

His rivals, a US-backed army known as the Kuomintang (KMT), mostly fled seaward. They landed in Taiwan, where their successors still run the island republic — or in Beijing’s view, a renegade province. Others escaped to Hong Kong.

But there was also an exodus in the opposite direction. Fighters who couldn’t reach the coast had to scramble over western mountains into the jungles of Myanmar, then called Burma.

Their journey, though often forgotten, was no less dramatic. The long saga that ensued — involving secret weapons shipments and opium caravans — is covered in CIA fingerprints. And its aftereffects still ripple into the 21st century.

Take it from Somboon Iamwittayakul, now 66 years old. The former guerrilla’s home, painted canary yellow, clings to a mountaintop along the Thai-Myanmar border. Today, it looks down into a misty valley studded with tea shrubs. But when he first arrived, it was a more barren place, patrolled by boar and bears.