The two tropes of “boom” and “bust” are recurrent in analyses of frontier capitalism across Asia's borderlands. Liminal spaces par excellence, borderlands seem to experience periods of frenetic (and often illicit) activities, when people move in, fortunes are made, and promises of further development amplified. Often, however, such “boom” phases are followed by a period of government crackdown, or overall decline due to fluctuations in the market. As the “bust” settles in, formerly (and briefly) prosperous outposts turn, once again, into semi-deserted out-of-the-way places, where stories about the “good old days” are subjects of daily conversations. The social sciences literature on Asian borderlands has, indeed, captured a significant variety of such stories of boom-to-bust (cf. Horstmann, Saxer and Rippa 2018; Tsing 2005). In this chapter I contribute to this body of scholarly research by addressing the case of the Boten Special Economic Zone (SEZ), at the Laos-China border. Boten is currently undergoing major development as part of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Starting in 2017, China Railway, a state-owned enterprise (SOE), set up offices in Boten to manage the construction of the northern Laos section of the China-Laos high-speed railway project. Since then Boten has doubled its size and now features two large office towers, a railway and a bus station, and a new shopping mall. Yet the story of Boten pre-dates the construction of the China-Laos railway and the BRI.