One-time drug warlord Khun Sa, variously described as among the world's most wanted men and as a great liberation fighter, died Friday at the age of 74.

Khun Sa is shown in Homong, Burma, on Nov. 22, 1995.
(Associated Press)

Khuensai Jaiyen, a former secretary for Khun Sa, confirmed Tuesday that his former boss died in the Burmese capital of Rangoon.

The cause of death was not immediately known, but Khun Sa had long suffered from diabetes, partial paralysis and high blood pressure.

A Burmese official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Khun Sa was cremated Tuesday morning.

For nearly four decades, the charismatic warlord claimed to be fighting for autonomy for the Shan, one of many ethnic minorities groups who have battled the central military government in Burma, also known as Myanmar, for decades.

But narcotics agents around the world used terms like the "Prince of Death" to describe him, and the United States offered a $2 million US reward for his arrest.

"They say I have horns and fangs. Actually, I am a king without a crown," he told a reporter who visited his remote headquarters of Ho Mong after an 11-hour mule ride.

At the height of his notoriety, Khun Sa presided over a veritable narcotics kingdom complete with satellite television, schools and surface-to-air missiles in the drug-producing Golden Triangle region where Burma, Thailand and Laos meet.

He preferred to paint himself as a liberation fighter with the Shan United army — later the Mong Tai army — in Burma's northeastern Shan state.

He had lived in seclusion in Rangoon since 1996, when he surrendered to the country's ruling military junta, which allowed him to run a string of businesses behind a veil of secrecy.

Born of a Chinese father and Shan mother on February 17, 1933, Khun Sa received little education but learned the ways of battle and opium from the Kuomintang, remnants of forces defeated by China's communists and forced to flee into Burma.

Defends sales to 'drug-crazed' West

By the early 1960s Khun Sa, also known as Chang Chi-fu, had become a major player in the Golden Triangle.

For a time he served in Burmese government militia, but was jailed in 1969 after allying himself with the Shan cause. He was freed five years later in exchange for two Russian doctors his followers had kidnapped.

The wily operator sought a less hostile environment in Thailand, but he was driven out in 1982 and lodged himself in Ho Mong, an idyllic valley in Burma, near Thailand's border.

There, the chain-smoking warlord entertained visitors with Taiwanese pop songs, grew orchids and strawberries, and directed a flow of heroin to addicts around the world.

Washington estimated that up to 60 per cent of the heroin in the United States was refined from opium in his area.

Khun Sa argued that only economic development in the impoverished Shan state could stop opium growing and its smuggling to the "drug-crazed West."

"My people grow opium. And they are not doing it for fun. They do it because they need to buy rice to eat and clothes to wear," he once said.

When the central government offered Khun Sa amnesty in 1996, he disbanded his Mong Tai army of about 10,000 fighters and moved to Rangoon, where some suspect he continued his work in the drug trade.