by David Eimer
A SAVAGE DREAMLAND
Contents
Introduction
1 Down the Rabbit Hole
2 Clubland
3 Rangoon Revolutionaries
4 Shanty Town
5 Crime and Punishment
6 Christmas in Chin
7 The Road to Heaven
8 The Buddha Belt
9 Mawlamyine
10 On the Myeik Main
11 Hiding in Plain Sight
12 The Dream Factory
13 Astrology and the Abode of Kings
14 The Ta’ang Tea Party
15 Sky Lords
16 A Tale of Two Border Towns
17 Enter the Dragon
18 The Triangle
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Select Bibliography
Index
Note on the Author
Burma as represented on a modern political map is not a geographical or historical entity; it is a creation of the armed diplomacy and administrative convenience of late nineteenth-century British Imperialism.
Edmund R. Leach, ‘The Political Future of Burma’ (1963)
Modern Burma is only dead Burma reincarnate.
C. M. Enriquez, A Burmese Enchantment (1916)
Introduction
BURMA 2010
I came to Burma in search of the road less travelled. In early 2010, this was a mysterious nation: little-visited, barely mentioned, hardly known. A paranoid military dictatorship had ruled for almost fifty years and Burma had become the monster in the Southeast Asian attic, the unhinged relative locked in a top-floor room. While its neighbours hosted an ever-increasing number of tourists, the generals sought to isolate the country from outside influences and regarded foreigners with intense suspicion.
Three years before, in 2007, I had attempted to reach Yangon, Burma’s largest city and the former capital, to cover the so-called Saffron Revolution, the latest popular uprising against army rule. Along with many other reporters, my visa application was refused. The closest I came to Burma was standing on the banks of the Moei River in the Thai border town of Mae Sot, waiting for the expected flood of refugees to wade across from the other side. But the exodus never happened.
When I applied again for a visa in Bangkok in January 2010, with a new passport untainted by any evidence that I was a journalist, it was still more in hope than expectation. Returning to the Burmese embassy the next day, my surprise on finding I had been granted twenty-eight days to visit was rather too visible. I boarded a plane for Yangon the next morning, just in case the officials changed their minds.
After the hustle of Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport – a giant, crowded shopping mall with runways – Yangon’s international terminal could have been a provincial bus station on a slow day. There were no queues at passport control. A sole luggage belt revolved. Stepping outside, there was a sudden blast of heat, a cloud-free, azure sky and a bright sun that made me squint. I climbed into a taxi, its windows open in lieu of air conditioning, and asked the driver to take me to downtown.
We set off along a half-empty road overseen by palm and pipal trees, shaded in different hues of green. Their spreading leaves and branches partially masked the wooden houses topped with corrugated iron roofs and undistinguished concrete buildings behind them. Chinese-made trucks wheezed by belching black smoke, their exhausts mimicking the chimneys of the factories they had emerged from. There were few privately owned cars. Most, like my taxi, were falling apart in slow motion, their drivers unable to afford or find spare parts.
Walking along the broken-down pavements, or waiting for overloaded buses and pickup trucks, whose teenage conductors hung out of the doors and off the backs of their vehicles shouting out their destinations, were the locals. Almost everyone wore the sarong-like, traditional Burmese dress: sober-coloured longyi for men, brightly patterned htamein for the women. Only the Buddhist monks in their crimson robes stood out from the uniformity of the crowd.
What I was seeing could have been a street scene from the Yangon of twenty or thirty years before. Burma was in stasis; a country marooned under the junta that had snatched power in 1962. There were other reminders of the lack of progress, too. My mobile phone was in my pocket, its screen dark. There was no international network coverage in Burma. I discovered soon that the internet was a barely available, mostly non-functioning new invention as well.
But the shock of the old was alleviated by the faces I saw as we drove south. When my taxi stopped at the few traffic lights, people looked across at me from their crowded buses and some offered a shy smile, one that widened into a beguiling beam when I reciprocated. They made me feel like I was being welcomed to Burma, and that is the greeting every traveller hopes for.
A Chinese-owned hotel on the western edge of downtown was my first base. Yangon slopes gently downhill towards its eponymous river from its highest point, the hill where the Shwedagon Pagoda, Burma’s most holy religious monument, sits. By leaning out of the window of my room and twisting my neck to the left, I could see down Wadan Street as it ran for three blocks to the Strand, the riverfront road, and the city’s docks.
Yangon’s port was the second busiest in the world throughout the 1920s and 1930s, after London, and the city – then known as Rangoon – was riding high as one of Asia’s pioneer world cities. The docks were much quieter in 2010, but there were still enough ships to keep the port lively. The sound of their mournful horns rose easily above the noise of the traffic eleven storeys beneath me, as the ships slipped their moorings and floated downstream on the mud-brown waters towards the Ayeyarwady Delta and the Andaman Sea.
The river gave birth to Yangon. By the fifth or sixth century ce, Indian traders were already tacking east across the Bay of Bengal from the Coromandel Coast in search of new markets. Some penetrated the tangle of rivers and tributaries that make up the Ayeyarwady Delta, the region west of Yangon, and eventually landed at the small fishing village that would grow into Burma’s biggest city. Those same adventurers founded the Shwedagon, probably as a Hindu shrine initially, at the village’s highest point.
There is no record of the settlement’s original name, and not until the fifteenth century do written accounts of the place begin to emerge. By then, ‘Dagon’, and sometimes ‘Lagun’, was the name being used to describe the scruffy collection of wooden shacks that had grown up around the golden stupa of the Shwedagon, which had long since abandoned its Hindu origins and was already a revered Buddhist pilgrimage site.
Only in 1755 did the town become known as Yangon. The name, meaning ‘end of strife’, was chosen by the then king, Alaungpaya, after he had vanquished a rival southern kingdom. Almost a century later, though, the British seized lower Burma and Yangon’s name changed again. The invading armies employed translators from Arakan in the west of Burma, the region closest to what was then British India. The Arakanese pronounce ‘ya’ as ‘ra’, so Yangon became Rangoon.
In June 1989, the junta ordered that the name revert to Yangon once more. Burma became Myanmar at the same time, although many locals objected as of course they were not consulted over the abrupt change of their nation’s name. Some countries, like the UK and US, use Burma officially still, rather than Myanmar. I do, too, not being willing to abide by a unilateral decision made by a group of generals eager to rewrite history for their own purposes.
Other names associated with British rule disappeared in 1989 as well. Arakan, for example, became Rakhine State. But some have survived, like the Strand, Yangon’s riverfront road. As I walked it that first day, passing crumbling colonial-era edifices whose cupolas, towers and white stone pillars could have been transplanted from London, I understood why the name was once considered appropriate. T
he great travel writer Norman Lewis described Yangon as a city ‘built by people who refused to compromise with the East’. Not much appeared to have changed since his visit in 1951.
It was a British trope to impose themselves architecturally on the cities of their colonies. In Yangon the crowning incongruity is the Secretariat, the now abandoned seat of power in colonial times and afterwards. A collection of red and yellow brick buildings set around a neat quadrangle and surrounded by high walls, the Secretariat was an Oxford college planted in the commercial heart of an Asian city to remind its residents of who was in charge.
Downtown Yangon’s collection of colonial-era buildings is the largest in Southeast Asia. But even without their presence, I felt I had slipped back through time and arrived in a city that looked, smelled and sounded as it must have done decades before. The sweet aroma of food-stall curries and the disconcerting odour of ngapi – the pungent fish paste used in Burmese cooking – mingled with the more straightforward stink of open drains. Street vendors shrilled their wares while balancing them on their heads as they walked.
Trishaw drivers glistened with sweat as they stood on the pedals of their contraptions, hauling old ladies home from the markets. A few taxis competed with them for customers and space, as they edged down the narrow streets running back from the Strand that had not been designed for motorised vehicles. The buildings rising above them, whether the grand structures of the colonial past, or the tenements and apartment blocks built after the Second World War, were all neglected and in need of repair.
Pedestrians wielding umbrellas against the sun pushed past each other as they negotiated an ankle-twisting assault course of desperately uneven, cracked and potholed pavements. With the junta unable to supply electricity on a regular basis, and the Yangon Council too cash starved to install adequate street lighting, walking the streets at night could have disastrous consequences. After a fall that left me with ripped trousers and cut hands and knees, I learned not to stroll back to my hotel after a few drinks.
Avoiding the streams of maroon-coloured spit ejected from the mouths of Burma’s legions of betel addicts was also necessary. Chewing betel, a nut with nicotine-like qualities that is flavoured with lime and wrapped in a betel leaf, stains the teeth of its adherents an unattractive red and requires them to expectorate frequently. It was easy to get splashed, especially when walking by street-side teahouses and beer stations – Burma’s version of the pub – or when a bus was passing and the passengers gobbed out of the windows.
Everyone was shadowed by seamy-eyed, mange-ridden street dogs, limping and creeping in their perpetual search for sustenance. The Buddha’s ban on killing animals, except for food, is taken seriously in Burma and Yangon’s canine population is huge. When the British attempted culls, people hid the hounds in their homes. Unchecked and unneutered, the animals roamed everywhere. At night they curled up on pavements and in doorways and Yangon became a vast, open-air dog dormitory.
Most of the locals I met were friendly, courteous and curious about me and my life. I was wary of discussing politics, but many people brought up the junta unprompted. There was both rage and resignation about life under the generals, the latter often expressed with a vertical wave of the hand from side to side; the Burmese way of saying that something is unavailable, not possible or that nothing can be done about a situation.
Opposition to military rule was ruthlessly and violently suppressed. The dissidents in prison were proof of that. But no one appeared obviously cowed in their daily demeanour, and the Burmese have the knack of making the most of simple pleasures. Girls linked arms under their umbrellas and sang as they walked. Teenage boys played guitars at the side of the street. Families made excursions to their favourite pagodas. And the teahouses were always full of amateur philosophers deep in conversation, making a cup of tea and a samosa last hours.
Travelling is like watching a never-ending movie, either framed by a car, bus or train window, or an outdoor, panoramic experience. In Yangon, though, I was confused not only by the plot but by which film era I was in. In close-up, every scene appeared in vivid Technicolor. Step back and the people in their traditional clothes, the lack of the trappings of modern life, the cloak of colonial architecture, all conspired to present the city as a sepia image and Burma as a flickering black and white newsreel of a nation.
George Orwell’s Burmese Days is a near-obligatory text for foreigners who come to Burma. I was no exception. But I thought it telling that a novel published in 1934, and inspired by Orwell’s experiences as a police officer in 1920s Burma, should still be the most widely read book in English about the country. It was like coming to London having read only Charles Dickens, and the popularity of Orwell’s novel seemed to perpetuate the idea of Burma as a place frozen in time.
Leaving Yangon to take the road to Mandalay, from where I travelled east into the hills of Shan State, helped bring contemporary Burma in all its complexity into focus. About the size of Germany and Poland combined, Burma feels bigger than its appearance on a map suggests. The majority ethnic group are the Bamar, the people commonly called ‘Burmese’. They cluster in the lowlands close to the Ayeyarwady River, which winds through the country from the north to the south, in the regions between and around Yangon and Mandalay.
One third of Burma’s fifty-five million-odd people are not Bamar, though, and they mostly occupy the borderlands, an area that covers over 40 per cent of the country. In the early 1990s the generals assigned this segment of the population to 134 different ethnic minorities, although that was probably an attempt at divide and rule rather than an accurate anthropological exercise. Most of those 134 minorities are in fact sub-groups of the estimated twenty to thirty ethnicities found here.
That is still more than enough to make Burma the true melting pot of Southeast Asia, a place where over a hundred different languages have been identified. The minorities are transnational peoples, inhabiting Shan and Kachin states in the east and north, where Burma is caught between the Asian giants India and China, and Rakhine and Chin states in the west, next to Bangladesh and India again. To the south are Mon, Kayin and Kayah states and Tanintharyi, all bordering Thailand and home to their own ethnic groups.
Many of the minorities have been fighting for autonomy over their regions almost since the moment Burma gained its independence from Britain in January 1948. There are over thirty ethnic armies and militias in Burma and their battles with the Tatmadaw, the collective name for the Burmese military, are the longest running civil wars in modern history. Nor is everyone in Burma a Buddhist. Christians and Muslims make up around 10 per cent of the population, and there are smaller numbers of Hindus and animists, too.
Christianity is disproportionately popular among the minorities, but there are churches in all the major cities and towns. Islam’s followers include the descendants of Arab, Indian and Chinese immigrants, some of whom have intermarried with the Bamar, and the Rohingya, the most reviled and persecuted ethnic group in the country, whose roots are in present-day Bangladesh, as well as the Middle East.
Burma is rich in resources, too, even if the people and everything around me in 2010 suggested the opposite. One of the first Burmese traits I noticed was how many locals stare downwards when they meet a foreigner, towards their feet. A pair of shoes or trainers is both a novelty and a luxury in a country where flip-flops – called ‘slippers’ in Burma – are the standard footwear and plenty of people still go barefoot.
Out in the hills of Kachin and Shan states, though, are vast deposits of jade, precious gems, gold, copper, tin and other minerals. There is oil and teak, too, while in the south along the land and maritime frontiers with Thailand are rubber and palm oil plantations and natural gas fields. It was the urge to exploit those natural assets that prompted Britain to colonise Burma in the nineteenth century. British Petroleum, for instance, can trace its origins back to the Rangoon Oil Company, founded in 1886.
Under the junta, only the generals and their business ass
ociates – referred to always as the ‘cronies’ – were benefiting from Burma’s riches. Their houses behind high gates in the exclusive Yangon neighbourhood of Golden Valley were built in the Chinese nouveau riche style: mock Doric columned facades, terraces and balconies, a multitude of cars outside and teak furniture everywhere inside. But out in Yangon’s far suburbs people were living on £1 a day in shanty towns that lacked electricity and running water.
Injustice and inequality walked hand in hand in Burma, so much so that it seemed as if the country embodied all the difficulties facing Southeast Asia. Like Thailand, the military had been in charge for most of Burma’s recent history. The country was as corrupt as Cambodia and Malaysia. A creaking bureaucracy that did everything in triplicate mirrored Vietnam, while the languor induced by totalitarian regimes, which allow advancement only to a chosen few who embrace the system, reminded me of Laos.
My twenty-eight days in Burma were soon up. But already the gentleness of the individuals I encountered and the exhilarating, untamed landscapes that I passed through was fusing uncomfortably in my mind with the country’s combustible mix of peoples, religions and resources. I realised, too, how incomplete the outsiders’ map of the country is, because Burma is home to places that few foreigners have heard of, let alone been to.
Also obvious was the yearning for change. Yet even in 2010 I wondered what the removal of the junta-imposed restrictions which had governed society for so long would mean for such an elusive nation, a land that is home to so many different agendas and underlying tensions. But I knew that it would be fascinating to witness this unruly country stir itself after being becalmed for fifty years. As I returned to Bangkok, I was already planning my next visit.
