A Savage Dreamland

by David Eimer

  It seemed pointless to tell them that the jade deposits in Kachin State, like the opium and methamphetamines produced in Shan State, benefit only a small minority. Many Shan and Kachin people are just as poor as the Chin. But Michael and Mr Mang were convinced of the injustice their people were suffering, and they were right. We had simply to look outside at the rutted excuse of a main street in Rihkhawdar to see the paucity of development in Chinland. Perhaps one day the road to heaven will be paved.

  8

  The Buddha Belt

  Back in Kalay after a gruelling jeep ride from Rihkhawdar I decided to return to Yangon in stages. The plan was to follow the course of the Ayeyarwady River from Pakokku, a town close to the point where the Ayeyarwady is joined by the Chindwin River, its largest tributary. From then on Burma’s major waterway makes stately progress south through a wide valley surrounded by flat plains, before innumerable tributaries branch off to feed the Delta Region and the river empties into the Andaman Sea.

  Rising beneath the Himalayan glaciers of Kachin State in the far north of the country and formerly known as the Irrawaddy, the Ayeyarwady travels almost 1,400 miles before it reaches the coast. I had cruised its northern reaches before, making day-long hops on ageing government ferries and faster wooden speedboats south-west from Bhamo in Kachin State to Katha, the town George Orwell used as the setting for Burmese Days, and on to Mandalay. There is little romance in the journey: the vessels are overcrowded and uncomfortable and the scenery a never-changing panorama of rice paddies and maize fields.

  From Pakokku on, though, the final 700 miles of the Ayeyarwady’s course takes on a new significance, because it cuts through the heartland of the Bamar, Burma’s majority ethnic group. Immigrants from China started settling in the central basin of the Ayeyarwady 3,500 years ago, clustering close to the river that guaranteed life. By the ninth century ce, the ancestors of the Bamar were joining them there after migrating south-west from Tibet and Yunnan Province in China.

  It is the towns on either side of the Ayeyarwady here – Pakokku, Magwe, Pyay, Tharrawaddy, Hinthada – that are the true repositories of Bamar identity and culture, rather than the foreign-influenced and multicultural Yangon and Mandalay. Pagodas and monasteries dominate the landscape, stationed along the Ayeyarwady like lighthouses, with Christians and Muslims a tiny minority.

  This is the Buddha belt, a place where ethnicity and religion fuse so that the terms ‘Bamar’ and ‘Buddhist’ become interchangeable. Buddhism reached parts of the Ayeyarwady valley as early as the fourth century ce, with Pyay established soon after as a city of pagodas. Bagan, across the Ayeyarwady from Pakokku, was home to 10,000 temples and 3,000 monasteries from the ninth century to the thirteenth century ce, and the capital of the first kingdom to unite what is now inland Burma.

  Buddhist-inspired nationalism has a strong and proud history here. During the colonial period, the region was the scene of the biggest rebellion against British rule, when monks joined forces with farmers in a Burmese peasants’ revolt. Belligerent Buddhism remains a powerful, sometimes unwelcome, force in the Ayeyarwady valley today. Monks from Pakokku provided the impetus for the 2007 Saffron Revolution protests against the junta, marching in their thousands, while attacks on Muslims are a recurring theme.

  The Tatmadaw’s ominous rallying cry – ‘One voice, one blood, one nation’ – resonates the loudest in this part of Burma, an expression of solidarity that excludes anyone who is not Bamar. The military recruit many of their soldiers from the towns and villages close to the Ayeyarwady. And when the generals decided to rename Burma in 1989, they chose Myanmar because the ancestors of the Bamar who settled along the river called themselves ‘Myanma’, or the ‘strong and swift’.

  Despite the Ayeyarwady being a permanent presence as it flows towards the Andaman Sea, much of the country here is part of what is known as the dry zone: the cauldron of Burma. It is an area of scorching temperatures that can top forty-five degrees centigrade in the final weeks before the monsoon breaks. Then, the heat is conducted by relentless thermals so dry they are almost incendiary and you broil, the moisture sucked out of your body and evaporating so quickly that it seems like you are not sweating at all.

  Baking everything beneath it, the sun dries up the land so that it splits apart in protest. The earth crumbles and becomes fine and sand-like. Just a few crops can be grown in the dry zone: chickpeas, beans, sesame and tobacco, with rice in the rainy season, while only the hardiest trees like the toddy palms survive, their short, sharp, sword-like leaves guarding small patches of green beneath them. The toddy palm produces sugar and gives its name to a mild alcoholic drink, as well as being the source of jaggery, a teeth-rotting sweet sometimes served as an after-dinner delicacy.

  Pakokku, where I began my journey south along the Ayeyarwady, lies in the west of the dry zone. A few hours farther west are the verdant hills of southern Chin State, but Pakokku itself is surrounded by tobacco fields that provide the weed for Burma’s best cheroots, the hand-rolled, cone-like smokes wrapped in a green leaf that dangle from the lips of farmers, labourers and trishaw drivers across the country.

  I had been told that Pakokku is the most Buddhist place in Burma and monks are said to make up a third of its population. At first sight the town is little more than a collection of uninspired buildings set along and away from a main street that runs parallel to the western banks of the Ayeyarwady. Pakokku is intensely hot and dusty, and has always been a hard place for foreigners to like. C. M. Enriquez, the Indian Army officer turned policeman who found the North East Frontier intolerable, described the 1914 incarnation of Pakokku as ‘bare and brown and beastly’.

  Concealed down poorly paved lanes where tamarind trees flower, their drooping branches and abundant foliage offering much-needed shade, are eighty-odd monasteries and many Dhamma schools. They provide a free Buddhist education for children whose parents cannot pay the unofficial fees charged by public schools starved of government funding. In September 2007 the monks from those monasteries and schools emerged to help fire the Saffron Revolution.

  Like the 1988 pro-democracy demonstrations, the 2007 protests were prompted initially by a failing, barely managed economy. Steep rises in the price of basic commodities, especially cooking oil, natural gas and petrol, left people struggling to afford to eat. Nor were they able to commute to work, as bus fares rose by up to 500 per cent in the space of a few weeks.

  Marches began to take place across the country from the middle of August. But the most infamous demonstration occurred in Pakokku on 5 September, when hundreds of monks rallied in support of activists who had been arrested. Confronted by soldiers, police and thugs hired by the junta, three monks were captured, tied to lamp posts and beaten with rifle butts and bamboo canes.

  Burma is home to around half a million monks. Every Buddhist male in the country is expected to spend some period of their life in a monastery. Most become novices as young boys or teenagers, some staying for as little as a week in their local temple during the school holidays to make merit for their families, who are honoured by having a son who is a monk. Others remain for years, often because their parents cannot afford to support them. But senior citizens become novices, too, as my friend Tim’s father had done after retiring as a government lawyer.

  Only adults can be ordained, and even then they are free to disrobe and return to secular society whenever they wish. Those who do devote their lives to being monks are hugely respected. And despite attacks on their status in the recent past – the Sangha, the Buddhist clergy, were marginalised under British rule and sometimes persecuted by the junta – monks maintain a central and highly visible position in Burmese life.

  While the monasteries are not as powerful as they were when Burma’s kings habitually consulted with their spiritual advisers before making decisions, senior government officials, as well as ordinary people, continue to visit them in search of advice. Burma’s Buddhists are among the most devout people anywhere in the world, and it is
the monks who guide and educate them in the religion’s precepts.

  Some of my neighbours spend their days watching Buddha, a television channel where senior monks intone scriptures or deliver sermons from the most venerated pagodas and monasteries, while it is common to hear its radio equivalent in taxis and on buses. In a culture where lay people are not supposed even to touch a monk, attacking one physically is unthinkable for almost everyone. When news of the assaults on the monks in Pakokku leaked out, people across Burma were enraged.

  Local officials and policemen were held hostage at the Ashae Taike Monastery in Pakokku the day after the beatings, the monks burning the cars they had arrived in. The Sangha demanded an apology from the generals, as well as the release of Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest. When neither were forthcoming, tens of thousands of monks and ordinary people started protesting in every major town in Burma. Monks also refused to perform rites for government officials, army officers and their families, an excommunication devastating in Buddhist culture.

  So many monks were involved in the demonstrations that they were dubbed the ‘Saffron Revolution’, a reference to the colour of their robes, although most monks in Burma wear crimson ones. But like all public opposition to the junta the Saffron Revolution ended in bloodshed and failure, with around 130 people killed when the army broke up the protests and many more arrested, as monasteries were raided and some forced to close.

  Militant monks were absent when I visited Ashae Taike Monastery, a complex of wooden and stone buildings grouped around two courtyards. Most of the ones I saw reciting their scriptures or performing domestic duties were boys, novices who knew nothing about the protests of ten years before. The few older clerics were reluctant to revisit the past. I wasn’t made to feel unwelcome as I wandered around, but nor did I detect a willingness to reveal anything. The monastery was a closed shop for non-Buddhists, a place for believers only.

  Throughout the Ayeyarwady valley people can be wary of foreigners, eyeing them not with suspicion but a shyness that reflects their general lack of contact with westerners. Despite the region’s proximity to Mandalay in the north and Yangon in the south the Ayeyarwady valley is its own enclosed society and, when you travel through it, Burma’s largest cities feel much farther away than they actually are.

  People are conservative and traditional by instinct and upbringing. Local dress is the standard attire, except for the young country hipsters, and there are almost no western-style eating and entertainment venues. Yet residents of the Ayeyarwady valley are also overwhelmingly hospitable, once they have got over the shock of speaking with a foreigner, often ready to suspend their daily lives for a while to show off their towns and villages.

  At Hinthada, a pleasant town of teak houses and pagodas surrounded by lush vegetation that was my final stop on my way back to Yangon, I was taking photos of a striking three-storey colonial-era mansion when the family living there emerged to invite me inside. They pressed tea, water and mangos from their overgrown garden on me, while explaining the history of their home, built after the First World War for a rice magnate. Such a warm welcome is less common in Yangon or Mandalay.

  Across the Ayeyarwady from Pakokku is Bagan, reached by the longest bridge in Burma. If Pakokku is a vital seat of Buddhist learning, Bagan is a fossilised one, a vast, parched plain peppered with the remains of 2,000 or more temples. They are the remnants of the 10,000 that were mostly built in a 200-year-long rapture in the eleventh and twelfth centuries ce, as Bagan’s kings embraced Theravada Buddhism with the heady fervour of any new convert.

  Practised across Southeast Asia, Theravada Buddhism is the oldest and most doctrinally conservative branch of the religion, with its scriptures written in Pali, an ancient Indian language, rather than the Sanskrit used by most other Buddhist sects. Sri Lanka has long been the stronghold of the Theravada school, and monks from there started arriving in Pyay from the fifth century ce to spread the word. By the time the Bagan Kingdom began its frenzy of temple-building, Theravada Buddhism was already dominant in what would become inland Burma.

  For the tourists that flock to Bagan, the temples, some imposing red-brick or white stone structures whose terraces rise high above the alluvial soil they sit on, others no more than stubby, blackened stone pillboxes, are simply Instagram fodder. They are backdrops for people to pose, arms outstretched at sunrise or sunset, before the pictures are shared, liked and then forgotten. Even for the locals, Bagan is somewhere to tour more than a place for pilgrims, no matter that a few of the temples do still function as places to pray.

  Yet this was one of the great Buddhist cities of the world, as well as the place where the Burmese language began to be formalised with a written script borrowed from the Mon people who now inhabit southern Burma. Bagan is where Burma’s history really starts. Not only did the Bagan kingdom briefly unite many of the regions which now constitute the country, but prior to Bagan’s founding much of Burma’s past is no more than a mask of myths, legends and fantasies, part-purloined from classical Indian texts.

  All that can be said with any real certainty is that the Mon people were the first arrivals in Burma from across the border in what is now Yunnan in China, migrating first to the Ayeyarwady valley before establishing a series of kingdoms in southern Burma. They were followed by the Pyu, who founded the city of Pyay on the banks of the Ayeyarwady, and finally the Myanma, the forerunners of the Bamar.

  Bagan began its life in 849 ce as a humble Myanma settlement, much influenced by the Buddhist culture of the Pyu state farther south. But by the time King Anawrahta ascended to the throne of Bagan in 1044 ce, the kingdom had already expanded to include much of present-day central Burma. Anawrahta is the first of a trio of kings revered by the Tatmadaw for their warrior prowess, and he pushed Bagan’s boundaries yet further: west into what is now Rakhine State, east to the foothills of Shan State and south to Pyay.

  His greatest achievement was to defeat the Mon kingdom in lower Burma, and Bagan’s reach extended subsequently to the Ayeyarwady Delta and the sea ports of the far south. For the first time a country that resembles the interior of modern-day Burma had emerged. Equally significant for Burma’s future was Anawrahta’s adoption of Theravada Buddhism, which he made an integral part of his embryonic state. It was on his watch that Bagan became a city of pagodas and monasteries and Buddhism spread ever further through his land.

  Just like the Burma of today, though, the Bagan kingdom was an incoherent state, held together by the threat of force from its centre. And as Bagan’s influence spread the realm attracted the attention of the ferocious Mongol empire. In the late thirteenth century ce, Kublai Khan’s armies invaded from Yunnan with their legendary, brutal efficiency and the Bagan kingdom collapsed. But the Mongols did not sack the city of Bagan in their customary style. Instead, over the next few centuries, the earthquakes to which the region is still prone reduced Bagan to little more than the village it had been before Anawrahta’s time.

  Petrifying slowly, Bagan became home to only a few outposts of diehard monks and their followers. They could not maintain the temples and the majority of them disappeared over the years, subsiding slowly into the dust of the dry zone. Treading the vanished city now, surrounded by tour groups and backpackers, is a forlorn experience, the surviving pagodas standing as a teasing, unsatisfactory reminder of a long-vanished glory.

  Crossing back over to the western bank of the Ayeyarwady, I continued south past the oil fields of Yenangyaung to Magwe. Bigger than Pakokku but just as unmemorable architecturally, Magwe is a sprawl of streets occupying both sides of the Ayeyarwady. It is a city with an unpleasant recent history. The tiny Muslim community in Magwe and its surrounding townships was attacked by Buddhist mobs in 2006, 2013 and 2017.

  Magwe and the region around it is 98 per cent Bamar and Buddhist and hostility towards Muslims and people of Indian descent dates back to the colonial era, when many of them came here as economic migrants. The friction is such that something as trivial as the
failure of a Muslim bus driver to drop a Buddhist woman at the correct stop is enough to cause rioting, as happened in 2006. Then, the violence spread to different areas leaving three people dead, while mosques and Muslim-owned homes and shops were burned to the ground.

  Of all the towns along the Ayeyarwady, however, it is perhaps Pyay that is the most stridently Buddhist. Pyay is the cradle of Buddhism in the region, the religion arriving in the fourth century ce with Indian traders who sailed down the Ayeyarwady, to be followed later by monks from Sri Lanka. Soon after, Sri Ksetra – the ‘field of glory’ – was established by the river in what is now Pyay’s eastern outskirts. This walled city of pagodas and palaces was the largest settlement of the Pyu people, until they and their state were subsumed by the Myanma and the Bagan kingdom.

  Pronounced ‘p-yay’ or sometimes ‘pi’, Pyay lies alongside the eastern banks of the Ayeyarwady. The scrubby foothills of the Pegu Yoma range, the source of the teak that is still shipped downstream from Pyay to Yangon, undulate gently to the east of the town. Open drains covered with precarious planking run along the sides of the main streets, with palm trees lining the less odorous lanes off them. Dust flies everywhere, collecting at the edges of the roads in mini-dunes imprinted with the flip-flops of passing pedestrians.

  Pyay’s skyline is dominated by the Shwesandaw Pagoda. Taller even than the Shwedagon, its golden zedi is surrounded by smaller stupas and topped with two elaborate hti, umbrella-like decorations that encircle the top of the stupa linked by dangling golden chains. The Shwesandaw is said to enshrine two of the Buddha’s hairs, enough to make the pagoda one of the most visited temples in all Burma.