Golden Earth

by Norman Lewis

  On June 8th, after floundering for a fortnight along tracks that were knee-deep in mud in places, they reached the Nam Yung river. It had been converted by the rains into a roaring torrent. Within an hour and a half of their arrival, they saw nine men in succession who tried to cross it torn from the guide rope and drowned. One Gurkha woman, on seeing her husband carried away, gave birth to a premature child. It was born dead, and thrown into the river. That night the guide rope gave way and they were stranded. There were four hundred and fifty demoralised refugees at the crossing and several thousand on the way. Lee found a place upstream where the river split into two arms, the nearest of which was only sixty feet wide. All they had to do was to drop one of the large trees growing on the bank across it, use it as a bridge, and repeat the manoeuvre on the further bank. But of the four hundred and fifty waiting to cross only twenty-two would volunteer to help cut down the tree. They were all so weak that they could only peck at it with their dahs for a few minutes at a time. ‘We nibbled at that tree like so many woodpeckers.’ In the end it fell in the wrong direction, lengthways along the stream. Then when another day had been spent in felling a second tree, which had dropped into the correct position, it was suddenly noticed that the water was falling, for it had stopped raining in the upper reaches of the river. At this moment a party of Oorias turned up, ex-fishermen from the Puri coast of India. They were all expert swimmers. It was then decided to repair the guide rope, which the Oorias agreed to swim across with, and to re-attempt a crossing of the main stream. Six or seven orderly batches, five at a time, made the crossing, with Lee covering the rope with his pistol from the northern shore. Then the crowd panicked. About thirty at once rushed the rope. It broke under the strain, and they were all swept away. Lee and his party went on without looking back.

  Immediately after this came what were for Lee the two worst moments of the whole journey. His old Chinese servant was in a very bad state. He could not keep down any food, and had lost the use of his legs. They were obliged to leave him to die, an action for which he assures me he has never been able to forgive himself. About this time it seemed clear that his baby son also would not survive. He had carried the child on his back for the whole journey, and now it seemed to be in the last stages of dysentery; it was in a state of coma, and constantly oozing blood and pus. As there appeared to be no hope, Lee decided to put him out of his suffering and administered a lethal dose of morphia tablets, ‘enough,’ he says, ‘to kill ten men. To our astonishment he immediately recovered; and later on, when he had dysentery again, I repeated the morphia treatment on a minor scale, again with success.’

  And so, at the end of June, they came finally into India. Most of the males in the party collapsed utterly as soon as they reached safety, and several nearly died. Lee’s normal weight of one hundred and fifty-five pounds had been reduced to ninety pounds. Ma Pyo was the only one who had not lost weight; but she was covered with sores. About eighteen thousand refugees coming this way had got through before them, but most of these, by starting earlier, had avoided the worst rains. There were very few to follow.

  * * *

  The centre of the Burmese jade industry was at Mogaung, near Myitkyina, and next morning I asked the driver to take me there. But it soon appeared that the direct road marked on my map no longer existed, and as Mogaung could only be reached by an enormous detour, the driver said that he would take me to a small jade mine which was more easily reached. We drove perhaps ten miles out of Myitkyina, walked for half an hour up a valley, and there was the mine, a series of small caverns in the hillside, only one of which looked as if it might have been excavated in recent times. The driver assured me that these, as well as some pits to be seen in the half-dry bed of the river, were being worked. To a question as to the miners’ whereabouts, I received the astonishing reply that they had gone to chapel. Judging perhaps from the tone of my voice that an affirmative answer was expected, he also assured me in answer to a further question that the traditional method of ‘fishing’ for jade by paddling barefooted in the stream was still followed here. It is one of the many picturesque fallacies with which the jade industry is beset, that the best pieces are always found, by touch, in this way. Outside the caverns, a few dirty pieces of rock were strewn about. These, the driver said, were jade of inferior quality, and having observed that precious stones are usually without attraction in their unprepared state, I was prepared to believe that this was so.

  The history of jade provides an interesting illustration of the creation by a refined and luxurious society of its symbol of wealth. The white nephrite chosen possessed all the qualifications required. It was beautiful and rare; it could be obtained only with immense trouble – the original Jade Mountain was at K’un Lun in South-East Turkestan – and its fashioning into jewellery, owing to its extreme hardness, called for the expenditure of infinite labour and much technical skill. In the original quarries in Turkestan a certain small amount of green jadeite was also found. By virtue of its rarity this green stone became practically priceless. With a kind of dim recognition of the influence of metallic oxides in establishing the jade’s colour, many attempts were made to fake this valuable green by such ingenious methods as burying copper in contact with blocks of white nephrite. With the adoption of jade symbols for the State worship of the Heaven, Earth and the ‘Four Quarters’, jade assumed for the Chinese the prestige associated with gold in the West; and it is safe to say that had one of the Biblical Three Wise Men of the East come from China, jade would have been his gift.

  The discovery by a thirteenth-century Chinese prospector, at a moment when the K’un Lun mines had reached exhaustion, of great quantities of jadeite in the Kachin States of Burma, caused a sensation in the Celestial Empire, and Mogaung became the El Dorado of many Chinese expeditions, the members of which mostly perished, after horrible privations of the type suffered by their Spanish counterparts in their search for gold. Finally the trade was established, and it was found that, most happily, although jadeite of pure translucent green existed, it was rare, compared to the colours produced by the action of metallic oxides, other than copper, upon the silicate. There was plenty of green jadeite at Mogaung, but most of it was the wrong green, or it was too opaque, or was variable in colour, and thus succeeded in one way or another in defeating the demands of finicky connoisseurship. The undermining of Chinese values was averted. Otherwise, one suspects, it would have been necessary to combat the threatened devaluation in some way, perhaps by the disappearance, for reasons of State, of all those concerned in the mine’s discovery.

  As things were, Chinese economy remained unshaken. Some sort of a jade-rush took place. Laden caravans set out for China, and were regularly ambushed and looted by jade-thirsty freebooters, although the majority got through safely, to swell what was believed to be the wealth of the nation. Remembering that in their war with Burma, the Chinese forces made a beeline for Mogaung, which they occupied, it may be surmised that the ends in view by those who provoked the conflict were less pure than those of justice.

  Prices were kept inflated and production restricted by the fact that all the jade mines were located in the Kachin tribal area. The Kachins insisted on working the mines in their own way, steadfastly declining all offers involving leases or contracts. In their search for the stone, the Kachins relied upon divination. Quarries were opened with elaborate sacrifices and feasting, and then only after the omens had been consulted to decide whether or not the stone was to be allowed to ‘mature’, it being a Kachin opinion that the colour improved with keeping. Even so the workings might be held up over some dispute about the sharing of the proceeds, a punctilious matter in which every member of the clan, whether present or absent, was taken into consideration. Work was carried on only in March and April. After that the mines became flooded by the rains, and took the rest of the year to dry out. Meanwhile the Chinese buyers sat by, twiddling their thumbs in impotent exasperation, unconscious of the fact that by great good fortune the incompet
ence of the Kachins worked in their favour and cancelled out the disadvantage that Burma was nearer the cities of China than were the mines of South-East Turkestan. In the last century prices were much enhanced when King Mindon, an enthusiastic monopolist, tried to set himself up as middleman of the industry, and the Kachins retorted by discovering only inferior jade.

  The Chinese have never been able to consider jade as mere ‘dead’ substance; they have always had a rather modern view of the nature of matter. From the earliest times, it was associated with the five cardinal virtues: charity, modesty, courage, justice and wisdom (one notes in passing the omission from this category of the peculiarly Christian faith and hope). It was also quite inevitable that it should be believed that jade could be taken internally with beneficial results. Once a year, therefore, the Emperor fasted ceremonially, consuming nothing but powdered jade of the most exquisite colour. This was for the good of the Empire; but, in the individual, the liver as well as all the organs in mystical association with it, according to the Chinese medical philosophy, were benefited by homoeopathic doses. The Chinese in their refined, almost tortured aestheticism, recognise one hundred and twenty-six colours of jade, some of them baffling to Western amateurs, who find difficulty in differentiating between such shades as sky-blue and the blue of the sky ‘after it has been washed by a shower.’ Nor can many Western experts claim, as do the Chinese, to distinguish one variety of jade from another by the touch.

  At the present time it seems likely that the jade mania may have come to an abrupt end. Production at Mogaung was entirely for the Chinese market, the stone being otherwise valueless. It is difficult to imagine that China’s present rulers would sanction this type of import, or that they would approve of so many Chinese man-hours being employed on the production of trinkets, whatever their artistic merit – unless for export. Perhaps, as the driver said so confidently, the opencast miners in this valley had indeed gone to chapel; or perhaps they had given up waiting for the Chinese merchants to come to the auctions, and had gone back to cultivate their opium, the market for which – if less spectacular – has always been dependable.

  CHAPTER 17

  Down the Irrawaddy

  LAVING LEARNED that in the dry season only rare military boats went down the river from Myitkyina to Bhamó, I decided to return to Bhamó by road and to take a river steamer thence to Mandalay. This stretch of the river was covered by a twice-weekly boat service, and the trip took three days. When I had made some preliminary enquiries about this part of the journey, at the offices of the Irrawaddy Water Transport Board in Rangoon, the information to be had was surprisingly vague. It was known that the boats passed through areas held by both types of Communists, as well as PVOs, and that although they were usually attacked, an escort of soldiers was carried and no boat had so far been lost. What they were not sure about was the nature of the accommodation. The executive I saw thought I would have to sleep on deck and take my own food with me.

  At the company’s Bhamó office the picture painted was a brighter one, to the extent at least that there was a regular food supply. A butler attended to the needs of first-class passengers, and there was even a choice of Burmese or Chinese food.

  * * *

  At seven in the morning I walked a plank over the shining Irrawaddy mud separating the solid bank from a shallow-draught lighter, one of a number which were hastening with passengers and goods to the steamer anchored in midstream. Like most river-steamers it had a romantic and anachronistic air; a flat-bottomed and skeletal construction of open-sided decks, terribly vulnerable, it seemed in its flimsiness, to assault of any kind. The Pauktan, of one hundred and six tons displacement and licensed to carry 228 deck-passengers on 2053 square feet of deck-space (when not occupied by cattle, cargo or other encumbrances) proved, to my surprise, not to be a survival of the last century, but a postwar production.

  The show-boat illusion was dissipated as soon as I put my foot on the iron deck, after boarding the ship close by a central redoubt covered by steel plating, from behind which came a cushioned thumping of powerful engines. On one side of this was the deck-passengers’ kitchen in which, as I passed, a cook was hacking through a piece of dried fish held on a block. It took two blows of his heavy dah to cut off each segment. Early arrivals had already staked out their claims to deck space. As soon as they arrived they spread out mats or carpets, made tea and prepared bowls of rice and fish which they ate with ready holiday appetite. Before and after doing so they made a constant procession up to a row of sinister iron prison-cells mounted in the stern, labelled in English, Women and Men Wash Place.

  After half an hour, an army launch came alongside with an escort of fifty soldiers, each man carrying, besides his rifle and normal kit, an embroidered pillow. A few minutes later there was a second influx of the military, twenty soldiers who were escorting forty-seven Chinese Nationalist internees and five dacoits. The escort party had started out with fifty Chinese, but three had already escaped. They were being taken to an internment camp at Meiktila. The dacoits were going to a prison two days’ journey away. Two of them – one a Chinese soldier – had committed murders, and all five, although, as was to be expected, they looked exceedingly depressed, seemed from their appearance incapable of desperate deeds. The Chinese murderer in particular had a gentle and sensitive face.

  The military took over the whole of the upper deck, laying out their kit, army-fashion, in neat rows, the embroidered pillows – some with lace fringes – perched squarely on haversacks. Sentries were posted at the tops of the companionways. The dacoits, now chained hand and foot, were seated in a melancholy row. To reduce the chafing of their gyves, they had been allowed to wrap rags round the metal. The Chinese formed squatting circles and began to play a game with engraved ivory counters, while their guards looked on with keen interest. A group of pongyis had formed round one of their number who had produced a snapshot album. To my surprise, most of the pictures were of girls, including one combing her hair in front of a mirror. On the deck below barge-load after barge-load of passengers continued to come aboard, alternating with hundreds of bales of dried fish, the odour of which slowly filled every corner of the ship. Most of the passengers, too, had brought with them tough, grey, salt-powdered hunks of fish, and, nervous at first of the promiscuous contacts of voyages, carried them everywhere they went, so that for some hours the decks and approaches of the Pauktan were heavy with the intertwining of ammoniacal stenches.

  Much to my surprise, in view of the ship’s semi-transparent silhouette, there were cabins on the Pauktan, containing besides the bed, an electric fan, a washbasin which emptied out into a bowl placed below, and a placard recommending the Asia Chop-Chop Shop at Katha. A minute triangular saloon was fitted into the bows, where you could sit with an excellent view of the river; and first-class passengers, Burmese and Chinese, who had retired here kicked off their sandals and looked up beamingly at the approach of footsteps, ready to ask politely, ‘May I know your destination, sir?’ In this room meals were served, presided over by the butler, the Burmese counterpart in dignity and conservatism of attire of the impressive domestic who in England survives chiefly in advertisement descriptions of gracious living.

  A good hour after the advertised sailing-time passengers were still arriving. Even when the last of the lighters had cast off, small boats came racing up, with much excited hailing and waving, disgorging fares who for the most part appeared to have come along on the spur of the moment, as they were without luggage. This, in fact, was the case. On making enquiries I learned that these latecomers were members of parties who had been seeing friends off, and then had suddenly felt an urge to join them. On the boat there were many happy and unforeseen reunions. In the end, the captain got tired of this kind of thing; a bell rang and up came the anchor. Leaving in the lurch a couple of boatloads of impulsive Burmans, we began to slide down the river, accompanied by a dipping, slowly-flapping escort of Indian river terns.

  * * *

  Al
l the world’s great waterways are scenically uninteresting except in places where the river narrows in its passage through mountains or a gorge. Otherwise, the expanse of water is too great, the banks too far away. Here the Irrawaddy was half a mile to a mile wide, and the monotony of clouded water and the close vegetation of the distant shores was broken only when the pilot, steering a course that wound in great sweeping curves through an unseen channel of deep water, sometimes came close to the banks. The water opened in folds at the bows, carrying a broken, dusty sparkle, and although the sun was high the water had a cold, breath-catching smell of stagnant pools. The banks had been undermined, laying bare the roots of trees in a pale tracery, like some coral growth exposed by the recession of the sea. We soon passed one of the hundreds of ships that had been sunk or scuttled during the war. It had become an extension of the jungle, a boat-shaped peninsula, from which, surprisingly, a smokestack and one paddle protruded. The deck-rail embraced a variety of luxuriant grasses, bushes and one small tree – a vantage point selected by a bittern to survey the waters.

  Within a few hours we entered the second or middle defile, where the river, narrowing perhaps to a hundred and fifty yards, was shut in by hills covered by the most luxuriant forest, a multiple volcanic eruption of foliage, beneath which a wall of green lava toppled over upon a foreshore of glistening mud. As we nosed forward, silently cleaving the surface of clouded jade, the channel ahead closed in as if we had reached the end of a dark lake, barred by a cliff rising a sheer eight hundred feet out of the water. Then, as we turned a tree-crowded headland, the water could be seen, going on in glossy patches beyond the black boulders. Most travellers have recorded that they saw elephants here, but there were no elephants when the Pauktan passed through, although at a blast on the ship’s siren a flight of parakeets broke from the treetops and came low overhead, a brief green glitter in the blue.