A Savage Dreamland

by David Eimer

  Along with its neighbouring lanes 15th Street runs back from the Strand and the river, travelling south to north and intersecting with the main roads that cut west to east across downtown. It is lined with post-Second World War tenements that loomed as high as eight storeys above Nilar and I, and a smaller number of decrepit colonial-era houses that have been chopped into apartments, a mix of housing common throughout downtown.

  Washing hung from small, barred windows, or was draped over fretwork balconies. Long cords with rusty bulldog clips tied to the ends descended from the upper storeys, dangling head high above the pavement. Groceries and newspapers were attached to them, so that the residents of the top floors could haul them up and drop them down again with their payment. The cords saved the elderly especially from walking the steep stairs to and from the street. Only the newest and most expensive Yangon apartment blocks have lifts.

  Nilar and I were flat-hunting. Her fluent English meant she had been designated by the letting agency to show me their apartments for rent. Stick-thin – she told me her friends had nicknamed her ‘toothpick’ – with long lank hair, Nilar was in her late twenties but looked ten years younger. She ushered me through the doorway and we ascended two tight flights of concrete steps to a wooden door guarded, like most Yangon apartments, by a metal grille.

  Inside, the flat consisted of a long room. A window looked out onto the street, while a cupboard made up the furniture. At the back of the apartment, divided from the living space by a thin partition wall, was a kitchen that consisted of a sink and a tightly shut window. When I opened it the smell of garbage wafted in. The bathroom was a cubicle off the kitchen. There was just enough room between the toilet and the wall to stand under the hose that was the shower. I told Nilar the flat wasn’t for me.

  Foreigners had only recently been allowed to live in downtown. During the junta era they were technically confined to condominium compounds north of the Shwedagon, mainly located in Bahan Township. Bahan is home to Golden Valley and the southern shoreline of Inya Lake, Yangon’s two most desirable neighbourhoods, whose residents include Aung San Suu Kyi, ambassadors, cronies and generals.

  Making foreigners keep to an expensive ghetto where they could be monitored more easily was another manifestation of the military’s deep distrust of westerners. But even now, when the restrictions on where expatriates can reside have been lifted, those foreigners who can afford it – diplomats, senior United Nations and NGO staff, the representatives of big overseas companies – still mostly choose to remain in Bahan alongside the local rich.

  There they are insulated to some extent from the noise and crowds of a city whose century-old, creaking infrastructure cannot cope with the official population of 5.2 million people, let alone the seven million who actually live here. It is a figure that is expected to double in the next twenty years, assuming Burma follows the same path as its Southeast Asian neighbours and becomes a predominantly urban economy.

  Many of Golden Valley’s foreign residents live in a neo-colonial style, their contact with the locals restricted to employees and servants: the maids who clean their homes, the drivers who chauffeur them to work and the nannies who pick up their kids from the nearby international schools. That was a world away from the Yangon I wanted to experience. But I was beginning to doubt if I could cope with the depressingly dark apartments from a different age that Nilar was showing me in downtown. I knew I needed more amenable surroundings than an unfurnished room two floors above a car- and pedestrian-snarled street.

  The solution was to compromise between living like a local in downtown and hiding away as an expat in Bahan. I did just that by locating an apartment in a small enclave known as Min Ma Naing. Strategically sandwiched south of the Shwedagon and north of downtown, this meant that I could walk to either in twenty minutes. If I strolled east for ten minutes I arrived at two semi-fashionable streets, known as York and Lancaster Roads in the colonial era, where there were cafés and restaurants, as well as the high school Aung San Suu Kyi had attended in the late 1950s.

  I felt a little guilty for not embracing the mayhem of downtown. But I justified my retreat to Min Ma Naing with the knowledge that I was staying in Yangon’s historic heart, in the township that still bore the city’s original name of Dagon. Yangon’s first street, Shwedagon Pagoda Road, was just a five-minute walk away. Originally, it had run uphill to the Shwedagon from the jetty on the river where pilgrims had landed, before roads connected Yangon to the rest of Burma.

  Yangon’s centre of gravity was shifted south from the Shwedagon to downtown by the British, who built what was essentially a foreign city on Burmese soil. Prior to that, the then Dagon consisted only of a few streets running from the river to Sule Pagoda, which sits now in the middle of downtown and is said to be the oldest Buddhist shrine in Yangon. Two further neighbourhoods of wooden houses and monasteries stretched east and west of the Shwedagon.

  That was the town King Alaungpaya renamed Yangon in 1755. Many villages in Burma are reminiscent of how Yangon must have looked in the middle of the eighteenth century: bamboo and wooden huts with thatched roofs, raised off the ground on stilts, livestock living beneath and crop fields nearby. The only difference from old Yangon is that Alaungpaya’s town was fenced in by a teak stockade, which kept out the tigers which roamed the tangle of jungle beyond.

  My apartment in Min Ma Naing was sited west of Shwedagon Pagoda Road in an area that would have once been covered by the ramshackle homes of Yangon’s first residents. It was on the fourth and final floor of one of a series of red-brick buildings, all topped by corrugated iron roofs, originally constructed in the 1960s as accommodation for army families.

  Unlike the downtown apartments I’d seen, which ran straight back from the street, my flat ran parallel to the side of the building, allowing for more windows and plenty of natural light. It faced away from the street, too, onto an enclosed communal area in the middle of which rose a giant saman tree, known locally as a kokko tree. Thick-trunked, it stood higher than the apartment block, its green-leaved branches splaying out in all directions. By leaning out of the window by my desk, I could almost touch them.

  Nature seems a distant ideal in downtown, and the car-clogged roads ensure that pollution levels there rival those of Beijing, but parts of Yangon are a green delight, thanks to the array of trees and bushes that line the streets. Alongside the different varieties of palms and ferns are banana, banyan, mahogany, mango, pipal, tamarind and teak trees. And while tigers and other dangerous animals are no longer a threat, apart from a few snakes lurking in the outlying suburbs, there was plenty of wildlife in Dagon Township.

  Crows congregated in the kokko tree, squawking non-stop, along with many squirrels. Closer to the Shwedagon, fruit bats squeaked in the upper branches of the palm trees, before emerging when the sky shone red at dusk to shoot off in arrow formation on a sortie to an unknown destination. At ground level turquoise-striped lizards, tongues flicking, scurried in and out of the undergrowth that lined Min Ma Naing’s roads. Chubby black rats moved around, too, unfazed by the feral cats which lived alongside them. Male frogs croaked through the night during the rainy season, calling to their potential partners.

  All sorts of airborne insects flew in and out of the windows during the day, until I shut them in the early evening to keep the mosquitos away. Ants found the four-storey climb from the street easy, and marched across the small kitchen’s work surfaces. Geckos clung to the ceilings and walls, occasionally losing their grip and free-falling onto the wooden floor. Spiders of varying sizes spun their webs across the building’s concrete stairwell and on the metal gate outside my front door.

  Apartments in Yangon have their own idiosyncrasies. Washing facilities in the older ones consist of a tank in the bathroom, from which you ladle water over yourself. I did have a shower, but getting the water for it required using an inconsistent pump stationed four flights below, which sent the liquid upwards to a tank through an elaborate network of plastic pipes. The
pump could only be turned on twice a day at specific times. Failure to switch it on for a couple of days meant I ran out of water. If I left it on for too long, the kitchen flooded.

  Power cuts occurred on a regular basis, especially in April and May as the heat peaked before the start of the monsoon season and fans and air-conditioning units ran full blast, overloading the grid. Invariably the electricity went when I had just put on the washing machine, was about to watch a DVD, or it was so hot that it was impossible to do anything except sit, sweat and wait for the power to return. I was fortunate to be in Yangon. In provincial towns, electricity is normally only available for a few hours in the evening.

  Most of the flats housed different generations of one family. I was the lone foreigner and my arrival was swiftly noted. Early one morning, soon after I moved in, my neighbour knocked on the door and offered me a bowl of mohinga, noodles in a fish sauce that are typical breakfast fare in Burma. Other residents asked if I had eaten yet, the standard Burmese greeting, when we passed on the stairs. Some stopped to comment on how it was either extremely hot or very wet, the only two meteorological possibilities in Yangon. A small minority ignored me.

  Opposite the entrance to the building was a grassless five-a-side football pitch, flanked by a tumbledown tea shop run by two cheery old ladies and a decaying stand that was missing so many slats that only two levels could be sat upon with any sense of security. Boys, teenagers and men turned up to kick a ball around in the early evening and all through the day on weekends. Their matches were the loudest activity, bar the crows, in the immediate vicinity.

  Some played barefoot, others wore the latest model of fluorescent orange, pink or green boots, but all sported replica football shirts of the usual suspects: Manchester United, Real Madrid, Chelsea, Barcelona, Liverpool, Bayern Munich and Arsenal. It is an Asian trait to support only the best-known and most successful football clubs. No one I met in Yangon wanted to talk about the local teams.

  When the pitch wasn’t in use it was the domain of the local street-dog gang. The start of a game saw the hounds loping to the stand, slumping on its remaining rungs and acting as apathetic spectators. There were separate crews of stray dogs throughout the area, all surviving on scavenging and charity: people laid out rice on newspapers, or occasionally in bowls, once a day for them to devour.

  From eight in the evening the street grew quiet. The vendors who passed through during the day singing out their stocks of food, flowers and brushes were gone. So, too, were the mobile music men, who pushed wheeled carts with an on-board CD player and speaker around the neighbourhood, selling and playing pirate versions of the latest Burmese love songs and pop videos. Televisions were on and only a few people were outside, talking and walking, enjoying the cooler evening air and the chance to escape crowded homes.

  Going to bed early is a habit for most Yangonites. People wandered around in their pyjamas from the late afternoon. And many parents frown on the idea of their daughters being out and about at night, no matter their age. By 10 p.m., the lights in the apartments were going off. But not for long. Within seven hours, people were stirring. When I opened my windows at around seven in the morning, the smell of cooking was already powerful and unwelcome, children were leaving for school and barefooted monks were collecting alms.

  Min Ma Naing was unusually tranquil for somewhere so central and I came to regard it as an oasis, albeit one whose boundaries were jammed main roads, in a city trying to catch up with the twenty-first century after having missed fifty-odd years of development. It didn’t take much of an imaginative leap to picture how rural Min Ma Naing must have been in Alaungpaya’s time, with only the steady stream of monks and pilgrims passing through on their way to the Shwedagon to disturb the serenity.

  Just as the Yangon River had brought Indian adventurers to wake up a sleepy fishing village thirteen centuries before, however, so Alaungpaya’s new city was given a geographical fillip as waterways in the surrounding region shifted their courses. From being known solely as the site of the Shwedagon, Yangon became the principal port of call for ships entering the Ayeyarwady Delta from the Bay of Bengal. And by the late eighteenth century increasing numbers of foreigners were landing in Burma.

  Those arrivals were relative latecomers. Indians were the first visitors, and were soon followed by the Chinese and Arab and Persian traders. Marco Polo mentions Burma in the account of his travels, although there is no evidence that he came to the country. But it is likely that the first Europeans to arrive in Burma were merchants from Venice like Niccolò de’ Conti, who stopped by in the early fifteenth century while on an epic journey through the Middle East and Asia. Portuguese traders and mercenaries were also present by the sixteenth century, and Armenians from the early seventeenth century.

  Only after Alaungpaya had renamed Yangon did the British show up. In 1795 the rapacious East India Company, which had been busy conquering and asset-stripping India, turning it into one vast monopoly for themselves and the British government, sent a delegation to Burma. It was led by an Irishman named Michael Symes. He asked permission from King Bodawpaya for a British agent to be allowed to reside in Yangon to look after the interests of King George III’s subjects there.

  Symes’s request was granted, but it was spurious at best. There were only a handful of Britons living in Yangon then, and none were the sort of people whose welfare King George would normally be concerned with. In an account of his Burmese expedition published in 1800, Symes noted how ‘Rangoon, having long been the asylum of insolvent debtors from the different settlements of India, is crowded with foreigners of desperate fortunes’. Almost all the British in Yangon were hiding from their creditors in India.

  Instead, the stationing of an agent in Yangon was a reconnaissance mission so that the East India Company could later establish itself in Burma. Since the seventeenth century, there had been sporadic contact and trade with different parts of the country, including Arakan, which bordered India, and regions in the south which at that time were ruled by Thailand. But commerce between India and Burma was largely an informal affair in the hands of individuals who traded cotton, sugar, tobacco, opium, wool and cheap metal goods for prized Burmese teak.

  By 1795 there was enough demand for teak from shipbuilders in Calcutta and Madras for the Company to send Symes to negotiate with King Bodawpaya. Britain was at war with France, too, so there was a need to counter French attempts to win favour with the Burmese king. But money was always the main affair for the East India Company, something exemplified by the fact that ‘loot’, the Hindi slang for ‘plunder’, was one of the first of the many Indian words to enter the English language during the eighteenth century.

  Despite the presence of an official representative the British population of Yangon hardly increased. They were far outnumbered by the Chinese and Armenian communities. Teak aside, trade remained negligible, too. But the Yangon of the early nineteenth century wasn’t a tempting town for Europeans. Contemporary accounts describe a dirty, damp and unsanitary place that stank. Cholera, dysentery and smallpox were rife, snakes swarmed in the untouched undergrowth and every visitor commentated on the sheer number of stray dogs.

  Yangon is a challenge for foreigners even now. Unlike Thailand, it offers little in the way of the luxuries that make life more comfortable for those who arrive from the West. Food poisoning is an occupational hazard, and few first-time visitors leave without suffering a dose of diarrhoea or a spell of fever. Eating at a street stall is unwise, unless it is something that can be barbecued in front of you. And Burmese curries are generally made in the morning, before being left to float in oil for the rest of the day.

  Lack of development, though, is the principal reason why Yangon feels more alien to foreigners than other cities in Southeast Asia. Withdrawn for so long from the world under the junta and starved of investment, Burma sticks out noticeably from its more homogenous neighbours with their ubiquitous shopping malls, western fast-food outlets and, above all, the abandonmen
t long ago of their traditional dress.

  Yet I had arrived at the time when foreign companies and aid organisations were supposedly rushing to help escort the country into a brighter, more westernised age. In November 2015, Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD won the first free and fair general election held in Burma since 1960. A new wave of assistance was expected to follow, as people, both inside and outside the country, hailed her victory as a rebirth for the nation.

  Certainly, it was a resounding win for Daw Suu, with the NLD receiving over double the number of votes garnered by the military-backed USDP. The celebrations began days before the official result was announced, with crowds converging on the NLD’s tiny headquarters in Bahan. For a month after the election people showed off the red ink-stained tips of their left little fingers as evidence they had voted.

  Daw Suu couldn’t become president, though. The junta had redrafted the constitution in 2008, inserting a clause barring people with foreign spouses or children from Burma’s top office. It was designed with Aung San Suu Kyi in mind, because her late husband was British, as are her two sons. But Daw Suu didn’t regard that as a problem. She would rule through a proxy with the title of State Counsellor. In her words, she would be ‘Above the president’.

  Burma has a strong authoritarian tradition. For centuries, the country was ruled by kings who wielded absolute power over their subjects. Elections were unknown. The arrival of the British resulted in the end of the monarchy, but the colonists ruled in its place with a similar disregard for public opinion. Independence in 1948 ushered in a brief period of flawed democracy, before the army took control in 1962.

  Now it was already becoming apparent that Daw Suu would be an uncompromising head of the country as well, only one who had been democratically elected. Such is her dominance of the NLD that few people in Burma can name any other senior politicians from the party. Teahouse cynics like Tim were well aware of Daw Suu’s autocratic tendencies. ‘That’s the problem with our leaders,’ he told me soon after the election. ‘You’re just supposed to obey them.’