A Savage Dreamland

by David Eimer

  She is tied to the Tatmadaw, too. When the generals rewrote the constitution in 2008, they made sure to reserve a quarter of the seats in both houses of parliament for their nominees. The NLD’s representatives sit alongside unelected army officers. Nor can the constitution be revised without the approval of over three-quarters of all parliamentarians, thus ensuring that the military can veto any attempt to remove it from the political process.

  Partial democracy is better than no democracy. Yet the Tatmadaw’s continuing involvement in government, even if it is now as a back-seat driver rather than steering the ship of state, taints Burma still and makes it much harder to view the country as being on the brink of a new golden era. But the unlikely sharing of power between Daw Suu and the generals also acts as a salutary introduction to the complexities of life here, a reminder that nothing in Burma is entirely as it appears.

  2

  Clubland

  It was a short walk from my apartment to one of the most evocative remnants of the colonial era. Heading west past the kiosk where I paid my electricity bill, and then along a leafy road lined on one side with grubby government housing and on the other by new-build houses for Yangon’s rising middle classes, brought me to the back wall of the Russian embassy. Directly opposite stands a sorry looking two-storey teak building, topped by the inevitable corrugated iron roof.

  Partially hidden from view by tall palm and kokko trees, its windows are broken, the gutters dangle bent and loose, and washing has been draped over the long balcony rail outside. Nothing suggests that this was once the Pegu Club, the haunt of the British elite. From the time the club opened here in 1882 until it closed in March 1942, when the Japanese army occupied Rangoon, the Pegu was the most exclusive place in Burma.

  Used as a brothel by the Japanese, who also turned the main Anglican church into a sake brewery, the Pegu was taken over by the Tatmadaw after the Second World War and became a club for officers. The army prevented Paul Theroux from exploring when he passed through Yangon in 1971, but later left and the Pegu fell into disuse. The Tatmadaw own the land still, and families of former soldiers were occupying part of the complex when I made my first visit. A sign at the front gate said permission is needed to enter. I ignored it and walked in.

  Along with the other top clubs in Rangoon, the Pegu barred the Burmese from membership. Only European men could join. The army families staying there still abided by that rule, inhabiting the back buildings surrounded by banana trees, rather than the former clubhouse and the sturdier and newer concrete structure in fading yellow next to it that once housed the club’s bedrooms. ‘It’s not safe to go in there,’ a women told me, only to be contradicted by a bare-chested man perching on the balcony rail, who motioned towards the clubhouse door.

  Inside, dogs were curled up in the corners where the parquet floors were giving way. Mouse droppings were everywhere and I could hear the rodents scuttling behind the skirting boards. Wide wooden stairs with still-firm bannisters swept upstairs to huge rooms with elaborate ceiling cornices. Ancient fans looked down on me. I could almost see the ghosts of the members, sunk in their leather armchairs, ordering another round of Pegu cocktails, the club’s signature concoction of gin, lime, orange curaçao and bitters.

  Yet the comforts on offer at the Pegu belied the fact that Britain had struggled to impose itself on Burma. It took no less than three wars to colonise the country. The first was prompted partly by the prospect of opening up a new market for the East India Company, but more by fears over the threat posed to India by Burma. King Bagyidaw’s armies, under his top general Maha Bandula, had pushed into Arakan in the west of Burma and what is now Bangladesh, right next door to British India.

  Much to the surprise of the Burmese, the East India Company responded by invading Yangon in May 1824. The city’s residents fled ahead of the mixed force of British and Indian soldiers, who took up positions at the foot of the Shwedagon. Subsequently, another British army moved into Arakan. By the time a truce was signed in February 1826, Maha Bandula was dead and King Bagyidaw was forced to cede control of Arakan and a chunk of the far south of Burma to the Company.

  Tens of thousands of Burmese were killed in the battles, while 15,000 British and Indian soldiers died, most from disease, in what was a mismanaged campaign. Those who lived succeeded in burning down much of Yangon by accident, after looting every bottle of alcohol in town. The war was also expensive. Anger in London over the bill for the invasion – around £1 billion in today’s money – led to the East India Company being stripped of its lucrative monopoly to sell opium in China. The decision marked the beginning of the end of the Company’s avaricious reign in the Orient.

  Twenty-six years later the British returned to Burma for the sequel. The Second Anglo-Burmese War proved to be shorter, lasting less than a year, and not as costly in terms of lives and finances. It resulted in Britain acquiring Yangon – which was renamed Rangoon – and lower Burma, thus cutting off the then capital of Mandalay from the sea.

  That wasn’t enough for the British trading houses who quickly established themselves in Rangoon. They were already eyeing central Burma’s deposits of oil, copper, lead and tungsten, as well as its seemingly endless teak forests. Oil has been bubbling to the surface at Yenangyaung near the town of Magwe for centuries, something noted by Michael Symes on his 1795 scouting mission to Burma, and a deal had already been signed for some of it to be sold to the UK.

  Why pay for oil, though, when you can just take it? This was the jingoistic late Victorian era in Britain, when belief in the might and right of the empire was at its zenith. As the business community in Rangoon pressured London to finish the job and take over all Burma, there was also concern over the unpredictable behaviour of King Thibaw. Burma’s last king had a taste for brandy and a willingness to listen to French overtures for an alliance.

  In November 1885 the final act took place. The Third Anglo-Burmese War lasted just twenty-two days. Burma was officially annexed by the British on New Year’s Day 1886. Thibaw was exiled to India. But for the next ten years a conflict of varying intensity took place in the hills of upper Burma, as bands of guerrillas fought the British army, the first of a series of rural rebellions against colonial rule that continued into the 1930s.

  Britain reacted by pioneering the tactics it would use a few years later in the Boer War: exiling the relatives of rebels from their villages, or simply burning their homes to the ground, and conducting mass executions. Among the dead was Aung San Suu Kyi’s great-grandfather: beheaded for leading a local resistance group. Today, the Tatmadaw employs similarly repressive strategies in its efforts to subdue the ethnic minority armies who are fighting for autonomy in the borderlands.

  Insurgents in upper Burma were so distant as to be little more than a rumour for new British arrivals to late nineteenth-century Rangoon. They concerned themselves instead with business and recreating upper-middle-class English life in a city where tigers still prowled the edges of the outlying suburbs and elephants were used for transport. The Pegu was part of that elaborate charade, a place for a sundowner after work. On the weekends, there was tennis and golf, horse racing at the Turf Club, sailing on Inya Lake and dances in the evening.

  There was a strict hierarchy among the British in Rangoon and the Pegu was for those at the very top: senior officials and army officers and prominent businessmen. Maurice Collis became Rangoon’s Chief Magistrate in 1929. Installed in a Golden Valley house and elected to the Pegu, he detailed his experiences in his book Trials in Burma. Damning his fellow clubmen as ‘aloof and all-powerful’, Collis especially noted their complete lack of empathy with the people they ruled.

  To be what the Pegu members called ‘pro-Burman’, which could range from simply being interested in the locals to taking their side in disputes, was the worst sin of all. In George Orwell’s Burmese Days it leads to the downfall of Flory, the hapless and hopeless central character of the book. Orwell’s novel is a devastating portrayal of clubland in the col
onial period. It chronicles the turmoil unleashed when the small-minded, deeply racist members of a British club in provincial Burma are forced to elect a non-European member.

  Orwell based the club in Burmese Days on the real one in Katha, a tiny, tree-lined town on the banks of the Ayeyarwady River, a day’s journey north-east of Mandalay. Katha was Orwell’s final posting during the five years he served as a police officer in Burma between 1922 and 1927. The town is just as small now as it was when Orwell was stationed there and the clubhouse exists still, although much modified over the years. Almost adjacent to it is the tennis court Orwell and his fellow clubmen played on, its ‘1924’ sign indicating when it was laid out.

  Nearby are crumbling mansions from the same period, including Orwell’s old home, occupied now by the present-day chief of the local police. It is hard to think of a less sympathetic job than being a colonial policeman: enforcing the law of an alien culture in someone else’s country is an unenviable task. Its effect on Orwell was to induce a degree of self-loathing evident in the hyperbolic prose he uses to describe the bigotry, tedium and feuds of Katha club life.

  But Burmese Days is fiction, and Orwell set out to paint the worst possible portrait of colonial society. Flory, the timber merchant who is knowledgeable about Burmese culture and rails against imperial rule, is pathetic, paralysed by his inability to stand up to the hideously prejudiced other club members. Nor do the locals in the novel come off well, being mainly represented by Flory’s money-grabbing mistress and the scheming, venal, monstrously fat local kingpin U Po Kyin.

  Daily life for Europeans in colonial-era country Burma was certainly as stultifying as it is portrayed in Burmese Days, but it was also rather less segregated than the entitled existence enjoyed by the Pegu’s members. In Rangoon, the British could glide daily by car from their homes in Golden Valley to their offices in downtown and then on to the club without encountering any Burmese bar servants.

  Foreigners were far scarcer in the provinces and, inevitably, they had much more contact with the locals. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the British Empire is how few British people were actually involved in running it. Even at the height of the Raj there were never more than a thousand or so British officials in the Indian Civil Service, which administered both India and Burma. On the eve of the Second World War, the Burma Frontier Service was employing just forty men to govern well over one-third of the country.

  Hardly more numerous were the British based in rural Burma to make money. John Ritchie Gardiner, always known as ‘Ritchie’, was one of them. He began his career as a real-life Flory: a forestry assistant harvesting teak trees. Adventurous and from a family with a history of working overseas, Gardiner recalled some of his experiences in a private memoir. For eight months each year he lived in the forest and jungle-covered hills surrounding Taungoo, a town around 170 miles north of Yangon, with only his Burmese workers for company.

  Four months a year were spent in Taungoo, where the handful of Europeans lived side by side in houses opposite the club with its bar, billiards table and tennis court, the only entertainment apart from a sandy golf course. By the time the 22-year-old Gardiner arrived in early 1926, the Taungoo club was accepting Burmese and Indian members, although Gardiner wrote of how ‘colour then was a touchy subject in clubs’. And unlike most members of the Pegu, Gardiner learned to speak fluent Burmese, a requirement of his job, as it was for Orwell.

  Life as a forestry assistant was lonely and arduous but lucrative. If living in the jungle for months on end didn’t send you mad, drive you to drink or see you succumb to the annual attacks of malaria, you could expect to return to the UK in your mid-forties with enough money to retire. Gardiner was a robust and resilient man, but his memoir records bouts of depression, especially in the rainy season, and details how some of his colleagues died, or had to be sent home after suffering breakdowns.

  A Scotsman from Ayrshire, Gardiner came to Burma after answering an advertisement in the Glasgow Herald placed by Macgregor & Co. Macgregor’s had been in business since the early nineteenth century, soon after it became apparent that Burmese teak was just as good for building ships as the less plentiful supplies of English oak. Scottish firms dominated the timber trade in Burma, and would later be prominent in oil, rice and rubber, too.

  Today, the most lasting legacies of the Scots in Burma are football and golf, both introduced by Scottish expatriates. But from 1886 companies like Macgregor’s, the Steel Brothers and Burmah Oil, founded in Glasgow, helped to transform Rangoon into an economic powerhouse, as rice mills, timber yards and oil refineries opened. Soon, ships no longer needed to use the Shwedagon to guide them into Rangoon’s harbour: the smoking chimneys lining the waterfront did the job just as well.

  Burma was colonised more by capital raised in the City of London than by any significant movement of people from the United Kingdom. Yet cheap labour was still needed to build roads, houses and power stations, to work the docks and railways, man the police force and staff the hospitals, as well as to act as clerks and semi-skilled workers. The British knew just where to look for them: across the Bay of Bengal in overpopulated India. The fact that Burma was ruled as a province of India until 1937, as opposed to being its own colonial state, made it even more logical to import Indian workers.

  Immigration from India began to jump dramatically from the mid-nineteenth century. The British believed it was easier to employ Indians in almost any capacity than to train the locals to do the jobs. Indians made up almost half of Rangoon’s population by 1881 and they kept on coming over the next few decades. In 1927 so many Indians arrived that their numbers outstripped those of the immigrants disembarking at Ellis Island in New York.

  Chinese migration to Burma and especially Rangoon peaked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, too. A distinct Chinatown emerged, which still exists in the west of downtown Yangon, and Chinese shopkeepers and rice traders flourished. Some Chinese made fortunes out of mining in the north of the country, or rubber plantations in the south, and joined the British in running their racehorses at the Rangoon Turf Club.

  Increasingly, the Burmese were pushed to the swampy fringes of Rangoon. A torrent of construction was creating a new, foreign downtown of European-style buildings, while churches, mosques and even a synagogue were appearing to rival the Shwedagon and other Buddhist temples. But the locals were still confined to the same wood and bamboo homes that had characterised King Alaungpaya’s Yangon over 150 years before, only now much farther away from the river.

  Lacking jobs and exiled to the boundaries of the city, the number of Burmese in Rangoon dropped steadily until, by 1937, they made up less than a third of the estimated population of 400,000. From being a small Burmese town, Rangoon had joined Calcutta, Manila, Shanghai and Singapore as one of Asia’s first global metropolises. It was not so much a melting pot as a bear pit where different nationalities and ethnicities competed for a share of the spoils, while the indigenous people could only look on.

  Newcomers to Rangoon were quick to remark on the relative lack of locals. One reporter covering a visit to the city by the Prince of Wales in 1906 noted wryly, ‘This is Burma without the Burmans, who are the scarcest commodity in Rangoon’. In her 1907 travel memoir A Bachelor Girl in Burma, G. E. Mitton wrote, ‘The crowd is cosmopolitan, not by any means distinctively Burman, and the general effect is bewildering.’ Mitton did not stay single in Rangoon for long: she married James George Scott, the man who introduced football to Burma.

  More pertinent were the comments a year later of J. S. Furnivall, a colonial official who would later become an academic. Writing home soon after arriving in 1908, Furnivall categorised Rangoon’s foreign residents as ‘a crowd of greedy folk recognising no duty to the country where they have been striving to make their fortunes’. Furnivall observed how the different nationalities and races in Rangoon stayed segregated from each other, mixing only for business purposes, and that unofficial apartheid inspired him to come up
with the concept of the plural society.

  Inevitably, given their numbers, it was Indian immigration that had the biggest impact. Hindustani was the lingua franca of the Rangoon business world and British recruits to the trading houses were required to learn to speak it, rather than the Burmese language. Indeed, until 1930 it was impossible to make a phone call in Burma without speaking English or Hindi, as all the telephone operators were Indian.

  Burmese resentment at the Indian presence, and to a lesser extent the Chinese, crystallised quickly. Anti-Indian riots erupted in Rangoon in the 1890s and continued at regular intervals in the colonial era and beyond, the worst occurring in 1930 when hundreds of Indians were killed and British soldiers had to be deployed to restore order. Attacks on the Chinese community took place from 1931, too. In Burma today there is continuing, if not always spoken, animosity towards the descendants of the Indian and Chinese immigrants of a hundred years or more ago.

  But it was in the Ayeyarwady Delta, west of Rangoon, that the Indian influx into Burma would have the most catastrophic consequences. A combination of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, allowing for much faster journeys to Europe, and the American Civil War, which put an end to rice cultivation in the southern US states, made Asian rice a valuable export to Europe. The British set about turning the Delta into the world’s most profitable rice paddy.

  Little has changed geographically in the Ayeyarwady Delta since the nineteenth century. It remains a vast, flat patchwork of lime-green fields interspersed with endless tributaries and small rivers that flow into the Andaman Sea. But it was an underpopulated region until rice became a cash crop. At first, the British encouraged Indians to move there to take up farming. Then, after 1885, Burmese from the newly conquered lands of upper Burma began migrating south to the Delta.