A Savage Dreamland

by David Eimer

  Burma maintains the death penalty today, although no one is believed to have been hanged since 1988. Under the junta almost all of those who went to the gallows at Insein Prison were dissidents, including one of the leaders of the 1974 Rangoon University protests, or members of the ethnic minority armies fighting the Tatmadaw in the borderlands. Hangings were at least more merciful than the punishments meted out in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Yangon. Criminals could be crucified, disembowelled or impaled at the execution grounds in what is now the west of downtown.

  Not all crime in the colonial era was committed by the locals. Michael Symes, the emissary of the East India Company, had noted as early as 1800 that Yangon attracted ‘foreigners of desperate fortune’. As more Europeans arrived during the nineteenth century, the city became known as a bolthole for chancers who had exhausted their credit elsewhere in Asia and were looking to roll the dice one more time. Entertainment venues catering for them soon began to open.

  By the early twentieth century the concentration of brothels, dive bars and nightclubs in downtown ensured that Rangoon rivalled Shanghai – then known as the whore of the Orient – for licentious living. Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Indian sex workers were present in the city, alongside Burmese and ethnic minority women. Sexually transmitted diseases were rife and Rangoon was the equivalent of Bangkok today: a place where sex could be bought easily and foreigners believed themselves released from the codes of behaviour and morality that bound them elsewhere.

  Cocaine and opium were widely available as well and Rangoon’s reputation as a sin city began to seep into the popular literature of the time. In B. M. Croker’s not very imaginatively titled 1917 novel The Road to Mandalay: A Tale of Burma, a young English woman in Rangoon gets caught up with a gang of dastardly cocaine-trafficking Germans, before the Burma Police in the shape of a handsome Irishman ride to the rescue.

  Another English novelist, Sax Rohmer, created the arch villain Fu Manchu in 1913, the most evocative expression of the xenophobic fear that western civilisation was under threat from the Chinese hordes: the yellow peril. But long before Fu Manchu and his nemesis Nayland Smith confronted each other in the foggy streets of an imaginary London, they had first crossed swords in Burma, a country that, according to Rohmer, was ‘a plague spot, the home to much that is unclean and much that is inexplicable’.

  Rohmer didn’t visit Burma or China. But Rangoon’s Chinese community of the time was involved in crime, especially drugs, gambling and prostitution. Chinatown was home to nightclubs and brothels on 19th Street, opium dens on 23rd Street and illicit gambling joints everywhere. The different Chinese secret societies – the Rangoon branches of the triads that had originated in mainland China and followed the Chinese diaspora – clashed sometimes in downtown’s streets, chopping each other with knives and axes.

  Chinese shopkeepers maintained a near-monopoly on the legal outlets for alcohol and opium, too, not just in Rangoon but across Burma. That was something of an irony, as the East India Company had pioneered the Asian opium trade by selling Indian poppy to China. Later, the British fought two wars with the Chinese in the mid-nineteenth century for the right to flood their country with the sticky black drug.

  Opium could be bought from licensed shops, a useful source of income for the colonists. George Orwell’s father worked in the department of the Indian Civil Service charged with collecting the revenue, although addicts were invariably forced to turn to the black market to supplement the official allowance. Cocaine fiends, too, could obtain legal supplies, with dubious preparations containing the drug advertised in the newspapers as ‘liquefied energy’.

  Alcohol and opium were illegal for the locals until the British arrived; those caught indulging risked execution. The more astute colonial officials wondered if the new and easy availability of liquor and drugs might have something to do with the huge leap in violent crime. Certainly the Burmese believed that. Chinese shopkeepers were sometimes driven out of villages because their stocks of beer, whisky and opium were viewed as corrupting the youth.

  Drugs were the downfall of one of the more colourful British ne’er-do-wells of the period and the likely inspiration for Flory, the lead character in Burmese Days. Herbert Robinson was an officer in the Indian Army who first came to Burma in 1915, before serving in present-day Iraq during the latter part of the First World War. By 1921 he was back in India and broke, so he applied for a posting with the Burma Military Police.

  Spending two years in a remote part of Burma with the military police was one of the favourite options for India-based army officers looking to save money. In Burmese Days, Flory’s rival for the hand of the ghastly Miss Lackersteen, who has come to Burma in search of a husband, is the superbly obnoxious Lieutenant Verrall. No longer able to afford his polo-playing lifestyle in India, Verrall has been forced to downgrade to the police.

  Robinson was posted to Putao in the far north of Burma. He could not have chosen a better place to cut his costs, because Putao was and is as remote as it gets in Burma. In the colonial era it was part of what was known as the North East Frontier, the region where Burma meets the north-east of India, south-eastern Tibet and the south-west of China. Less storied than its equivalent on the other side of colonial India, the North West Frontier with Afghanistan, there was nothing to do in Putao except fish for Himalayan snow trout.

  C. M. Enriquez, another British officer who served with the police in the far north, wrote of how dull life was in a region populated largely by ethnic minorities and a handful of foreigners, all male as European women weren’t allowed to reside in the frontier areas. ‘So we get rich, or pay our bills, but we do not live – we merely exist,’ moaned Enriquez in his 1916 book A Burmese Enchantment. He went on to list the drawbacks of life on the North East Frontier: ‘Solitude, fever, dirt, lice, mails that miss, goat’s meat for months on end, and chicken in all its hideous disguises.’

  Responsible for a vast area consisting mainly of mountain villages that could only be reached by lengthy journeys on horseback or foot, Robinson spent much of his time travelling and settling arcane disputes, while keeping an eye on the Chinese traders who came across the border from neighbouring Yunnan Province. But he made the mistake of sleeping with a local woman accused of poisoning her husband, a case he was required to adjudicate. She was found not guilty and Robinson was cashiered for consorting with the natives.

  Ordered to Mandalay in March 1923 to await his dismissal from the army, where Orwell was doing his training at the city’s police college, Robinson smoked opium for the first time in the back room of a Chinese restaurant. Almost immediately he gave himself over to the narcotic, becoming a nightly visitor to the opium dens. He dabbled with cocaine, too, which he took in the local style: mixed with lime and smeared under the lower lip as if it was betel nut. Before long Robinson acquired a reputation as the most debauched Englishman in Mandalay.

  That was enough for Orwell, ever the contrarian, to make a beeline for him. Their friendship cannot have impressed Orwell’s police superiors, but it provided him with valuable material for Burmese Days. Robinson’s sojourn with the Putao police gave Orwell the reason for Verrall’s presence in Burma. And Robinson’s dreamy personality – he fancied himself a poet when he wasn’t on the opium pipe – found its fictional equivalent in the misfit Flory’s fantasies of abandoning Burma to lead a bohemian life elsewhere.

  Flory’s ignominious end was also inspired by the way Robinson was ruined by his affair with a local lady. After Flory’s Burmese mistress reveals their relationship to the entire British community while they are at church, Flory shoots himself. Robinson attempted suicide in 1925, by which time he had briefly become a Buddhist monk in a failed attempt to kick opium and was penniless, having sold all his clothes and possessions to fund his habit. Unlike Flory, Robinson botched the job and succeeded only in blinding himself with his gunshot.

  Repatriated back to the UK by the authorities, Robinson lived out the rest of his days in sou
th London. In 1942 he published an elusive and grandiloquent memoir of his time in Burma, A Modern De Quincey: Autobiography of an Opium Addict. Orwell gave it a kind review in the Observer, the least he could do after appropriating so many of Robinson’s experiences for Burmese Days.

  Rangoon’s louche reputation began to fade in the 1950s, as the city entered a much-romanticised, so-called ‘golden era’ when Burma had a seemingly democratically elected government, a relatively free media and jobs were plentiful. But for the first time it was the Burmese, those who could afford it anyway, rather than foreigners who got to enjoy those bars and clubs that stayed open, or who went to the races and sailed on Inya Lake.

  It didn’t last. Rangoon’s days as a party town were ended for good by the puritanical junta. After 1962 nightclubs and brothels were shuttered, beauty contests banned and the Rangoon racecourse closed. The generals were so fearful of pernicious western influences that they didn’t even allow people to watch TV for two decades: a nationwide television service was only introduced in 1981. When I first came to Yangon in 2010 you could count the number of western-style bars, outside of hotels, on one hand.

  Yangon is still more straitlaced than other major cities in Southeast Asia. Even predominantly Muslim Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur are livelier than Buddhist Yangon. There are just a few nightclubs and music venues. Alcohol is widely consumed – Burma has never gone back to the prohibition that existed before the colonial era – but the beer stations close at ten and almost every bar in town is shut by midnight. After that, the stray dogs dominate the streets and only a few simple tea shops cater for insomniacs and night workers.

  This is a poor city, too, and that limits its entertainment potential as much as any inherent, Buddhist-inspired modesty in the locals. The average monthly income is around 360,000 kyat (£190), but millions of Yangonites survive on far less than that, not just in the shanty settlements, and are faced with a higher cost of living than anywhere else in Burma. One of the reasons the pagodas in the city are always busy is that they are free to enter.

  Poverty is all too apparent almost everywhere in Yangon: the ten-year-old tea shop waiters working twelve-hour days because their families need their tiny salaries, or children scavenging rubbish to recycle it for small change. Cigarettes sold individually because many people can’t afford the 600 kyat (30p) needed to buy a pack of Burmese smokes, the roadside food vendors for those who aren’t rich enough for even a noodle dish in a cheap restaurant, people on the street buying and selling stained second-hand pairs of flip-flops.

  Little has improved financially for ordinary people since Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD came to power, and there is no sign that will change in the near future. More than anything else, Burma’s spluttering economy ensures that Yangon’s crime rate remains high. More than 52,000 people were charged with various offences in Yangon in 2017, a roughly 20 per cent increase on the year before. Mandalay experienced a sharp rise in crime in 2017 as well, including over forty murders. But homicides apart, most of the crimes being committed – bag-snatchings and muggings, thefts of mobile phones and car break-ins – are indicative of people stealing to find the money to live.

  ‘If you can’t earn a couple of thousand kyat a day, you and your children don’t eat. That’s a problem across Yangon, not just in Hlaing Tharyar,’ U Thein Naing told me in the police station. He was sceptical about the scapegoating of the shanty dwellers as criminals by the media and other Yangonites. ‘The bad reputation Hlaing Tharyar residents have isn’t really deserved. Actually, I don’t think many people leave the township to commit crime. Most people here work in factories or are labourers. They’re too busy to be committing crimes elsewhere.’

  Nor can the spate of robberies of taxi drivers be attributed solely to the squatters. ‘When the taxi drivers get robbed that’s mostly people from outside the area telling the driver to take them to Hlaing Tharyar because it’s a long journey from downtown and they can rob them on the way. It’s not really Hlaing Tharyar crime,’ explained U Thein Naing.

  He was also dismissive of the theory that the township is overrun with criminal gangs. ‘There’s not much organised crime. If there was then people wouldn’t be so willing to give us information. They’d be intimidated. Local people often help us or call us anonymously.’ More often it is the factory owners and the absentee landlords who recruit groups of thugs from the area to collect rents or evict other squatters so they can take over the land on which the shanties are built.

  Yet none of U Thein Naing’s smooth answers explained Yangon’s current murder rate, let alone the staggering number of killings in the near past. Burma led the world in homicides well into the 1950s. There were almost 12,000 murders, or about four a day, across the country in the first nine years after Burma gained independence. And those were the crimes that were officially recorded. It was only after the junta imposed its draconian rule that the figure started to drop.

  Such a propensity for violence stems perhaps from the impact of the never-ending sequence of conflict that has characterised the last millennium in Burma. The country’s recorded history starts with rival kingdoms and fiefdoms battling for power and moves on to armies invading Thailand or fighting incursions from Mongol, Chinese or British forces. Then came the rebellions against colonial rule and the appalling impact of the Second World War, resistance to the generals and now the continuing wars between the Tatmadaw and the ethnic minority armies in the borderlands.

  Under the junta, little bad news, whether crime or natural disasters, was ever reported by the media. Censorship made people feel safe from criminals, while a wide-ranging state surveillance operation, along with the regime’s willingness to employ violence against anyone seen as a threat, left many too scared to break the law. Now, just as the British fatally loosened the ties of traditional Burmese society, the replacement of the junta with an elected government means the country has entered a period where the certainties of the last fifty years are no more.

  Violent crime came close to home only once during my time in Yangon. A 26-year-old civil servant who lived down the street was raped and stabbed to death while on her way home one evening. Her parents set out chairs and tables, with soft drinks and snacks, under a temporary awning outside their apartment building. At first I thought a wedding was imminent, until I heard about the murder and realised it was for people coming to mourn the victim. But her killer wasn’t a shanty dweller from Hlaing Tharyar. He was a taxi driver from the adjoining township to mine who had murdered her after an argument over the cab fare.

  6

  Christmas in Chin

  Christmas was coming. Tinsel was draped over the imitation trees installed in the shopping malls, while seasonal songs and carols played at a subdued volume in the supermarkets catering for the middle classes. A ‘Happy Christmas’ sign in fairy lights had even been rigged up above one of the main streets in downtown. In Yangon, like elsewhere in Asia, Christmas is now firmly on the calendar, not as a religious festival but as a shopping opportunity, a chance for retailers to boost their sales with some Yuletide kitsch.

  Celebrating Christmas in Burma in the traditional manner is easy enough. Christianity is the second-most popular religion, with around 6 per cent of the population practising it, and Yangon has many churches. But for all the steeples and spires, Christianity is very much a fringe faith across lower and central Burma, where the country is most fervently Buddhist.

  Instead you have to travel to the borderlands to experience Christian Burma. In Kachin State in the far north and Chin State in the west, as well as parts of Kayin State in the south-east and Shan State to the east, the different ethnic minorities who make up the majority of the population in those regions are predominantly Christian. Around 80 per cent of them are Protestant, overwhelmingly Baptist and split between a disorientating array of denominations, with the remainder Catholic.

  Most were introduced to Christianity by the missionaries – American, British, French and Portuguese – who star
ted arriving in Yangon in the seventeenth century, but who found the greatest number of converts from the early nineteenth century onwards among the animist hill peoples living close to Burma’s frontiers. Missionaries remained active until 1966, when Ne Win expelled them, but local evangelists continued proselytising, while their American counterparts have made a stealthy comeback since the junta stepped down, travelling under the guise of ordinary tourists.

  Chin State was a particularly tempting place to celebrate the festive season, because around 90 per cent of the Chin people are Christian and their homeland is the only one of Burma’s states and regions where Buddhists are not a majority. Sixteen centuries of Buddhism in Burma have left little mark on the Chin Hills. Instead, the Chin stayed mostly animist, worshipping the spirits they believed to inhabit the forests, mountains and rivers around them, until American missionaries began arriving in 1899. Even today, the most remote parts of southern Chin State are the last significant strongholds of animism in Burma.

  Occupying the far west of the country, Chin State was closed to foreigners under the generals and remains little visited today. Pushed tight against the border with Bangladesh in the south of the state and India in the north, it is home to almost half a million Chin, who refer to the territory as ‘Chinland’, and is the least-developed and poorest of Burma’s states.

  A mountainous, heavily forested region spotted with villages that perch precariously on the hillsides or by the side of the mainly unsealed roads that connect the few small towns, Chin is almost completely untouched by industry. It is home to subsistence farmers whose lives are made harder every forty-eight years when the bamboo forests that cover a third of the state flower at the same time and black rats emerge to feast on bamboo seeds, before multiplying and fanning out across Chin to ravage grain, corn and rice stocks. The inevitable result is a famine, the last of which occurred in 2006.