by David Eimer
At first it felt as if I was wandering around a smaller Chin State equivalent of an English new town, soulless and uniform, and in fact Siangsawn is officially designated as a ‘model village’. But there was no one about and it was strangely silent – villages in Burma are always noisy, with children playing, people chopping wood, making repairs or revving motorbikes. I began to think I had strayed into the sort of sinister settlement featured in John Wyndham novels, a Chin Midwich, a hill country Village of the Damned.
Finally, I found someone to talk to. Mang Son Pau was twenty-five and on a return visit to Siangsawn from his new home in Waterloo, Iowa, where he ran a grocery store. Looking sharp in a smart jacket and longyi, he had come back in search of a wife. ‘It’s difficult, as there aren’t that many followers of Pau Cin Hau,’ he told me. ‘Only here and a few other places in northern Chin.’ But Mang Son Pau was a catch anywhere in Burma: a US resident with his own business, and he was newly married to a girl from Tek Loi, a village nearby split between Christians and Pau Cin Hau sect members.
‘Lots of visitors come here from around Chin and Sagaing Region,’ he said, asking me what I thought of Siangsawn. I told him I was impressed by how immaculate it was, and inquired about the reason for the sign at the village entrance. ‘We are clean. Tedim is dirty. If people come here trying to drink or smoke or be rude, we tell them to leave, that they cannot do that here. We are clean,’ repeated Mang Son Pau. Do they ever get missionaries visiting? ‘No. We’ve never had a missionary here,’ he said with a faint smile.
He explained that each family gives one-seventh of their income to the community. Siangsawn is largely self-sufficient and contact with Tedim is kept to a bare minimum, to avoid any chance of Christian contamination. ‘We have our own electricity and our own water supply from down the hill, where our fields and animals are. We grow corn and bananas mostly.’ The money pays also for their school, as well as supporting the sect leader who, like a proper village squire, doesn’t do any farming himself.
I asked Mang Son Pau if I could meet the prophet. ‘I think he’s busy,’ he said. ‘I just want to say “hello”. It won’t take long,’ I promised. Reluctantly, Mang Son Pau got on the phone and a few minutes later Kam Suan Mang came walking down the street. Middle-aged, squat, like many Chin men, and portly in a fleece and longyi, he looked at me quizzically, as if he was trying to guess what my game was. We shook hands and he led us into a nearby house, where he was greeted with reverence by the owner.
Over cups of green tea, Kam Suan Mang described his duties as the Siangsawn sage. ‘I speak to Pasian and he speaks to me,’ he said. ‘I spend most days reading and writing and I wait for Pasian to communicate with me. Sometimes, it is in a dream.’ He was on his guard, gloves held high. Kam Suan Mang wasn’t used to having to justify his role or actions. Mang Son Pau offered the information that the prophet’s dreams had started when he was twelve, and that he had flown around the world guided by an angel in one of them.
Their religion has some superficial similarities with Christianity – it has its own equivalent of heaven, populated by angels, and a hell overseen by a devil. But its scriptures are thin and vague, with much talk of harmony and a notable insistence on the primacy of the prophet. And I didn’t believe it was a coincidence that Kam Suan Mang had inherited the role of sect leader from his grandfather. Would his own grandson follow in his footsteps and become the next prophet? ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘Pasian hasn’t said yet.’
What did he think of the Christians in Tedim? ‘If they truly believe in their faith, then that is fine.’ I asked if he tried to convert people to his religion. ‘No. It’s the opposite. Many people come here and say they want to join us. But we accept very few. Most betray themselves by their actions as not being faithful or genuine,’ said Kam Suan Mang.
Tea finished, the prophet returned to his home to await the next message from his God. Mang Son Pau took me to a building that housed a statue of the sect’s founder Pau Cin Hau, as well as portraits and photos of both him and Kam Suan Mang and their families. He bowed low to the effigy. By now, with the cult-like nature of the Pau Cin Hau religion apparent, I was in full agreement with Glory’s assessment of the village’s residents.
The road to Siangsawn isn’t the only highway to heaven from Tedim. Another road leads to Rih Lake on the frontier with India’s Mizoram State. For the Mizo people, who can also be found in northern Chin, the heart-shaped lake has immense spiritual significance as the gateway to Pialrâl, their traditional animist interpretation of a seventh heaven. Pialrâl is a place reserved only for those whose lives have been so exemplary that they deserve to reside in an exalted state of happiness forever.
Making a pilgrimage to Rih Lake is a must for the Mizo and I wanted to see it, too. The lake lies close to Rihkhawdar, a border town thirty-four miles due west of Tedim and a four-hour drive on Chin roads even when it is not raining. I was faced with hitching there. It was a Sunday and no public transport runs on the Sabbath in Chin State. But trucks heading to Rihkhawdar and India pass through Tedim, so I sat at the junction of the road to Mizo heaven hoping for a ride.
Waiting with me were two of the town eccentrics, just about the only people who weren’t in one of Tedim’s churches for the Sunday services. The two men weren’t going to Rihkhawdar, but they had nothing else to do except sit next to me and gleefully repeat over and over again that no trucks would be travelling west today. One had a lolling head and a speech impediment, the other an off-kilter smile and nails caked in thick layers of pink varnish.
After an hour a heavily laden lorry appeared, groaning on its axles. I offered 10,000 kyat (£5.50) for a lift. The driver, his left cheek stuffed full of betel nut, nodded and I climbed in. Waving goodbye, my new friends appeared unconcerned by the inaccuracy of their transport information. As we pulled away the driver’s teenage assistant started showing me photos on his phone of crashes they had witnessed previously on the route: crushed jeeps and trucks that had gone off the edge of the road and cartwheeled to their doom.
Perched high in the cab between the two of them, I had a crow’s-nest view as we left Tedim and reeled downhill on a dirt and gravel track. In the valley beneath us were villages of one-room houses surrounded by small fields of rice, corn and millet, through which slender streams sidled. In the distance thick forest covered the hills on the other side of the valley.
Wooden churches were prominent in the bigger settlements, proof that it has taken little over a century for Christianity to supplant the ancient animist beliefs in all but a handful of villages in northern Chin. Followers of the traditional folk religion are more common in the hills of the south of the state, where elderly women whose faces are tattooed with intricate patterns of dots and lines can still be found. It is a tradition that supposedly started as a means of preventing Chin ladies from being kidnapped by marauding bands of Bamar men looking for wives.
Pointing ahead, the driver indicated a thin yellow strip that switchbacked up the mountain beyond us. It was in the shape of a rough ‘Z’, as if Zorro had slashed at the hillside with his rapier, carving his symbol into the earth. ‘That’s the road to Rihkhawdar,’ said the driver. I asked what he was carrying and where he was going. ‘Coconuts to Chennai.’ I thought that was quite a drive from Kalay. ‘Not really,’ replied the driver. ‘The roads are much better in India.’
Reaching the bottom of the valley, we began the climb up the mountain, the truck’s engine whining in low gear as it zigzagged slowly uphill, grinding through the potholes, while we bounced against each other’s shoulders as the truck swayed from side to side. It took almost two hours to reach the summit, where a woman sat outside a miserable shack selling energy drinks, fuel for the passing drivers.
Descending the other side of the mountain was quicker and easier and Rihkhawdar came into sight after an hour, a cluster of buildings by the side of the Harhva River, which separates Burma from India here. Two bridges, one for vehicles and one for pedestrians,
link the countries. On the outskirts of town the driver stopped at the customs area to declare his cargo and then we drove down Rihkhawdar’s hectic main street, lined with scruffy shops and teahouses, where he dropped me near the pedestrian bridge before driving on to India.
Rihkhawdar’s sole guest house accepting westerners was run by a family of friendly Muslims, the only ones I ever met in Chin State, who were watching Indian TV when I walked in. As a border town Rihkhawdar has one foot in India and the rupee is as common a currency as the kyat. Most of the goods in the stores are Indian imports too, which means more choice than is usual in Chin.
Not long after arriving I received a visit from the police, a middle-aged Chin officer who had come from his post by the red and white pedestrian bridge. He wanted to know what I was doing in town. I said I was here to visit Rih Lake. ‘OK. No problem.’ The guest house had told me that locals can cross over to India for the day, as long as they return by 6 p.m. I asked the policeman if I could do the same and take a look at Zokhawthar, the town on the Indian side of the border. ‘No,’ he said, and got up and left.
Following him to the bridge, I discovered a string of bottle shops cum bars close to it. They were rough and crude: Chin imitations of a Wild West saloon in a one-horse town. There was a single counter where the alcohol was bought, and tables in the darkened rear occupied by people who looked like they had been drinking for a while. The shops were surprisingly well stocked with western beers and spirits and I discovered that they cater mostly for Mizo people from across the border in India, rather than the Chin.
Mizoram was one of India’s dry states, where alcohol is illegal, until 2015. Even now, drinkers require a liquor card to purchase booze and are rationed to no more than ten beers a month. Most of the customers in the bottle shops had crossed over from Zokhawthar for the day to take advantage of Chin State’s less censorious attitude to beer and whisky. But just as Rihkhawdar’s residents have to be back in Burma by six in the evening, so the Mizo must return to India at the same time, only after a day spent imbibing.
As the deadline approached they started to stagger off, some supported by their more sober friends. But not everyone made it by six, when the gate at the Chin State end of the bridge is closed. The latecomers had to swing out onto the side of the structure and climb along it from spar to spar, until they reached a point where they could squeeze between the bars and be pulled onto the bridge proper by the Indian border guards, who walked down from their post to assist them.
With a thirty-foot drop down to the mud-brown river, it wasn’t a manoeuvre I would have liked to perform when I was sober, let alone drunk. But I suspected that many of the Mizo inebriates had done it before. The police on the Burma side found the spectacle hilarious, and didn’t lift a finger to help. To me, it just confirmed the futility of prohibition. Some people will do anything for a drink.
In the morning, the teenage son of the guest-house family drove me the fifteen minutes to Rih Lake on his motorbike. We shot down the main street, past the bridge for trucks, and then accelerated up through the main residential area of Rihkhawdar, where homes are ranged across the hillside, struggling for space amidst the trees. On the other side of the river Zokhawthar looked far more substantial and wealthier, its buildings bigger and sturdier, with many cars visible on the paved roads.
Rih Lake appeared almost out of nowhere, as we bumped along a muddy trail lined with ferns and bamboo on one side and on the other by rice paddies. The lake was smaller than I expected but almost perfectly heart shaped, the sunlight reflecting off water a deep blue colour that barely rippled in the breeze. Rice fields ring much of the lake, running close to the water’s edge, while beyond its northern shore hills of ink-green forest climb towards the border with India.
For the souls bound for Pialrâl, the Mizo heaven, ascending those slopes was the final part of their journey. After crossing the lake they drank from a spring hidden in the trees whose waters erased all memories of their earthly lives, before plucking a flower that prepared them for nirvana. Like the Chin, the Mizo are now largely Protestant, but the utopian ideal of Pialrâl has been blended with the Christian concept of paradise, allowing Rih Lake to maintain its sacred and mystical status.
No homes surround Rih Lake, with only a few houses barely visible from ground level looking down on it from the east. Nor are there any temples to indicate that it is a portal to a higher existence. Animists believe only in the water, trees, earth and sky, all alive with unseen spirits. The landscape itself is holy here and I could almost hear it breathing as I walked, the grass, ferns and foliage waving in the wind as if trying to communicate a message.
To travel to Pialrâl is to dog the footsteps of Hermes, the Greek god of travellers and borderlands whose duties included escorting souls to the afterlife. It is to depart the mortal for the celestial, taking flight into the sky that hangs above Rih Lake like a brilliant blue banner speckled with white clouds. But even at ground level the colours here appear more enhanced than elsewhere, especially when the rice paddies glisten lime-green before the harvest, or the forested hills take on a brooding, almost ominous shade after rain.
Sitting at the centre of this potent terrain the lake itself is supremely serene, the limpid, placid water a challenge to those who would dive in and disturb the spirits. That the lake’s banks form the outline of a heart is almost too serendipitous. It is as if the lake has been carved by hand into the land, one last natural wonder for the departed to see before they float off to an eternity of joy.
Returning to the glorified truck park that is the centre of Rihkhawdar was to be reintroduced to the unwelcome temporal world. Smaller than Tedim and Hakha but busier, thanks to the cross-border trade, Rihkhawdar’s main street is fume-filled and loud during daylight hours, as the lorries creep towards the bridge to India or jam the sides of the road as their drivers grab one last meal in Burma. It makes an unlikely pathway to paradise.
Later that day I joined Michael and Mr Mang in one of the tea shops on the street, a basic affair where a woman used her bare hands to scoop noodles into dirty, chipped bowls and then ladled a dubious broth over them. I had met Michael and Mr Mang briefly in Tedim over Christmas. Now they had returned to Rihkhawdar and their jobs as teachers at its high school. They were twenty-five, graduates of the University of Kalay, and the fiercest advocates of an independent Chinland that I met in my time there.
‘Every ethnic state wants independence, whether it’s Rakhine, Shan, Kachin or Kayin. We’re no different. Article 5 of the Panglong agreement said Burma would be a federated state,’ stated Michael with the certainty of the true believer. With his roving, inquisitive eyes, green camouflage trousers and a black leather jacket zipped to the neck, Michael was the more belligerent of the pair. Mr Mang had betel-stained teeth and was slighter and quieter in a hoodie and skinny jeans.
Article 5 of the 1947 agreement signed by Aung San and the Shan, Chin and Kachin leaders accepted the principle of autonomy for the frontier areas after independence. The subsequent failure to deliver on that promise sparked the civil wars still going on in the north and east of Burma. But the Chin militias stopped skirmishing with the Tatmadaw in the 1990s. These days the only armed rebels in the area are Indian militants from Manipur State, who are believed to maintain bases in the far north of Chin.
Instead, the Chin have turned to politics to achieve autonomy. The Zomi Congress for Democracy, the dominant party in northern Chin, campaigns for Burma to become a federal union. But Mr Mang was unhappy with the party’s name. ‘Zomi is a place name. It should be the Chin Congress for Democracy,’ he insisted. In fact, ‘Zomi’ is mostly used as the generic term for the hill peoples of Chin State, north-east India and south-east Bangladesh. But the word ‘Zomia’ has been coined in recent years to describe the entire upland area of Southeast Asia.
Mr Mang voted for the NLD in the 2015 election, like many minority people. Removing the military from power took precedence over everything else. There was also a
belief in the borderlands that the NLD would be more sympathetic to the minorities demands for self-rule. But that optimism dissipated quickly, as it became clear that Aung San Suu Kyi wasn’t going to do anything that might lead to the break-up of the country her father led to independence, no matter how disunited and unrealistic a nation it actually is.
‘We believed what the NLD said before the election. Not now,’ said Mr Mang. Michael expressed the dissatisfaction of the minorities more eloquently, and virulently. ‘Aung San Suu Kyi is like a kite. She is flying in the air and that’s what the countries in the West see. But who is holding the strings? The army. Aung San Suu Kyi is nothing to us. She doesn’t care about the minority people.’
Yet neither of them was eager to see a return to guerrilla war in Chinland. ‘This isn’t the right time to fight. The first option is non-violent: put pressure on the NLD. If that doesn’t work, then we may have to hold a gun. As Chin we are Christians, so it is difficult for us to use guns. But some young people want to. But it is still too early for that,’ said Michael.
Above all, it is the economic disparity between the borderlands and the rest of Burma which feeds the animosity of people like Michael and Mr Mang. The frontier regions were neglected by the British, and little has been done to remedy that since independence. The United Nations estimates that there are still only around sixty doctors in Chin, a state with almost 500,000 people. And many of them can’t afford the cost of medical care anyway.
Almost as infamous as Aung San’s failed promise of autonomy was his guarantee to the ethnic leaders at Panglong that ‘If Burma receives one kyat, you will also get one kyat’. There would be far fewer angry people in the borderlands had successive governments over the last seventy years made good on that commitment, or at least invested some money in the frontier states.
Like so many Chin, Michael and Mr Mang had done their time overseas, two years working as waiters in a Bangalore restaurant, earning the money to pay for their studies. ‘In Kachin they have jade. The Shan sell drugs. Here in Chin we have to go abroad to India and Malaysia and do the lowest jobs to make money. It’s not fair that our young people have to do that,’ said Michael.