by David Eimer
Mawlamyine lay on the other side of the bridge. A motorbike taxi took me to the Strand, the riverfront road. As it curled sharply right, before entering a long straight, I passed the main market, across from which long-tail boats were shuttling shoppers to and from Bilu, the island opposite Mawlamyine which sits between the Thanlwin and the open sea. Then came grimy government buildings and finally a string of decaying mansions, their walls blackened by mould, windows lacking glass, gates padlocked. Out on the river, fishing boats and a few rusting cargo ships rode the current apathetically.
Downtown Mawlamyine runs back from the Strand in a grid of lanes and roads that reach up to smarter streets in the hills that overlook the town. The houses and tenements are fronted with balconies with stone, wood or chrome balustrades depending on their era. Splashes of colour – bright red, muted yellow, jade green, rose pink and sky blue – enliven many of the buildings, the paint jobs masking rough plaster and distracting eyes from open drains, potholes and festering piles of garbage.
Trees sprout in defiance of the city around them: tall teaks, tamarinds, rain trees and ferns, coconut and toddy palms, as well as betel-nut palms with their drainpipe-thin trunks and narrow leaves. They march down the Strand in rough formation, cloak the lanes with their fronds and bunch together for protection on the hills above town, a half-colonised forest where frontier homesteads battle with the indigenous timber.
Everywhere are the reminders that Mawlamyine was the original capital of British Burma. It was a prize from the First Anglo-Burmese War, swiftly rebuilt in the image of its thieves and slowly forgotten from 1852 onwards, when Yangon began to supersede it as both the major port and administrative centre of the country. Occupying the lowlands of the town are the houses of God left behind by the colonists and those who followed in their wake: Anglican, Baptist and Catholic churches, mosques with their crescent-topped minarets, Hindu temples stamped with the image of Ganesha, Chinese shrines adorned with mysterious characters, all overseen by the far older pagodas strewn along the ridgeline.
Colonial-era schools function still, double-decker wooden buildings in white and green whose classroom doors open out onto wide verandas. A teak courthouse flanked by a cloister-like arched stone walkway where youthful lawyers in their short black gowns, the tropical version of an English barrister’s garb, shelter from the sun, snacking on corn on the cob while waiting for their cases to be heard. And in the centre of town is the prison. Designed on panopticon principles, its cell blocks run away in all directions from a central hub, a red-brick Edwardian spider enclosed by high walls.
Nowhere in Burma evokes the past like Mawlamyine. Getting off the bus here was to tumble down the rabbit hole again, one that led straight back to the nineteenth century and the days of the Raj. If Yangon’s latest life is an uneasy existence where the colonial period, junta years and the waning optimism of the present all telescope together, then Mawlamyine is stalled in Buddhist limbo, still waiting to be reborn.
There is a timelessness to living in Burma. It is part of the country’s charm that its clock seems to run more slowly than elsewhere, lagging behind with either a genial smile or an atavistic snarl. Everything about Burma, from the heat to its history, conspires to make things happen at a leisurely pace. But Mawlamyine takes that to extremes. It is a soporific city, one in a state of permanent hibernation, apparently not caring when or if it wakes up.
In the late afternoon I joined the sunset rush of tourists to the Kyaikthanlan Pagoda, a shimmering ninth-century ce vision regilded and enlarged over the centuries by both Mon and Bamar kings. Mawlamyine was part of successive Mon kingdoms, until the last of them was vanquished by King Alaungpaya in the mid-eighteenth century, a victory he celebrated by giving Yangon its name – ‘End of Strife’.
Now, the Mon people number around 1.1 million and their homeland has been reduced to Mon State, a slim coastal strip at the top of southern Burma. Much assimilated with the Bamar, the Mon retain only their history and a dying language understood mainly by monks. From Mawlamyine it is a short journey east to the hills and jungle of neighbouring Kayin State, home to the Karen minority, and then the border with Thailand, a hundred-odd miles away, where more Mon communities can be found.
Standing as a token of the Mon’s past glories, Kyaikthanlan is visible from miles around, the tallest of the temples that run along the ridgeline above Mawlamyine. Immediately beneath the pagoda the hillside has been bricked in and stiffened with concrete to prevent the stupa sliding towards the Thanlwin River. Monasteries, the robes of their monks drying on balcony rails, lie to the left and right of the two unnerving lifts that take visitors to the base of the pagoda.
Gazing down on Mawlamyine from Kyaikthanlan reinforces the sense that the town is trapped in time. The trees rule the hillside below, the farthest away shrouded by the clouds of dust sent skyward by the cars and motorbikes rolling through downtown’s streets. In the far distance is the river, shining almost red as the sun sinks towards the horizon. While the people around me waited with cameras and phones for the perfect sunset shot, the harsh white lights of the prison beneath us snapped on in the watchtowers and along the cell blocks.
Only the concrete buildings in downtown and the mobile-phone masts – the tallest structures in Mawlamyine bar the pagodas – act as reminders that this is the twenty-first century. Otherwise I could have been witnessing the same panorama Rudyard Kipling enjoyed when he visited Mawlamyine in 1889. The city was known then as Moulmein. In Kipling’s words it was ‘a sleepy town’, already a fast-fading version of the port that had been the principal exporter of the Burmese teak harvested by Scottish firms until it was displaced by Yangon.
Kipling was returning to London on leave from his job as a journalist in India and spent just three days in Burma, a night at the Pegu Club in Yangon and then a stop at Mawlamyine. But it was long enough for him to rhapsodise about the local women he encountered and to be inspired to write ‘Mandalay’, the best-known English language poem about Burma. Kipling coined the expression ‘the river of lost footsteps’, too, about the Ayeyarwady and the men he knew in India who had travelled up the river to fight the guerrillas resisting the recent annexation of upper Burma.
Kyaikthanlan is the temple mentioned in the opening line of ‘Mandalay’, ‘By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea’. Kipling’s poem remains a literary staple, recited, parodied or sung by everyone from Bertolt Brecht to Groucho Marx and Frank Sinatra. In January 2017 the then British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson attempted his own rendition while visiting the Shwedagon, only to be halted abruptly by the British ambassador, fortunately before he reached the lines, ‘Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud, Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd’.
Despite Kipling’s insensitivity towards local beliefs and his unwavering espousal of the empire, he has his fans in Burma. An extract from ‘Mandalay’ was read at Aung San Suu Kyi’s 1972 wedding – ‘a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land’ – and she named her second son Kim after Kipling’s most famous hero. She has spoken of how Kipling’s ‘If’ is ‘a great poem for dissidents’. In turn, the junta compared Daw Suu to the Burmese girl who consorts with a British soldier in ‘Mandalay’, an unsuccessful attempt to smear her as ‘unpatriotic’ for marrying an Englishman.
George Orwell, too, recognised that he and Kipling had much in common, despite their completely contrary views on colonialism. In a 1942 essay Orwell denounced Kipling as a ‘jingo imperialist’ and damned him as a ‘good bad poet’, not least for his unfortunate habit of phrasing some of his poems, like ‘Mandalay’, in music-hall cockney. Orwell, though, acknowledged the vitality of his writing and in the same essay unconsciously noted the similarities between himself and Kipling.
Both men went straight from boarding schools to jobs in the empire, where they were unpopular, regarded as eccentric and unclubbable. Just as Orwell made friends with outsiders like the hopeless drug addict Herbert Robinson in Mandalay, Kipling spent his nights in low
liquor shops and opium dens after a day spent bashing out copy for his newspaper in Lahore, as well as visiting the local prostitutes. It was Kipling who came up with the phrase ‘the world’s oldest profession’.
At their finest, Kipling’s short stories and poems about India are almost stylised reportage and they angered his contemporaries in the Raj after they became immediately popular. A few decades later Orwell would be accused of letting the side down with Burmese Days. Its account of the heavy drinking and petty rivalries of clubland, the memsahib watching her husband like a hawk so he can’t jump on the maids, reads like a heightened version of colonial life.
Orwell has a Mawlamyine connection as well. His maternal grandmother was born in the city and his mother, Ida Limouzin, spent part of her childhood there. Her French family arrived in 1826, just after Mawlamyine was taken by the British as part of the spoils of the First Anglo-Burmese War. The Limouzin family were swept into Mawlamyine on a wave of immigration as Indian labour, both Muslim and Hindu, arrived to build the port, roads and houses and the Chinese came to trade and run shops.
Establishing themselves as shipbuilders and teak exporters, the Limouzins prospered. Most of the family stayed on even as Mawlamyine began its lethargic decline, and his grandmother’s presence in the city is cited as the reason why Orwell applied to join the unfashionable Burma Police. In February 1926 Orwell got the one posting he craved during his time in the country when he arrived in the then Moulmein as deputy chief of police.
Like so many homecomings, Orwell’s sojourn in Mawlamyine didn’t work out, as the opening line from his 1936 essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’ makes clear. ‘In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.’ Detesting his job as a colonial enforcer, Orwell was both taken aback and enraged by the resentment he faced from the locals, especially the monks.
‘Shooting an Elephant’ describes an incident where a British policeman feels compelled to kill a rogue pachyderm in front of a huge crowd to maintain the facade of imperial control. Orwell had been confronted with a similar situation and, although he didn’t admit it publicly, he probably pulled the trigger. Certainly, his second wife Sonia believed he did. Working elephants were and are very valuable animals in Burma. Orwell’s punishment for killing one was to be posted to the backwater of Katha in upper Burma, the setting for Burmese Days.
A small lane in Mawlamyine is named Limouzin. It starts close to the southern end of the Strand, a couple of blocks back from the river. I had visited it before, but when I returned this time there was a new road sign, misspelling the name as Lain Mawzin. It is a dozy street, one half of which is taken up by a monastery. The former Limouzin family residence stood at the top of the lane, on the junction with Upper Main Road.
Their home was destroyed in an air raid during the Second World War and two large wooden houses of indeterminate age occupy the plot of land now. I knocked on the door of one and a bare-chested, middle-aged man in a green longyi answered. He invited me in and his wife, daughter and granddaughter looked on curiously as I asked if they knew anything about the Limouzin family. They didn’t. ‘We’ve lived here for twenty years. We bought it from an Indian. He moved to Yangon,’ said the man. ‘But come next door, a very old woman lives there. She might know.’
His neighbours were equally welcoming, smiling at our intrusion and pressing a can of Coke on me. The ninety-year-old matriarch of the family sat in an armchair, a white-haired skeleton in a thin cotton dress, her skin sagging off bare, bony arms. She had lived in the house for sixty years. But she had no memory or idea of who had come before. No one had heard of George Orwell either. I drank the Coke, thanked them and left.
Pirate copies of Burmese Days are on sale everywhere tourists can be found, but there is scant awareness of Orwell in Burma. His books were banned under the generals and, while they are on the syllabuses of universities now, he is not widely read. It is Kipling who, for all his jingoism, is better known. Daw Suu has never been heard quoting George Orwell. But, as Orwell observed in his 1942 essay, Kipling’s phrases have endured while many more politically correct and once fashionable writers are forgotten.
As for the Limouzins, they intermarried with the locals as the colonial period gave way to the independence era. Some did so in the nineteenth century, too, the reason why there has been speculation that Orwell might have had Burmese ancestry. But with the advent of the junta the large Anglo-Burmese community in Mawlamyine and elsewhere began to face increasing official bias and many, like Orwell’s relatives, departed for the UK or Australia.
Leaving Limouzin Street I walked south down Upper Main Road. It was fiercely hot under a cloudless blue sky. No one else was strolling around. Betel-nut vendors and motorbike taxi drivers congregated under the protective branches of trees, hiding from the sun as they waited for customers. Dogs sought the shade of parked cars, lying under them, their tongues hanging out, panting hard.
Soon the castellated, blackened red-brick tower of St Matthew’s appeared, behind which the Anglican church stretched back, supported by buttresses and roofed with corrugated iron. At first sight it seems abandoned, stranded in overgrown grounds where palms arch lazily and the grass is bleached brown from the sun. The door was locked, the two clocks on the tower told different times – both wrong – but through the slatted windows I could see teak pews, concrete walls painted pink and a distressed tiled floor.
Behind the church a few families have made homes in huts, their washing slung on lines between the trees. They told me that services were still held on Sundays and that the church shared a vicar with nearby St Augustine’s. Both were built in the 1880s, joining the numerous other churches in Mawlamyine, the oldest of which dates back to 1827. Now, though, the Anglican community in the city is much diminished. It is the Baptist churches and the Catholic cathedral that are busier with worshippers.
‘When I was young the church would be full, mainly with Anglo-Burmese and Anglo-Indian families,’ said Moses, the caretaker of St Augustine’s. ‘But they have mostly passed away, or they emigrated in the 1960s after Ne Win took over. Now, most of the congregation are Karen. We get about ten people on Sundays, the same as St Matthew’s, although more people come at Christmas and Easter.’ Around 20 per cent of the five million Karen minority are Christian, and many have moved from their homeland in neighbouring Kayin State to work in Mawlamyine.
Moses was a youthful looking sixty-two, his hair still black, in a white vest and blue longyi. He has lived next door to St Augustine’s his entire life. It is six years older than St Matthew’s, built in 1881, but looks much newer, having been recently renovated. Now boasting a salmon-pink paint job, both inside and out, Moses showed me around after we had taken our shoes off at the entrance. I admired the huge seashell which acts as the font. Moses nodded in agreement at its beauty. ‘But the last time we had a baptism was eight years ago,’ he said sadly.
The next morning I stood opposite St Augustine’s finishing a cigarette before stepping inside the tobacco-free grounds of the Myazedi Monastery. On the other side of the road from the church, Myazedi is the birthplace of the extreme Buddhist nationalist and anti-Muslim 969 movement. The number 969 stands for the nine attributes of Buddha, the six special attributes of his teaching and the nine attributes of the Sangha, the Buddhist clergy.
Burma is a country obsessed with numerology. Major events are habitually scheduled to coincide with auspicious dates, or favourable number sequences like ‘8888’ – 8 August 1988 – the day of the general strike that was the centrepiece of the 1988 pro-democracy protests. The radical Buddhists chose 969 to counter the 786 sequence sometimes displayed on Muslim homes and shops which represents the Basmala, the phrase, ‘In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious and Most Merciful’, which begins Muslim prayers.
Inside the monastery, a monk named Sucittasara explained the significance of 786 to me. ‘786 means this is the Muslim century.
Add seven and eight and six and it equals twenty-one, the twenty-first century.’ I couldn’t fault his arithmetic, but I wasn’t so sure that three numbers signified a hundred years of Islamic domination. Sucittasara, a podgy man in his late thirties with a quick smile, was here to vet me. We met in one of the courtyards that make up Myazedi, which is home to over five hundred monks and novices from all over Burma.
Sucittasara told me he had studied Buddhist literature in Sri Lanka, another country with a long history of strident nationalist monks. I said I had been there. He offered me one of his fast grins and then, apparently satisfied, ushered me into an anteroom lined with shelves full of gifts for the monks: mostly hampers of fruit and sacks of rice. Sitting on a mat in the centre of the room was U Vimala, the abbot of Myazedi, a lean 73-year-old with a craggy face, his eyes watchful behind square-framed glasses.
U Vimala was previously general secretary of Ma Ba Tha, the organisation led by the arch-Islamophobe monk U Wirathu that grew out of the 969 movement. He is also a prominent supporter of the opposition USDP. Before the 2015 election U Vimala said that Burma wasn’t ready for democracy and claimed Aung San Suu Kyi wasn’t fit to govern the country. ‘There needs to be good control for there to be peace,’ he told me in a soft voice.
We sat in a rough circle on the mat, Sucittasara to the left of his abbot. He was his trusted aide-de-camp and U Vimala left him to answer most of my questions, staying silent but keeping his eyes on me all the time. Three kittens appeared from the edges of the room and played around us, one trying repeatedly to snag my pen with his baby claws.
They claimed that 969 and Ma Ba Tha had been necessary because Muslims in Asia aren’t like those in the West. ‘The mentality of Muslims in the East is different. They want to make all Asia Muslim. We are surrounded by Muslims here. Islam has swallowed Indonesia and Malaysia. They were Buddhist countries once: look at Borobudur in Java,’ said Sucittasara, referring to the ancient temple complex that is the Indonesian equivalent of Bagan or Angkor Wat. ‘We don’t want that to happen here.’