by David Eimer
For that reason they were firm advocates of the 2014 laws requiring Buddhist women to get official permission before marrying men from other faiths or converting to another religion. ‘If you marry a Muslim man, you become a Muslim. We don’t agree with that. Prevention is better than a cure, right?’ said Sucittasara, flashing me one of his speedy smirks, which were becoming rarer as he got into his stride. ‘We have to be watchful. Once there were only ten Arab families in Indonesia. Now there are two hundred million Muslims there.’
Did they regard Christianity and Hinduism as a challenge to Buddhism in Burma? U Vimala rotated his right hand vertically to say, ‘No’, the most animated he got during the conversation. ‘Muslims are different from Hindus and Christians,’ asserted Sucittasara. ‘If they offer their life to Allah, they go directly to heaven. But suicide is against our law. It is a sin. The suicide bombings they do are all sins. Hindus, Christians and Buddhists respect life very much. This is the teaching of the Buddha and the Lord Christ.’
I mentioned the Rohingya and the oppression they face. Immediately, I knew I had made a mistake. ‘There is no such thing as Rohingya,’ sneered Sucittasara. ‘Rohingya is just a name, not a race. They are just Bengali Muslims. Invaders from Bangladesh. We want them to leave.’ He was leaning into me, his face close to mine, his dark eyes alive with the disdain of the true zealot. There was no sign now of the smiley monk who had greeted me thirty minutes before.
‘Why are you in the West so optimistic about the Muslims? You let all the migrants come and they cause problems. You haven’t been to Mecca, have you? No, because they won’t allow you. Buddhists and Christians let anyone into temples and churches. But Muslims won’t let you into a mosque because they do political things there. They have secrets. That’s why we don’t permit them to build any more mosques.’
He was ranting now, and I was struggling to get a word in. There was no reason in us continuing to talk. Even the kittens could sense that something wasn’t right, retreating back to their hides in the far corners of the room. I said that I should be going. Outside, we posed for a selfie as if nothing had happened. Then U Vimala placed his hand in mine and steered me around his monastery, decorated with giant posters bearing his face.
Towards the back of the complex, U Vimala pointed beyond the red and white tiled wall. ‘There is a Muslim neighbourhood over there. We have no problems with the Muslims in Mawlamyine.’ I thought that maybe he was embarrassed by his assistant’s loss of composure, although I knew he agreed with what he had said. We parted at the main gate. ‘Come for lunch next time,’ said U Vimala.
Crossing the road, I found Moses at St Augustine’s. I was in need of some Christian charity. He listened attentively as I told him about my visit to Myazedi. ‘We’ve all been under the gun for most of our lives – Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus – and we all got on OK, more or less,’ said Moses. ‘But things are different now. I’m not even certain there will be Christians in Mawlamyine in twenty years. There will be fewer of us, for sure.’
Circling the wall that surrounds Myazedi, I made my way to the Muslim area U Vimala had mentioned. It is actually a mixed district, with a minority of Buddhists, centred on the hundred-year-old Shah Bandar mosque. To its side, I met Junaid, a teacher at a nearby Islamic school who was lounging on a chair at his friend’s mobile phone accessories store. Skinny, with a wispy beard, he wore a taqiyah, the skullcap of the pious Muslim, and a long white shirt over his longyi.
Some of his students, dressed the same, were wandering down the street, or sitting in the tea shops, during a break in classes. ‘It’s a free education for boys from families who can’t afford the government schools, just like the Buddhists who send their children to the Dhamma schools or the monasteries to study. We teach the Koran and Arabic and Urdu too,’ said Junaid.
Buddhists and Muslims fought in Mawlamyine’s streets in August 1983, when hundreds of Muslims fled across the border to Thailand to avoid the violence. But Junaid was relaxed about current relations. ‘Most people around here are shopkeepers and we all get on, Buddhist and Muslim. There are no problems between ordinary people.’ Mixed marriages are unknown, though, despite monk Sucittasara’s claims that Buddhist women were being forcibly converted. ‘Ten, fifteen years ago, a few people were intermarrying, but not now,’ said Junaid.
During the lead-up to the 2015 election Ma Ba Tha had marched through the neighbourhood. ‘The monks came shouting, “Muslims go home.” One screamed, “Fuck you” at me. Monks are supposed to be peaceful,’ said Junaid, still scandalised. ‘I reported him to the police, but they wouldn’t even make out a report. They said, “This is a Buddhist country, not a Muslim one. If you don’t like that, you can leave.” The laws here don’t apply if you are a Muslim.’
Unsurprisingly, Junaid and all the Muslims he knew had voted for the NLD in the election, despite Daw Suu’s conspicuous failure to condemn the rabble-rousing of the Buddhist nationalists. ‘We didn’t really have a choice,’ he pointed out. ‘We voted for the NLD, those of us who were allowed to vote that is, because we knew that the USDP and Ma Ba Tha were hand in hand. You know how politics in Burma is a dirty game. The politicians know the country is ninety per cent Buddhist, so Muslims are an easy target.’
To vote in Burma one needs an identity card, the pink document that all people are supposed to carry. The cards record the holder’s ethnicity and religion alongside their name and age. Since 1990 Muslims are no longer allowed to identify themselves as Bamar on the documents. New applicants are now mostly described as ‘Indian Muslims’. In recent years it has become increasingly difficult for Muslims to get identity cards at all, making it impossible for them to vote or get a passport and much harder to move to different towns and cities for work or study.
‘Everyone knows that if you are a Muslim and you want an identity card you have to pay 500,000 kyat [£270]. Most people can’t afford that,’ Junaid said. ‘You can show proof that your family has been here for generations, but you still have to pay 500,000 kyat. I have proof that my family has been here since the nineteenth century, but I still had to pay.’ The cost and stress of obtaining an identity card is a deep source of anger for Muslims, and just another sign of how they are being excluded from the mainstream of society.
Later in the day, as the sun started its descent towards the sea, I found myself on the Strand staring down at the Thanlwin River. The water looked as if it was coming to the boil, rippling furiously in the red-hued light as it eddied around submerged obstacles. That was Mawlamyine, rather less somnolent than it appears at first glance. I was happy to be heading south.
10
On the Myeik Main
An endlessly bumpy road snakes its way from Mawlamyine towards Kawthoung, Burma’s most southerly town. The minibus departed while it was still dark, running through silent streets, the Thanlwin River and then the coast out of sight to our right. As the first splashes of pink in the sky announced the arrival of another day and the city fell behind, the Tenasserim Hills began to emerge in the distance to the left, a natural barrier of evergreen forest between Burma and Thailand.
Trapped between the Andaman Sea to the west and the frontier with Thailand in the east, the far south of Burma is a narrow sliver of land no more than ten miles wide in some places. Just inland from the highway are palm oil and banana plantations, floppy leaves spreading expansively as they lure the sun, and betel nut and rubber farms, dark lines of trees in neat order, so closely packed together that their branches shut out the sky. A few tracks disappear into the fields and shade, allowing access for the tappers and the farmers.
Mixed construction crews worked sporadically by the side of the road, almost every inch of the men and women hidden from the sun – long sleeves, some with longyi wrapped around their heads in lieu of hats – only their eyes, hands and feet visible. They hauled bamboo baskets loaded with rocks, widening the highway by tipping them at its boundary to await the heavy roller, while oil drums of bubbling pitch
stood close to hand.
Leaving Mon State for Tanintharyi Region, Burma’s southernmost province, a nondescript border marked by a police post, we shot through the town of Dawei. Heading on to Myeik, the major port of the south, the road was interrupted by narrow bridges guiding us across streams and tributaries. Villages of palm-thatched wooden houses sat close to the waterways, their fishing boats moored and ready for the commute to the nearby sea. Everyone was darker than farther north, their complexions blasted by the unrelenting sun.
The highway became progressively worse as the driver sped us south, barely able to run straight, twisting incessantly as its inadequate camber banked sharply left or right. The boy next to me was fighting to hold down his curry and rice lunch, gulping it back, until finally he admitted defeat and threw it up on the minibus’s floor, splattering his flip-flopped feet and my trainers.
Tanintharyi is truly tropical. In the north and west of Burma the mountain ranges of India and Tibet force their way into the country. The central dry zone is almost desert. To the east, the jungle-covered hills of Shan State mimic those of Yunnan Province in China. But the far south is sultry and languid, the heat relieved only by sea breezes. From Dawei down wide strips of sand backed by coconut palms fringe the coast, still awaiting the resorts and package tourists found across the border in Thailand.
Foreigners were barred from travelling overland south of Mawlamyine until 2013. When I got off at Myeik I realised what I had been missing. Mawlamyine is staid and slothful but Myeik was immediately alive, possessed of an energy which seemed to pulse through the sticky air as a motorbike taxi took me from the bus station to its ancient heart. Unlike Mawlamyine, Myeik is a city that has ridden its luck over the centuries, rather than letting itself be snared by its history.
My guest house was a block back from the harbour. It was the busiest port I had seen in Burma, outside of Yangon, fishing boats jammed tightly together, all seeking the shelter of a natural bay between the mainland and an island of two prominent hills a few hundred metres across the water. A giant reclining Buddha at the foot of one of them stretched out, easily visible from the town. Beyond the bay were more islands, some of the 852 that Burma claims ownership of, most of which lie off the Tanintharyi coast.
Come nightfall and the bay was lit up, a low-level floating cityscape of its own, as the fishing fleet prepared to sail to work. Strings of red and green bulbs shone out, slung along the tangles of rigging connecting the wheelhouses and masts or draped around them as if they were Christmas trees. The squid boats had their fluorescent white halogens on, ready to draw the cephalopods upwards to their nets. Shafts of light flickered across the surface of the dark water, creating a pattern of stripes upon which the vessels rocked.
People promenaded along the harbour front, pausing at food stalls to graze on squid impaled on wooden skewers, or sat on the harbour wall talking, laughing, playing guitars. Teenagers on tinny sounding motorbikes accelerated up and down the road, their friends squeezed behind them, two or three to a bike. The beer stations were busy and the palms positioned every few metres looked down on everything in silent approval, fronds fluttering as the wind came in on gentle gusts off the sea.
In the morning I walked up the steep hill which rises behind the harbour. Elegant, detached, well-maintained houses, pillars supporting gabled roofs, their distinctive arched windows guarded by wooden shutters, stood along the winding lane that led uphill. They had been built for merchant families in the Sino-Portuguese style and could have been transposed from the streets of Singapore or Phuket Town 200 miles south in Thailand.
Trailing down the other side of the hill were streets of shop houses – where the ground floor is for commercial use with the upper storeys for living – and substantial wooden homes. Some were given over to breeding the swiftlets that produce the bird’s nest delicacy Myeik is famous for. The bird nests are added to soups, giving them a unique flavour popular in southern China especially. This was the port’s old Chinese neighbourhood and many houses had characters inscribed above their doors. Wells were sited at strategic points, still supplying some people with water.
I stopped for a noodle breakfast at the Green Eyes Café. Its name harks back to the sixteenth century, when Myeik’s streets were already a melee of peoples and cultures, the Mon, Karen and Bamar joined by Chinese, Malays, Thais, Indians and Arabs. Europeans – Portuguese, French, Dutch and British – arrived soon after and everyone mixed, so that even a generation ago it was still possible to encounter locals with green or blue eyes.
Myeik was a thriving port, the western terminus of a trade route that ran from China to Thailand and then on by land and river across the Tenasserim Hills to Myeik. In the opposite direction, from the other side of the Bay of Bengal, goods from India and the Middle East travelled east. Myeik became a hub of global commerce, its overland connection to Ayutthaya, the then capital of Siam – the former name for Thailand – enabling ships to avoid passing through the pirate-infested Strait of Malacca.
Chinese silks, porcelains, tea, silver and copper vessels spread west from Myeik to India and then Europe. Thai elephants, the ancient equivalent of tanks, were imported by the Indian maharajahs for their armies, too, herded over the Tenasserim Hills to the town of Tanintharyi, floated downstream on barges to Myeik and then battened down in ships and sailed to Madras. Indian cotton and scented woods and pepper from the Middle East came to Thailand in return, before travelling on to China and Japan.
At that time Myeik – then known as Mergui – was not part of Burma. The port had been the southernmost extension of the Bagan empire but, after the kingdom collapsed in the late thirteenth century, Myeik came under the control of Siam for the next 500-odd years, providing the Thais with easy access to the Bay of Bengal. Alaungpaya’s forces regained the town in 1765, but sixty-one years later Myeik and the rest of southern Burma was ceded to the British after the First Anglo-Burmese War.
Strewn along the top of the hill I had walked up are the remnants of the colonial period. The area behind the harbour had been a fetid mangrove swamp until the 1920s, so Myeik’s most prosperous residents lived up or over the hill in an effort to avoid the tropical diseases being nurtured beneath them. I passed the courthouse, where the women squatting on their heels waiting for their errant husbands offered a cheery ‘Mingalaba’ and their kids high-fived me. Foreigners are still a novelty in Myeik, a result of them being banned from the city for so long.
On a nearby lane I found what I was looking for: the site of the former district commissioner’s house. Bombed in the Second World War and rebuilt a number of times, the locals avoid it if they can, believing the current building to have inherited the ghosts that inhabited the previous homes. Many residences in Burma stay empty because they are thought to be haunted. A government office occupies the land now, but the view from the garden remains the same as before, reaching across the harbour to the island opposite and its reclining Buddha.
Two of the more unusual British officials to come to Burma governed Myeik from this location at various times. J. S. Furnivall, who was criticising the lust for riches at the expense of the Burmese as early as 1908, and whose time in Yangon inspired him to invent the idea of the plural society, was district commissioner during the First World War. Myeik had faded into obscurity then, its days as a conduit to East Asia and China over, and the port was regarded as a punishment posting for officials who were ‘pro-Burman’ or didn’t display sufficient enthusiasm for the colonial mission.
Maurice Collis, who served as Myeik’s district commissioner between 1931 and 1934, fell into both categories. Like Furnivall, Collis was a member of the elite Indian Civil Service, arriving in Burma in 1912. He reached the high point of his career in 1929 when he became Rangoon’s chief magistrate. But Collis was too friendly with the locals and didn’t get on with his fellow members of the Pegu Club, quickly gaining a reputation for being soft on Burmese and Indian agitators for independence.
Removed from the post aft
er just two years, Collis was sent to Myeik. He liked the town, bursting into tears when he boarded the boat to leave it for the last time. His fellow British were embarrassed by his display of emotion. The Burmese consoled him. Myeik was Collis’s final posting. He retired to London to write numerous books, including one about Samuel White, pirate, emissary of the King of Siam, East India Company renegade and the most extraordinary foreigner to have lived in Myeik.
Arriving 250 years before Furnivall and Collis, White was the first to build a house on the plot of land on which their homes would stand. But while Furnivall and Collis were liberal administrators, White set out to make Myeik his personal fiefdom. He succeeded for a while and, for sheer rapacity, proved himself to be the equal of any of the companies set up in the colonial era to strip Burma of its resources.
Like all the best buccaneers, White hailed from Bristol in England’s West Country, a port city indelibly associated with the twin evils of piracy and the slave trade. Bristol is where Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver set sail from in Treasure Island, and Blackbeard, Calico Jack – the first pirate to fly the Jolly Roger – Black Sam Bellamy, Francis Drake, William Dampier and Woodes Rogers are just some of the freebooters who grew up in the port or the counties around it.
White is far less well known, but equally deserving of notoriety. Almost single-handedly he turned Myeik into the Southeast Asian version of the pirate haven of Port Royal in Jamaica. The islands beyond the port – the Myeik Archipelago – challenged the Strait of Malacca as the region’s equivalent of the Spanish Main, the haunt of the pirates and privateers who hunted the treasure-laden ships departing Spain’s empire in Central and South America.