by David Eimer
Breakfast was served on a bed of banana leaves: the remains of the chicken, bamboo shoots, a spinach-like vegetable and rice, all eaten with our fingers. After that it was time for me to return to a more familiar Burma. I shook hands with Major Robert and wished him good luck. A young soldier escorted me back down the hill to the village, where a civilian Ta’ang motorbike man was waiting to take me to Namtu.
More of a motocross ride than a taxi, we skidded down further hillsides, past the outlying TNLA pickets, until we reached a stone track that led to a more reasonable road. After I’d put on a helmet to hide my foreign features, we drove back to Namtu passing the golf course, cows grazing on the fairways, sited conveniently close to the Tatmadaw base. Most of the soldiers were away chasing the TNLA in the hills and the checkpoint into town was unmanned.
Namtu has a mixed Shan and Kachin population, as well as Ta’ang and Chinese. I hid in the safety of a friendly tea shop, while its owner called around for someone to take me to Hsipaw. A Chinese driver arrived, the son of migrants from Yunnan. We headed back out of town past the barracks, making for a junction where the road forks: one way led to Lashio, the western terminus of the Burma Road during the Second World War and where I had come from, the other route towards Hsipaw.
Before we reached the intersection, the driver slowed and pointed to his right. Motorbikes were parked off the road and beyond them I could see around a dozen people, mostly men but a few women, squatting in the bushes, syringes in their hands. ‘Heroin,’ said the driver. ‘They buy it in Namtu but they come here to take it. Sometimes there are lots of people here.’
15
Sky Lords
Centuries before Shan State was the front line in the battle between the Bamar and the minorities, it was carved into kingdoms governed by hereditary rulers known in Burmese as sawbwas, or ‘sky lords’. Their principalities ranged from areas no bigger than an English county to regions the size of small countries. The number of kingdoms varied, as warfare and marriages resulted in enforced mergers, but by the time the final vestiges of authority were stripped from the sawbwas in 1959 there were thirty-four of them.
Along with everyone else in Burma, the sky lords and their subjects came originally from outside what are now the country’s frontiers. The Shan, who divide themselves into a number of different groups, migrated south from China, along with the other minorities who live in Shan State. As the majority, the Shan settled in the valleys of the region as sedentary rice farmers, leaving the less fertile and harsher uplands to the likes of the Ta’ang, Wa, Akha and Lahu.
By the tenth century ce the first Shan kingdom had emerged. Over the following centuries the Shan fought the Bamar for control of upper Burma, which they largely dominated until the warrior king Bayinnaung subjugated Shan State in the mid-sixteenth century. But the sawbwas were left to rule their principalities, while intermittently rebelling against the uncertain control of the Burmese state and fighting each other.
Bamar royalty looked to the sawbwa families as a source of brides. Thibaw, Burma’s last king, was half-Shan, his name a corruption of Hsipaw, where his mother was from. The sky lords provided manpower for Burma’s armies, too, joining them in their wars from the seventeenth century onwards. Shan soldiers made up a significant part of the forces the British faced when they invaded for the first time in 1824.
Once Britain completed the full takeover of Burma in 1886, the sawbwas were initially allowed to carry on governing much as they always had, after swearing their allegiance to Queen Victoria. But in 1922 the British decided to rule the borderlands separately from the rest of Burma, establishing the Federated Shan States, and the sawbwas lost much of their traditional powers. They maintained the right to rule their subjects, oversee law and order and collect taxes, but now half of all the revenue went to the colonial state and the sky lords were overseen by British officials.
Keen to keep the local aristocracy on side, as in India, the colonists continued to treat the sawbwas as minor royalty. They were entitled to a nine-gun salute when they visited the governor in Rangoon or Pyin Oo Lwin, a hill town north-east of Mandalay that acted as the administrative capital during the hottest months of the year. Many sky lords attended the durbars of 1903 and 1911, the huge celebrations in India when the maharajahs gathered in Delhi to pay their respects to the latest British king.
Despite this acknowledgement of their exalted position within Shan society, senior British officials did not generally mix with the sky lords socially. And, of course, no sawbwa was ever elected to the Pegu Club, which remained restricted solely to Europeans until the very end of the colonial era. The British preferred to refer to the sawbwas as ‘chiefs’, too, rather than lords or princes, a diminution of their status that reflected the racist belief that the Shan and the other minorities of the borderlands were not completely civilised.
Nevertheless, considerable efforts were made to ensure the sawbwas’ loyalty. This involved granting them access to the institutions of the British elite and tutoring them in their ways. The Shan Chiefs School in Taunggyi, the capital of Shan State, was set up in 1902 as a local version of an English public school for the children of the sky lords and their relatives. A few travelled to the UK to attend the same boarding schools and universities that educated Ritchie Gardiner and the other men who staffed the empire. Some served as officers in the Burma Rifles during the First and Second World Wars.
One sky lord, Sao Shwe Thaike, became the first president of Burma after independence. The Sawbwa of Yawnghwe, an area in southern Shan State that includes Inle Lake, Sao Shwe Thaike was picked as a unity candidate for the presidency after the assassination of Aung San. Swiftly sidelined by the then prime minister U Nu, his four-year term as president is most notable for being a rare example of a member of an ethnic minority achieving nationwide political power in Burma.
Hsipaw, my next stop after my stay with the TNLA, was one of the largest and richest of the Shan kingdoms. The then sawbwa had been the first of the sky lords to pledge his loyalty to the British, who regarded his principality as especially important thanks to its proximity to China. There was a long-standing plan to use Shan State as a conduit for trade with western China, although little ever came of the idea, and a railway from Mandalay via Hsipaw to Lashio, the closest town of any size to the border with Yunnan, was opened as early as 1900.
Mandalay to Hsipaw is a journey of 130 miles but today it can take as long as twelve hours by train, the locomotives restricted to an average speed of around fifteen miles an hour thanks to the dire state of the track. Burma’s rail network has still to recover from decades of neglect under the generals. It is quicker to drive the twisting, two-lane highway that climbs out of Mandalay up to the Shan plateau and which terminates at Muse, the scruffy frontier town with Yunnan.
Off the highway is Hsipaw, snug in a hollow, surrounded by forested hills and divided by the winding Dokhtawaddy River. It is one of the few towns in northern Shan State open to foreigners. I visited it first in 2010, when it was a modest tourist destination drawing backpackers for treks to the minority villages in the area. There were only a couple of guest houses and restaurants, no banks or internet access and the social centre was the cinema, used for screening soccer matches rather than movies. English football was one of the few foreign imports allowed on TV during the junta era.
Over the coming years I watched as Hsipaw experienced a mini-boom, the number of foreign tourists jumping after the generals stepped down. ATMs arrived, unknown in Burma until 2012, along with hotels, mostly financed by Chinese or Bamar migrants. Hsipaw’s market began to stock much more than the fresh produce and basic household items previously available, as trade with Yunnan increased. Everyone seemed to have a motorbike and Hsipaw became prosperous by Shan State standards, even if you had only to travel outside town for a few minutes to find the more familiar bamboo shacks and barefoot children.
Now, though, Hsipaw is a Shan State version of Fort Apache. The town is an oasis ringed by
hills full of rival armies – TNLA, RCSS and the Tatmadaw – the skirmishes coming ever closer and civilians increasingly caught in the crossfire. My closest friends in Hsipaw, a Shan–Chinese family, told of RCSS and Shan State Army – North soldiers, their uniforms swapped for longyi, coming to town and demanding annual ‘taxes’ as high as £7,500 from the most successful businesses, threatening kidnappings if the money wasn’t paid.
Cars and trucks were held up at night on the road – closed to foreigners – that runs south to Taunggyi, as Shan highwaymen raised funds for the fight. And the supply and use of narcotics was rising. The first time I saw opium in Burma was in Hsipaw, offered to me by an ethnic Wa man and former soldier in the UWSA. It is heroin that is more widely available now.
My driver took me into Hsipaw by the back road that runs from Namtu, via the junction where the stone track to Namhsan begins its agonising ascent. The road passes close to where the palace of the former sawbwa stands. Only six of their palaces remain intact across Shan State. Many have been demolished, after falling into disrepair when their occupants were imprisoned or left Burma for good following the 1962 coup. In a few infamous instances some were pulled down by the Tatmadaw as a warning to Shan nationalists across the region.
Hsipaw’s sawbwas were regarded as the most cosmopolitan of Shan’s aristocrats. Maurice Collis returned to Burma just once after he left Myeik and retired from the Indian Civil Service, touring Shan State in 1937 and stopping at Hsipaw for lunch at the palace. He and the sawbwa were old chums, first encountering each other on the boat out to Burma from England in 1919. Collis was immediately impressed by his charm and sophistication. But then the sawbwa had gone to the same school and university, Rugby and Oxford, as Collis.
On my first visit to Hsipaw the palace was closed, its gates chained, by order of the Tatmadaw. Its guardians, Mr Donald, the nephew of the last sawbwa, and his wife Mrs Fern were under effective house arrest. Donald had already been imprisoned between 2005 and 2009 for supposedly advising a proscribed Shan political party, but mainly because he was a relative of a sky lord. They were allowed to receive foreign visitors again only after the military gave up power. I had met Mrs Fern on a number of occasions since, introduced by a Hsipaw friend whose grandmother had been a family retainer to the sawbwas.
She was waiting for me at the gate when I went to the palace the day after my arrival. Short, with spectacles, her black hair in a bun, Mrs Fern was in her customary flowery htamein and a traditional Shan blouse buttoned to the neck. She is a princess herself, officially known as Sao Sarm Hpong, one of eight daughters of the last Sawbwa of Mongyai, a kingdom south-east of Hsipaw that had covered an area about the size of Devon. Now seventy-four, Mrs Fern’s life has been quietly dramatic, but no trace of that shows on her tranquil face, her dark eyes expressionless unless she is smiling, which she does a lot.
Trailed by her pack of half-feral dogs, we walked down the rocky path that leads to the palace, past the disused tennis court with grass and weeds sprouting from its cracked concrete. ‘We didn’t restore it because, while Donald likes to play, we knew the soldiers would want to play too and we didn’t want them to enjoy themselves at our expense,’ said Mrs Fern, who speaks English with the precise pronunciation of a 1950s BBC presenter. The palace has been the unwilling host of Tatmadaw troops at various times.
A water buffalo was grazing in the tangled, overgrown garden enclosed by a brick wall and overlooked by tall tamarind trees. An ancient tractor was parked in front of the steps to the main entrance of the palace, while a flagpole leaned at an angle. ‘It is very hard to find local people to work here now,’ Mrs Fern said regretfully. ‘So many young people have gone to Thailand to work and we can’t afford to pay very much.’
The palace once stood on five acres of land, now reduced to what I could see around me. Built in 1924, it is not a palace in the traditional sense of the word. Instead, it is a dilapidated, but still imposing, white stone mansion, part supported by pillars, with a red-tiled roof and wood-framed windows. A mournful air infuses it, as if the house itself could remember the times when it was staffed and played host to glamorous parties, its walls freshly painted and the lawns around it tended. Alone out of the six surviving sawbwa palaces, it is the only one still occupied by a sky lord’s family.
Inside there are parquet floors, high ceilings and solid wooden furniture that looks as old as the house. Photos of Donald and Mrs Fern’s relatives and ancestors sat on bookcases and tables in the drawing room. A large Shan flag, a white circle representing the desire for peace imposed on horizontal yellow, green and red stripes, hung on one wall. Mrs Fern’s grandson, a junior officer in the Shan State Army – North, back on leave from his base north-east of Lashio, popped his head into the room to say hello. As usual, Donald was away at their other home in Taunggyi.
These days, the family income comes mostly from Mrs Fern hosting visitors – both locals and foreigners – drawn by the chance to hear first-hand the romantic story of the doomed last Sawbwa of Hsipaw, Sao Kya Seng. Inheriting the title from his uncle, Maurice Collis’s friend, he went to university in Denver, where he met and married his Austrian wife Inge Eberhard, who was studying on a Fulbright Scholarship. Only after they returned to Shan State in 1954 did she realise that her husband was a sky lord. He hadn’t mentioned it.
Coming home to Hsipaw with ambitious plans to modernise farming techniques in his kingdom, Sao Kya Seng handed over the rice fields owned by his family to the people who worked them. He was a member of the upper house of Burma’s parliament, a supporter of a federal state and a critic of the military’s cruelty towards the Shan and other minorities. That was enough for Ne Win to mark his card. Last seen being taken into custody at an army checkpoint soon after the 1962 coup, Sao Kya Seng died in unknown circumstances at a Tatmadaw base in southern Shan State.
His wife tried vainly to find out what happened to her husband, before departing for Austria and then the United States in 1964 with their two daughters. Mrs Fern saw them off at Yangon Airport and photos of the now middle-aged daughters, resident in Colorado, are prominent in her drawing room. Inge wrote a book, Twilight over Burma, about her marriage and its tragic end, which was made into a movie in 2015. It was banned in Burma, the government insisting also that it not be shown in Thailand.
From the 1930s on the sawbwas were allied to the Shan nationalist cause, disgruntled by the reduction of their rank under the British. Later, some became advocates of the federal state which had been agreed in theory at the 1947 Panglong Conference but was never put into practice. By the 1950s, though, the sky lords were also coming under pressure from both their own subjects and the government to renounce their rights to rule their kingdoms. Not all the sawbwas were as progressive as Sao Kya Seng, and resentment of the feudal-like power they wielded in the independent Burma was acute.
In April 1959 the sawbwas bowed to the march of time and gave up their authority in a ceremony at Taunggyi overseen by Ne Win. A millennium of tradition came to an end with each of the thirty-four sky lords accepting a state pension, withdrawn after the 1962 coup, in return for no longer being able to levy taxes on their subjects. Since then there have been no sawbwas, although their descendants are still identified by their prestigious ancestry.
For Mrs Fern it has been a steep fall from grace. ‘The contrast between now and then is big. We were royalty,’ she said simply. ‘I went away as a boarder to convent school in Namtu, but I remember playing in the palace in Mongyai as a child and celebrating the festivals. But the palace became a barracks after 1962 and the army left it in a bad way. My father went to prison after the coup and when he was released in 1968 and saw the state of it he ordered it to be demolished.’
Did she ever yearn for the old days? ‘Well, it was much more peaceful in the British era. It was the British who created Burma and they kept the ethnics ruling, under them of course. The Shan didn’t want to take independence at the same time as the Burmese, but Aung San persuaded them by offer
ing the chance to secede from the country after ten years. Politics is a dirty business. The Bamar wouldn’t agree, of course. The Burmese were never happy after the royal family was exiled.’
Many of her siblings and relatives are now in the US or UK. ‘Most of the educated people in Shan left after the coup, to Yangon or abroad,’ said Mrs Fern. She is related to numerous sky lord families. In the old Shan State there was no middle class. You were either royalty or a farmer. The female children of the sawbwas married other sky lords or their junior relations, or stayed single. It was one of the reasons why the sawbwas often had a number of wives at the same time.
Mrs Fern believes one positive development in recent years is a revival across the regional borders of the sense of what it is to be Shan. ‘I think there has been a renewal of Shan culture and identity. You see on Facebook that Shan people are celebrating the festivals and Shan National Day in Assam [there are Shan in India, too], Thailand, Laos, even in Yunnan they wave the Shan flag. I think that’s why the Burmese are afraid of us, because there are so many of us. We could overpower them numerically,’ she stated.
‘But of course the Shan fight among themselves. Shan State is very big and once the military took over the different parts were isolated. I think they didn’t repair the roads deliberately. So there was a lack of communication and that created problems. Facebook has helped improve that, although you can’t believe everything you see on it. I am half optimistic and half pessimistic about the future. The army is still strong and they have a lot of money. Peace depends on them.’
Shan disunity isn’t just a result of poor infrastructure or the ideological and political splits that have prompted the formation of so many rival armies. There are also stark issues of trust between the different branches of the Shan people that not even the presence of a foreign army, the Tatmadaw, in their territory has enabled them to reconcile. Speaking distinct languages, the rivalry between the Tai Yai, who make up the majority of the Shan, and the Tai Khun, Tai Leng, Tai Lü and Tai Nua groups is very real, if often unspoken.