by Rory Maclean
‘Secretary-1 of the State Law and Order Restoration Council Lt-Gen. Khin Nyunt,’ the article had reported, ‘pressed a button to formally open the signboard of the Yuzana Garden Hotel.’ Each paragraph had begun with the name of an officer present, arranged in descending order of rank. ‘Secretary-2 Lt-Gen. Tin Oo…Minster for Hotels and Tourism Lt-Gen. Kyaw Ba…The Commander-in-Chief (Navy) and the Commander-in-Chief (Air)…’ Every man at the ceremony had held a military title.
‘Colonel, so far we’ve been welcomed with open arms,’ I said. ‘Don’t the Burmese blame us – if you like, the children of former colonists – for these last years?’
‘The Burmese forgive easily, my dear.’
‘But don’t they think that we could have done more to help? Your government has taken so much from you, yet there is no sense of revenge.’
‘I told you once that the Burmese never understood Hamlet. I hoped that you would appreciate that now.’
‘It is an honourable virtue, a lack of vindictiveness. But if the Burmese always forgive, how can the system ever be changed?’
The Colonel gazed out through the tinted glass towards the harbour. ‘Our situation today is like Rangoon’s weather,’ he sighed. ‘A great rainy downpour that bubbles our hopes down the drains, then sunshine making everything looking picture-perfect. But really all is withering in thirsty drought, terrible dry-season drought.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘At least the Lady is devoted to healing our country.’
‘You have met her?’ I asked, excited, curious. The Lady was Aung San Suu Kyi.
‘We all know her,’ whispered Than. ‘Her example is always with us.’ Then he thumped the arm of the sofa. ‘How I wish I could join you young things on your jaunt. But instead I will transmit my mettá to you every day in prayers so no catastrophe, no cyclones or typhoons can reach you from any direction whatsoever.’
We thanked him for his time and guidance, even though it had not been of much use.
‘I am just a lonely old bhikkhu, or wayfarer, a leaver of home and family, striving for knowledge to help liberate other good citizens from suffering. Send me an SOS if I can provide any further assistance,’ he offered, standing up to bow to Katrin. ‘Tally-ho and safe footsteps, charmed girl,’ he said to her, then whispered in my ear, ‘Remember my dear, she is one who knows how to rock the cradle. Travel well.’
There is a deep sadness in Burmese travel; not for the traveller himself, who can come and go as he pleases, but for the Burman who is tied by fear and penury to one place, prevented from unravelling the filaments and strands which have formed his remarkable country. Yet the sadness does not come from the native people, in spite of their bondage. They appear to be free of envy and greed, seem to be at peace with themselves, remain cheerful, modest and happy. They smile, while telling a tragic story of eviction and execution. Rather the sadness comes from the outsider, the lucky traveller who is allowed to enjoy the places that a resident cannot visit. It gripped Katrin and me as we boarded the Leo Express bus that evening, and stayed with us long after the completion of our journey.
‘We pray and wish for the physical and spiritual comfort and well-being of our passengers throughout the journey,’ soothed the soft, on-board welcome. The pre-recorded English had an Oriental overlay. Its vowels sounded as rounded as Burmese lettering appears to the Western eye. ‘May our voyage together tonight be blessed with calm and peace.’
A squat traveller, wearing a drab suit and bright betel-stained tie, swayed down the aisle and fell into the seat across from us. A light shower of dandruff settled on his threadbare shoulders. The young man beside him, who had been listening to an English-language programme, switched off his shortwave radio and looked away. Our yellow-robed stewardess turned up the bland music as the passengers, who were mostly prosperous Burmese, settled into their books and magazines. A lone, heat-blanched Englishman sat at the back of the bus reading a two-day-old Financial Times. All were travelling overnight on the new private service to Mandalay, except for us. We planned to disembark at dawn to catch a local connection to Pagan.
We cruised through the early-evening traffic, past the ignoble White Bridge where protesting students had been drowned in 1988. Inya Lake was now best known to businessman as the site of the International Business Centre. We drove north along the Prome Road, where Ni Ni could have lived with her father, past the airport and poor Wayba-gi, onto Highway No. 1. I caught sight of the Tatmadaw Golf Club beyond the Defence Services General Hospital. A convoy of new khaki Chinese Lanjian pick-ups drove into the military compound in Mingaladon. Hilux line-buses, crammed with commuters and traders, coughed and spat their way towards the grimy suburbs. Ancient lorries without bonnets or doors, their engine blocks bolted onto bare chassises, blazed along the dusty shoulder. The stewardess turned on the video player.
Hidden away in the folds of mountains which reach down like the fingers of a hand from the heights of Asia to the sea, Burma has always been a nation apart. Its high ranges squeeze the country between India and China, cramming the diverse peoples into the deep river valleys of the Irrawaddy, the Chindwin, Sittang and Salween. Its borders contain one of the world’s most complex racial mixes: twenty-one major ethnic groups, divided into seven divisions and seven minority states, speaking over a hundred languages. The Burmans, who dominate the Irrawaddy’s vast, fertile flood plains, make up two-thirds of the population, but even their majority is not homogenous.
‘I feel like Rip van Winkle,’ volunteered the squat businessman, nodding out of the window. Along the rutted roadside women and children toiled in labour gangs. ‘The country has been asleep for decades.’
‘I imagine they wish that many things had changed,’ said Katrin. We had read that local authorities maintained the right to call on ‘voluntary’ labour in lieu of taxation. Children were paid about one dollar a week to work on projects ‘for the benefit of the community’. The improvement of the fifty-mile stretch of Highway No. 1 between Rangoon and Pegu, a popular tourist destination which featured the famed Great Golden God Pagoda, had earned it the name of ‘the road of no return’. According to Amnesty International, on this road two workers had been executed by their military supervisors after they had tried to escape. Another had been beaten to death with a hoe.
‘This is the tradition in Myanmar,’ said the businessman, using his country’s new official name. ‘People give their labour voluntarily and patriotically for the love of the Union.’ We watched a young boy, wearing only a short kilted longyi, struggle under the weight of a basket filled with stones. ‘I lived in Australia for twenty-seven years, so I realise that it can be difficult for Europeans to understand.’
‘It is terrible to see.’
‘I agree. That why most work is undertaken when there are no tourist buses passing. There must have been some sort of slip-up.’
Katrin looked around to see if there were any unoccupied seats, but the bus was full. She turned away, slipped on her pair of slumber goggles and pretended to sleep. ‘You lived in Australia?’ I asked.
‘Here’s my card,’ he smiled, passing me a business card and dislodging another downpour of dandruff, ‘Michael Naga of Naga Insurance. Maybe you’ve heard of the firm?’ I shook my head. ‘Then you’ve never been to Perth. I left Myanmar back in 1962, when the country began its march towards socialism. I didn’t fancy the walk so stowed away on a boat heading down under and claimed political asylum.’
‘You left your family?’
‘Of course,’ he shrugged, his gestures smoothed by vanity. ‘We stayed in touch at first, until we started speaking different languages. How could they understand about health care and Christmas holidays and buying a second family car?’
‘It must have been difficult, living your life disassociated form your past.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ he replied, ‘but it sure was right grabbing the opportunity to come back.’
To encourage the country’s development, and in the hope of repairing th
e damage wreaked by the failure of Burmese socialism, the government had offered a general amnesty to its former adversaries – especially if they were successful businessmen. Those who returned to the country, and who took the precaution of aligning themselves with a SLORC minister, grew wealthy with alarming speed.
‘We’re building three shopping malls in Mandalay now,’ Michael gloated, with a fearless confidence. ‘Construction insurance is my niche.’
The coach lurched over single-track bridges, dipping and rising like a ship at sea. As dusk settled around us dim hearth-fires became visible in the distance. Our headlamps caught bullock carts and trishaws in their glare. They, and all manner of broken-down vehicles, appeared like apparitions in the colourless beam of light before being swallowed up again by the night. Michael fell asleep, a copy of an American self-help paperback, The Leader in You, on his belly. On the video a sci-fi kung-fu thriller, made for the Asian market in English with Japanese subtitles, was playing.
Around midnight the bus stopped at a roadside restaurant for dinner. Vast bowls of rice had been laid out on refectory tables and the passengers pounced on the food. Michael served himself two portions of chicken curry and broke off a hand of stubby, plump bananas. ‘Everything is included in the price of the ticket,’ he explained, ‘so eat all you can.’ There were endless flasks of tea and platters of palm-sugar cake on offer. The restaurants, which were equipped with toilets and snack stalls like open-air motorway service stations, had sprung up to serve the long-distance coaches. The innovation impressed Michael. ‘It’s ventures like this,’ he pronounced while eating, ‘that will create our new middle class. These are the entrepreneurs who will build up our prosperity.’ I didn’t know who had financed the building of the restaurants, though later we learned that Leo Express was owned by the son of a Kokang drug trafficker. ‘But it will take time,’ Michael warned me. ‘You saw the country ten years ago. Come back ten years from now. You won’t recognise the place. Rip van Winkle will have become an insomniac.’
‘And will there still be child labourers then?’ asked Katrin.
‘It’s churlish to talk about politics. We want to make politics an unfashionable subject.’
‘By concentrating only on making money?’
‘Initially. Then democracy will slip into place and every citizen’s life will be improved. Capitalism first, democracy second; that is the Eastern way.’ As he stood to return to the coach Michael stowed half a dozen pieces of cake in his jacket pocket. ‘It is necessary to work the system if one is to survive, but to succeed one needs opportunities.’
We managed to change seats with two Mandalay traders returning from a shopping trip in Rangoon, and settled into the back row. The Englishman reading the FT did not meet our eyes. But the night’s conversation and the seesaw movement of the bus conspired to deny us sleep. ‘I find it hard to comprehend,’ Katrin whispered without removing her goggles, ‘that every foot of this road has been built by hand.’ Rock had been broken into gravel, gravel laid onto the road base, the base pounded and tarmac poured by bare hands. When we stopped later at a level crossing to wait for the northbound ‘Up’ train to pass, I crouched in the headlights and touched the road surface. Meanwhile the women slipped off into the shadows on the right-hand side of the bus. The men relieved themselves in the darkness to the left.
Michael caught my eye as we climbed back on board. ‘Look me up when you reach Mandalay,’ he suggested between mouthfuls of palm-sugar cake, ‘and we’ll do lunch.’
‘Not a chance,’ replied Katrin.
At Meiktila we stumbled through unlit, silent streets from our sleek, express coach to the pre-war bus gate. Drivers dozed in their cabs, and passengers who had arrived long before dawn to find a place waited on the hard bench seats. Apart form the odd colonial rail line and the expensive air service, which was priced to exclude all but foreign tourists and rich entrepreneurs, the only way to travel in the country was by line-bus. Leo Express and Myanmar Arrow ran between Rangoon and Mandalay, but elsewhere there was nothing other than aged pick-up trucks fitted with wooden benches. The roads along which they clattered were often unpaved, always single-track, and to pass vehicles needed to pull over to the shoulder. Transportation, like most systems in modern Burma, had been structured to hinder communication. Rather than linking, it isolated towns, individuals and thought.
Day broke to find us moving but unable to move, packed in with thirty other travellers. Our limbs were jammed between sacks of vegetables and boxes of reconditioned car parts. A child slept across our laps. There wasn’t enough room for me to crane my neck around to catch sight of the arid, scorched plain beyond the pick-up’s metal frame. Not that I was missing much. Once I spotted a spindly, pathetic eucalyptus plantation, but otherwise there was only a barren wilderness of stony ground, laced by the dust-dry gullies of last year’s monsoon.
For two monotonous, grinding hours the scene remained unchanged, until tall, slender toddy palms came into view, the first verticals in a flat landscape. At the morning tea stop we watched farmers guide long bamboo ladders to the trees, then, with charred pots suspended from their waists, climb the elephant-grey trunk to topknots of broad, splayed leaves. There, a hundred feet above the ground, the long tubular nodes were bound together like bundles of oversized genitalia and, in a strange sexuality, the toddy milked into the perfectly round orb of the suspended collecting pot. The toddy juice, either boiled and sweet or fermented into alcohol, was sold in the shaggy, thatched hamlets, alongside rectangular-lidded baskets woven from the palm’s fringed, pointed leaves.
The morning and the miles dragged on, our back and arms ached, until, after seven bone-jarring hours of travel, a serrated line of hills cut the horizon. The landscape became dotted with gleaming bleach-white stupas. According to Scott, ‘Jerusalem, Rome, Kiev, Benares, none of these can boast the multitude of temples, and lavishness of design and ornament’ to be found in Pagan. We had arrived in ‘the most remarkable religious city in the world’.
At a scorched crossroad we hobbled off the back of the pick-up, numbed by the journey and dazzled by the noonday sun.
‘Hello my friend where you go?’
‘What country? What your name?’
The rising heat wrung the colour from our vision and we blinked at the shimmering silhouettes of half a dozen horse-drawn carriages.
‘This is my horse-cart. You see pagodas?’ asked a lean young man at the reins.
‘You German?’ enquired another, patting the skeleton of his underfed mare. ‘Bitte, wir gehen zusammen. Sehr billig,’ he begged.
There were no trees to offer respite from the sun. The only shade was under the carriages’ canopy. ‘We need a bed first,’ I managed to say, as feeling began to creep back into my legs.
‘Good bed clean hotel fried egg breakfast no problem,’ gabbled a child, taking Katrin’s hand. ‘Please madame,’ she pleaded, ‘come with me.’
‘Come with me, my friend.’
‘Freund, wir gehen zusammen.’
We chose to ride with the quietest boy. His horse did not seem to have been maltreated. As we trotted past ancient temples crumbling away into the bare, tinderbox plain I gave him the name of our hotel, recommended by Colonel Than. ‘What is your name?’ I asked him.
‘Soe Htun,’ he replied. It was his first day on the job, but he overcame his shyness to ask, ‘Please sir, later we go to temples?’
Anawrahta, the first great Burmese king, was an Asian Crusader, determined to purify Burmese Buddhism by capturing holy scriptures and relics. In 1047 thirty-two white elephants carried into his capital, Pagan, his sacred booty along with ‘such men as were skilled in carving, turning and painting; masons, moulders of plaster and flower-patterns; blacksmiths, silversmiths, braziers, founders of gongs and cymbals, filigree flower-workers; doctors and trainers of elephants and horses…hairdressers and men cunning in perfumes, odours, flowers and the juices of flowers.’ Anawrahta’s military victories, financed by agriculture an
d the rich trade with India, China and Malaya, heralded Pagan’s golden age. He and his prospering subjects were inspired to build magnificent monasteries and temples, earning merit for their patrons and assuring them a better life after reincarnation. Thirty thousand prisoners were pressed into the frenzied building of pagodas. They too had ‘given their labour voluntarily and patriotically for the love of Burma’. Over 250 years the officers and rulers built thirteen thousand temples and kyaungs on the arid curve of the Irrawaddy. ‘The towers are built of fine stone and then one of them has been covered with gold a good finger in thickness,’ wrote Marco Polo; ‘…really they do form one of the finest sights in the world, so exquisitely finished are they, so splendid and costly’. But this extraordinary undertaking impoverished the kingdom. Asia’s greatest city became vulnerable to Mongol invasion.
The popular view of Pagan’s demise evokes a fanciful vision of Kublai Khan’s hordes ransacking and looting the royal city. In truth its end was the result of complacency and exhaustion. Burmese rulers never developed a bureaucracy capable of maintaining control without a strong army. The centuries of supremacy had made the military indolent. The last king, Narathihapate, was so frightened of invasion that he tore down all of the city’s wooden houses to construct fortifications. On discovering a prophecy under one of the ruined buildings that predicted his downfall, he fled from Pagan. In 1287 the Mongols took over the deserted city, and for half a millennium its ruins were cursed with bandits and evil spirits.