Eimer - A Savage Dreamland

A SAVAGE DREAMLAND

Contents

Burma as represented on a modern political map is not a geographical or historical entity; it is a creation of the armed diplomacy and administrative convenience of late nineteenth-century British Imperialism.

Edmund R. Leach, The Political Future of Burma (1963)

Modern Burma is only dead Burma reincarnate.

C. M. Enriquez, A Burmese Enchantment (1916)

BURMA 2010

I came to Burma in search of the road less travelled. In early 2010, this was a mysterious nation: little-visited, barely mentioned, hardly known. A paranoid military dictatorship had ruled for almost fifty years and Burma had become the monster in the Southeast Asian attic, the unhinged relative locked in a top-floor room. While its neighbours hosted an ever-increasing number of tourists, the generals sought to isolate the country from outside influences and regarded foreigners with intense suspicion.

Three years before, in 2007, I had attempted to reach Yangon, Burmas largest city and the former capital, to cover the so-called Saffron Revolution, the latest popular uprising against army rule. Along with many other reporters, my visa application was refused. The closest I came to Burma was standing on the banks of the Moei River in the Thai border town of Mae Sot, waiting for the expected flood of refugees to wade across from the other side. But the exodus never happened.

When I applied again for a visa in Bangkok in January 2010, with a new passport untainted by any evidence that I was a journalist, it was still more in hope than expectation. Returning to the Burmese embassy the next day, my surprise on finding I had been granted twenty-eight days to visit was rather too visible. I boarded a plane for Yangon the next morning, just in case the officials changed their minds.

After the hustle of Bangkoks Suvarnabhumi Airport a giant, crowded shopping mall with runways Yangons international terminal could have been a provincial bus station on a slow day. There were no queues at passport control. A sole luggage belt revolved. Stepping outside, there was a sudden blast of heat, a cloud-free, azure sky and a bright sun that made me squint. I climbed into a taxi, its windows open in lieu of air conditioning, and asked the driver to take me to downtown.

We set off along a half-empty road overseen by palm and pipal trees, shaded in different hues of green. Their spreading leaves and branches partially masked the wooden houses topped with corrugated iron roofs and undistinguished concrete buildings behind them. Chinese-made trucks wheezed by belching black smoke, their exhausts mimicking the chimneys of the factories they had emerged from. There were few privately owned cars. Most, like my taxi, were falling apart in slow motion, their drivers unable to afford or find spare parts.

Walking along the broken-down pavements, or waiting for overloaded buses and pickup trucks, whose teenage conductors hung out of the doors and off the backs of their vehicles shouting out their destinations, were the locals. Almost everyone wore the sarong-like, traditional Burmese dress: sober-coloured longyi for men, brightly patterned htamein for the women. Only the Buddhist monks in their crimson robes stood out from the uniformity of the crowd.

What I was seeing could have been a street scene from the Yangon of twenty or thirty years before. Burma was in stasis; a country marooned under the junta that had snatched power in 1962. There were other reminders of the lack of progress, too. My mobile phone was in my pocket, its screen dark. There was no international network coverage in Burma. I discovered soon that the internet was a barely available, mostly non-functioning new invention as well.

But the shock of the old was alleviated by the faces I saw as we drove south. When my taxi stopped at the few traffic lights, people looked across at me from their crowded buses and some offered a shy smile, one that widened into a beguiling beam when I reciprocated. They made me feel like I was being welcomed to Burma, and that is the greeting every traveller hopes for.

A Chinese-owned hotel on the western edge of downtown was my first base. Yangon slopes gently downhill towards its eponymous river from its highest point, the hill where the Shwedagon Pagoda, Burmas most holy religious monument, sits. By leaning out of the window of my room and twisting my neck to the left, I could see down Wadan Street as it ran for three blocks to the Strand, the riverfront road, and the citys docks.

Yangons port was the second busiest in the world throughout the 1920s and 1930s, after London, and the city then known as Rangoon was riding high as one of Asias pioneer world cities. The docks were much quieter in 2010, but there were still enough ships to keep the port lively. The sound of their mournful horns rose easily above the noise of the traffic eleven storeys beneath me, as the ships slipped their moorings and floated downstream on the mud-brown waters towards the Ayeyarwady Delta and the Andaman Sea.

The river gave birth to Yangon. By the fifth or sixth century ce , Indian traders were already tacking east across the Bay of Bengal from the Coromandel Coast in search of new markets. Some penetrated the tangle of rivers and tributaries that make up the Ayeyarwady Delta, the region west of Yangon, and eventually landed at the small fishing village that would grow into Burmas biggest city. Those same adventurers founded the Shwedagon, probably as a Hindu shrine initially, at the villages highest point.

There is no record of the settlements original name, and not until the fifteenth century do written accounts of the place begin to emerge. By then, Dagon, and sometimes Lagun, was the name being used to describe the scruffy collection of wooden shacks that had grown up around the golden stupa of the Shwedagon, which had long since abandoned its Hindu origins and was already a revered Buddhist pilgrimage site.

Only in 1755 did the town become known as Yangon. The name, meaning end of strife, was chosen by the then king, Alaungpaya, after he had vanquished a rival southern kingdom. Almost a century later, though, the British seized lower Burma and Yangons name changed again. The invading armies employed translators from Arakan in the west of Burma, the region closest to what was then British India. The Arakanese pronounce ya as ra, so Yangon became Rangoon.

In June 1989, the junta ordered that the name revert to Yangon once more. Burma became Myanmar at the same time, although many locals objected as of course they were not consulted over the abrupt change of their nations name. Some countries, like the UK and US, use Burma officially still, rather than Myanmar. I do, too, not being willing to abide by a unilateral decision made by a group of generals eager to rewrite history for their own purposes.

Other names associated with British rule disappeared in 1989 as well. Arakan, for example, became Rakhine State. But some have survived, like the Strand, Yangons riverfront road. As I walked it that first day, passing crumbling colonial-era edifices whose cupolas, towers and white stone pillars could have been transplanted from London, I understood why the name was once considered appropriate. The great travel writer Norman Lewis described Yangon as a city built by people who refused to compromise with the East. Not much appeared to have changed since his visit in 1951.