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ONE FLOWER - TWO COLOURS, BURMA 2014
by Paul de Zulueta
formerly Welsh Guards
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A typical market day in Mandalay |
‘This is Burma and it is unlike any land you know about’
Rudyard Kipling, Letters from the East (1898)
It is first light and I have come to watch the Ngapali fishermen bring in the night’s catch from the Bay of Bengal on Burma’s west coast. The sun, gathering its strength, edges its way through the veil of palm trees surrounding the beach. It lifts the dawn chill but with little hint of the midday heat to come.
Everyone plays a part in this daily ritual. Young men, lithe and leaf-brown, flashing the keenest of knives, throw their haul into large bamboo baskets. Young women, with strong calves, wearing pink and pitch blue-checkered longyis, snatch-lift the baskets to the top of their heads and carry them to a large flat area of straw covered matting. The community elders look on, their eyes lingering on the glittering haul: red snapper, kingfish, barracuda, yellow fin tuna, squid and rainbow sardine.
Beside a set of weighing scales, a man barks orders. He is large with a fleshy face and small, darting black eyes. In one hand he has a mobile phone and calculator. A new 4WD car is parked just a 100 metres away. Behind the car a new sign has been erected with its ominous message, ‘Real estate services.’
I glance back towards the fishing village. It should be vibrant and prosperous but, as I discover later that day, it is shrouded in poverty, serried ranks of bamboo huts thatched with palm leaves. A Buddhist monk’s intonations rise above the morning pageant from the monastery behind the village like mist above still water.
I have come to Burma for reasons of history and family. Mountbatten asked my grandfather, as his chief of staff, to represent him and see ‘fair play is done’ at talks on Burma’s independence with General Aung San. Fair play was done, and Burma won her independence on 4th January 1948. Aung San, however, did not live to see the day, cut down by an assassin’s bullet on 19th July 1947. His daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, took up his glowing torch and fights Burma’s democratic election next year as leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD). My grandfather, whom I remember with affection, standing to attention during the Queen’s speech each Christmas Day, barking at anyone who spoke ill of the Queen’s choice of outfit, would have been pleased. Married to my grandmother, the writer Daphne du Maurier, and like Aung San Suu Kyi an original and independent woman, he always saw women as equals.
After breakfast that morning, I pick up a newspaper: The New Light of Myanmar. Today is 2nd March, ‘Peasants Day’ in Burma. I am startled by the letter on the front page from President U Thein Sein, with its address ‘Esteemed Peasantry’. I chuckle to myself, as I imagine David Cameron addressing the farmers of the Somerset levels in such a manner. But the President’s message is heartfelt. Burma is an agro based economy and, as his letter goes on to show, his government seems to be making huge efforts to improve irrigation and the overall lot of Burma’s farmers.
That afternoon we fly to Mandalay, an evocative name for many men of my generation who, as young boys in the 1960s were fed an enjoyable diet of colonial 'culture' like John Masters’ classic, The Road Past Mandalay and David Lean's film The Bridge over the River Kwai.
Nyein Nyein Naing is our guide for Mandalay, the Irrawaddy and the pagodas of Bagan. She has a kindly, astute face with deep set hooded eyes. She tells me her father, worked for both the British and the Japanese during the war, which has left her fluent in both languages and a talent for ‘sniffing the wind’. She is proud of Burma, and proud of its renewal, telling me as we travel from the airport, ‘my country is about to flower again’. I am reluctant to touch upon politics, a discourtesy in any country but one’s own, but Nyein Nyein has a conspiratorial air to her and, as we sit down later for a cup of tea, our backs to the wall, her eyes darting around the room, she whispers, ‘So what do you think of my country, what are your impressions?’ I pour myself some tea as I collect my thoughts. I tell her that from what I’ve seen so far, she is right to be proud adding that President U Thein Sein’s reforms seem sound and well meant. ‘Yes you are right, ‘she says, ‘the General is a good man, honest and clever, his father you know became a much loved Buddhist monk in the second part of his life.’ She catches my eye looking at a poster of Aung San Suu Kyi discretely placed in a corner of the room. ‘Of course many love her and she may win the election next year’ she says, adding, ‘but you know, there are 800,000 monks and 800,000 soldiers in this country and they are afraid of what democracy and human rights might bring. They are afraid of the Muslims coming to us from Bangladesh and Bengal, their numbers, their zeal. The Buddhist way is our way, the ‘middle way’.’
At dawn the next day we set off down the Irrawaddy, the most heroic of rivers. It is at Nyaung U on the Irrawaddy on 14th February 1945 that Bill Slim’s Seventh Indian Infantry division first crossed the Irrawaddy in the Burma campaign, suffering heavy losses as the Japanese machine guns swept the river, not helped by the river’s treacherous and forever shifting sand bars.
The river plays to all my senses: boats loaded with teak from the vast forests of the North on their way to Rangoon; fishermen and their sons, eyes alert for tell-tale bubbles; pale river dolphins playing in twos and threes around our bow; egrets, brown-winged kingfishers and river lapwings swooping and skimming; and villages, with vegetable gardens growing on the roof of every house, each one built on stilts for the monsoon season, oblivious to the passage of time and seemingly cut off except by boat. I see young women bathing in the river, rinsing the long tresses of their raven hair. It is a scene I find rather pleasurable.
After 12 hours we ‘dock’ in Bagan. The pagodas and temples in the late evening light, like Venice for the first time, seem dream-like and of another long forgotten world. As I leave the great golden pagoda of Shwazigon, I spot a tall distinguished gentleman with wispy hair like white smoke, standing in front of a small stall with the jolly sign ‘Goods from the Empire'. He holds himself well, a soldier’s bearing, and reminds me of Billy Fish, the former Gurkha soldier in Kipling’s ‘The Man who would be King’. I have a chat with him, the conversation hilariously sprinkled with his Raj English ‘Jolly good show’, ‘tip top’ and ‘chocks away’ as he tells me he served in the 10th Gurkhas at the Battle of Imphal. Needless to say, I feel obliged to buy one of his ‘goods from the empire’ and choose a pair of Japanese army binoculars. I imagine some hapless Japanese officer’s grisly end on the battlefield.
No No Ku, our new guide, meets us at Heho airport in Burma’s Shan State where we will visit the old British hill retreat at Kalaw and the majestic Inle Lake. No No is from the Danu tribe, one of Burma’s 135 tribal minorities. She is attractive and assertive with powerful legs which augur well as I plan to trek in the hills above Kallaw. I see at once the order, hierarchy and social distinctions of our colonial rule in Kalaw: the station which links Mandalay to Rangoon with its late Victorian chimneys and panelled waiting room; the sign ‘Station Master’ gently swaying in the breeze; the avenue of yellow and purple bull-hoof blossom leading up to the station entrance; the bungalows and houses laid out according to position and rank, those in the foothills of their careers close to the station, the higher ranks just a short walk from the Anglican church in the pine trees overlooking Kalaw.
No No and I set off on our trek at first light. I forget I am at 5,000ft and dress hopelessly for the sharp morning chill. We climb briskly to 7,000ft and reach Beinne Pin, home to the Palaung tribe at 08.30. The village men and women are assembling in the village square to pick green tea. No No stops to pass the time of day with an elderly tribal woman dressed in purple, pink and pale yellow. The woman tells No No with pride and joy that her grand-daughter has left the village to study Computers at Taunggyi University. Further on, a rather beautiful young woman wearing a bamboo hat and a pink and dark pastel green longyi stares intently at a black rubber hose which leads down the hill. She, too, is from the Palaung tribe and is studying human geography at Taunggyi University. No No tells me that the black rubber hose carries water to the village and the young woman is looking for a suspected break in the pipe. The scene, though timeless, is full of promise as I see what education may now bring to the lives of young Burmese women.
When Kipling wrote ‘This is Burma and it is unlike any land you know about,’ he must have first set eyes upon Inle Lake. The lake, revealing itself gradually as you wind your way by launch through the narrow waterways, heightens the senses until you burst out onto the lake itself. It is the lake’s variety that is so compelling. The Lake’s fishermen who row standing up, one leg on the stern, the others wrapped around the oar so that they can see the fish more clearly. 7,000 acres of floating gardens with every imaginable crop of fruit and vegetables; the 500 year old silverware village of Ywarma on the lake’s south western edge, its well-built, green and lavender coloured houses witness to its wealth; and my favourite image that of the last Superintendent of the Shan State, Sir George Scott’s weekend retreat built on stilts from wood and woven bamboo in the lake’s centre.
I rather see myself in a lotus silk cardigan so I ask No No to take us to the lotus silk weaving village of Innponkhan. No No tells me you need 120,000 lotus plant stems to make five metres of silk cloth. I toy with the idea of a purchase until I overhear a conversation between an American tourist and his wife: ‘Henry, for 500 bucks you gotta be kidding, anyway they’re just a nightmare to wash, forget it honey.’ I leave Inle Lake for Rangoon with a sense of optimism despite No No’s concerns about the effects of tourism. Buddha's enigmatic statement ‘We are the heirs to our own actions’ suggests Burma will protect its extraordinary heritage with calmness and good sense.
It is the afternoon before I fly back to London and I am billeted in the Governor's Residence - now a hotel - in Rangoon city centre. It was here that my grandfather signed the preliminary surrender agreement with the Japanese. The hotel reminds me of lines from Seigfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer drummed into me by an English master at prep school. 'The Hotel de la Poste hadn't altogether modernised its interior but it contained much solid comfort and supplied the richest meals in Rouen,… so much so that strong suggestions had been advanced by senior officers that it should be put off bounds to all infantry subalterns on their way to the Line’.
Early that evening, I ask the hotel’s driver to take me to Commonwealth War Graves cemetery. I am touched that he knows where it is. ‘Yes sir, pleased to be taking you there, good place for final resting of brave soldiers’. It was beautifully kept. There are 37,781 Commonwealth war graves in Burma and 1,381 in this cemetery, most either killed in the recapture of Rangoon, or of those who died in Rangoon jail as prisoners of war. I choose at random a grave on which I place a small bunch of roses. It is that of Private Dennis Alfred Dodkin, the Border Regiment, killed in action 15th May 1945, aged 19.
As I await my flight back to London, I pick up a copy of the Rangoon Times. I often wonder about the British Empire’s legacy. But there is one legacy that I feel sure about as I read some of the headlines in the Rangoon Times. It is our language. ‘Bank heist: robbers vamoose into thin air’ … ‘Incestuous expat community get up to high jinks in sealed pheromone ridden sin pit’.
And from the sports pages: ‘Chinese cricket on sticky wicket as bails fly in Bejiing’. ‘Well, we’ve got Rangoon and beaten the monsoon by an acid drop,’ wrote my grandfather to my grandmother on 4th May 1945. On 8th May, he took the salute to celebrate VE Day and Rangoon’s fall, in place of Mountbatten who was unwell with a bad bout of dysentery. In the celebrations that night, George Gordon Lennox, (later, Lt Gen Sir George Gordon Lennox), my grandfather’s GSO1 and life-long friend, played the piano while my grandfather, who had competed in the hurdles in 1924 Olympics, performed a Cossack dance.
I like to think that, almost 70 years on, they and all the men who had played their part in the Burma campaign, though they may not have thought so at the time, would agree with Kipling that Burma remains ‘unlike any land you know about’.
The temples and pagodas of Bagan Mount Popa
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