This is a fascinating country in all sorts of ways and seems to be most popular with European and Japanese tourists, some Australians of course, but they are everywhere.

Since childhood Burma has been a romantic and exotic place for me.  It was impossible to grow up in the Australia of the 1950’s and not be familiar with that great Australian bass-baritone Peter Dawson’s rendition of Rudyard Kipling’s 'On the Road to Mandalay' recorded two decades or so earlier:  

Come you back to Mandalay
Where the old flotilla lay
Can't you hear their paddles chunking
From Rangoon to Mandalay

On the road to Mandalay
Where the flying fishes play
And the Dawn comes up like thunder
out of China 'cross the bay

The song went Worldwide in 1958 when Frank Sinatra covered it with a jazz orchestration, and ‘a Burma girl’ got changed to ‘a Burma broad’; ‘a man’ to ‘a cat’; and ‘temple bells’ to ‘crazy bells’.  

 

 

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Rangoon, like Bombay and Madras and Calcutta, has gone to be replaced by Yangon.  Why do we do this?  We still call Florence, Paris and Rome by their historical English names.  Is it some sort of post-colonial cringe? 

It would be nice if we tried to see history as past and dead, the unalterable inheritance of all mankind, not a political weapon to use against the future or something we have to ‘correct’.  What can that possibly mean? 

As I have said, time and again on this website, history is what put us here, exactly as it happened.  Without it happening exactly as it did until the day I was born I would not exist to write this.  And the same goes for you. 

Australia’s history is interwoven with that of Burma. When I was a boy the Australian Governor General, Sir William Slim, had previously been the General credited with winning the Burma Campaign against the Japanese, the first to turn the war against them. He is regarded as the greatest British General of WW2 and among the greatest British military commanders of all time.  Without his impact on the war I would not have been born, my parents would not have migrated to Australia and my children, specifically, would not exist.  Nor for that matter would anyone born in Australia, or elsewhere, since the war.

 

 

A little bit of background

For seventy years after full British occupation in the late 19th century Burma was administered as a part of British India.  Then, following local demands for independence, it was granted independent statehood in 1937, based on a Westminster system of democracy, as we have in Australia, with a Premier/PM and a locally elected Legislative Assembly and a Senate that was half appointed by the British Governor and half by the Assembly. 

It seems like a good transitional model to the full independence of Australia, New Zealand or Canada. But it was no more popular with the radical independence movement than the similar Westminster Parliament in India.

 

Burma's High Court building in Yangon (Rangoon) from the colonial period

 

Burma was occupied by the Japanese for three years during WW2 (see more below).  After the war Britain no longer had the resources, or the heart, to hold on those parts of empire that were unwilling.  And Gandhi, Nehru and Jenner had done their work well in India.  So in 1947 India was partitioned into India and Pakistan; and Burma became independent too. 

Millions were immediately killed in inter-religious conflicts.

After Independence Burma suffered interminable intertribal/interregional squabbling, mostly seeking regional autonomy.  But it is clear from their advanced infrastructure and the style of buildings in Yangon and Mandalay that at one stage Burma was highly developed compared to its neighbours.

In the midst of ongoing civil unrest, a communist inspired military coup seized power in 1962 and imposed martial law.  Thus another domino in US President Eisenhower’s ‘domino theory’ fell.  All major industries were nationalised along with many private businesses owned by foreigners and their decedents.  The Indian and British families that had not left with Burmese independence and Indian Partition in 1947 now did so.  Foreign travel to Burma was heavily restricted.

This repressive situation lasted for almost 30 years, longer than most Burmese have lived.

The outcome was an almost immediate destruction of the commercial class followed by economic collapse and steady decline in standard of living, together with the reported exploitation of the vulnerable as slave labour.  Along with this went what seems to be inevitable when people do not own or feel personal responsibility for property, a decaying built environment.

 

In the old business district - look at the roofing

 

Increasingly violent protests resulted in the military junta agreeing to free elections in 1990.  But when Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD party, won 80% of the seats the Junta declared the result invalid, outlawed the party and locked her up. 

Another 20 years passed. Another election, this time widely thought to have been rigged, Aung San Suu Kyi is still under house arrest.  On to 2012 and by-elections.  This time Aung San Suu Kyi has been released and the NLD has been allowed to participate.  The world shouts hooray!  And tourists and smart money start flooding in. 

The next General Election is in 2015.  Standby for trouble.

 

 

Yangon (Rangoon)

Yangon has this history written across the cityscape like a collage. 

Here, some once magnificent free standing 1920/30's mansions.  Each on half an acre.  The grounds gone to seed and weed and tree overgrown. The buildings are squats:  windows gone, rags hanging out to dry, wrecked equipment and cast out household equipment littering the yards. 

There, magnificent new homes protected by razor wire and cameras. 

The city is undergoing a renaissance and there are signs of reviving commerce everywhere among the generally advanced decay.

Dominating the city is the Shwedagon Pagoda a huge glowing golden structure visible from everywhere.  We visited for half an hour or so.  But we were put off by what seemed to be largely commercial interests, including an outrageous tax on foreign tourists as well as the Disneyland nature of the Buddha images.  It was our first real exposure this trip and we were still re-acclimatising to the garishly painted mega-doodads that support the religious beliefs of others.  This was not helped by the sight of western Europeans kneeling in prayer before the golden idols or sitting in earnest conversation with the monks almost everywhere we went.  Constant repetition was soon to soften that particular consternation. 

 

 

Shwedagon Pagoda

 

 

To each his own - as long as it permits them to live in harmony with others.   In Myanmar theology says yes. Practice says no.

There are lots of other pagodas and payas in Yangon.  Perhaps the oldest, Sule Pagoda, is bizarrely surrounded by a shopping arcade in the middle of a major roundabout that abuts a popular park.  This boasts some hair of the actual Buddha.  Across the road is the main mosque and we initially thought the loud chanting over a loud speaker system was the call to prayer.  But no. It is the season when Buddhist monks call on the faithful to increase their merit towards a better next life by contributing to the maintenance of pagodas and stupas. We retired to the rather threadbare park but the loud chanting persisted for so long we fled.  Next time we passed it was still going on.  How do people function around there?

 

 

Sule Pagoda across the park - you have to imagine the noise

 

We thought it was about time for another religion.  Let’s look up old Badadur Shah Zafar the last Mughal Emperor of India. The Mughals first imposed Muslim rule in India in 1526 (after the first Battle of Panipat) and continued to rule after defeat by the British until the mid nineteenth century, albeit but without much military power. 

Among the dead, monarchs have particular potential to be singled out as, usually quite ordinary, people cast hither and thither by the currents, tides and waves of history.

Those of you who have read my travels to India diaries will know, if you didn’t already, that Badadur was ‘just a very naughty boy’. He broke his family’s generations long power sharing agreement with the British East India Company and sided with the rebels during the Indian Mutiny of 1857.  52 Europeans were murdered within his palace, possibly without his knowledge. As a result the history of the world was changed forever.

All his sons took and active part in the rebellion that followed the Mutiny and they were rounded up and summarily shot by Company officers as rebels.  As a result, non-Muslim sepoy regiments saw the real prospect of getting rid of the Mughals forever.  They took advantage of the unrest to seek out every possible male heir and put them to death. 

In this situation it's difficult to feel concern for the murder of the heirs.  When tens of thousands are being murdered what's another couple of handfuls?  Everyone who died had a family, and a life story, and anyone's death can be made poignant with a bit of imagination; just listen to an eulogy for a dead soldier.  But we can't all know all the stories of everyone who dies, so we focus on the deaths of the rich or famous. 

Of course killing all the prospective heirs to the throne is not unprecedented.  For example, the last king of Burma came to power the same way. It even happened in Europe. It’s roughly what happened to the family of Nicholas II of Russia on Lenin’s orders. But that was an old grudge. Lenin's older brother was hanged, accused of trying to kill Nicholas' father. Unfortunately for Nicholas' girls, female heirs could succeed in Russia so the whole family had to go. 

The interesting story is not not the deaths of all his family or of the old bloke himself dying from natural causes at the age of 90 but what his foolhardy actions precipitated. The uprising in which his family participated led to the disbandment of the commercially oriented East India Company and the imposition of British Imperial Rule out of London.  No longer were decisions based on improving Indian economic productivity in the interests maximising shareholder profits or enriching company officials.  Now decisions were political, concerned with power and prestige.  This was to be a new world in which the majority of Hindu princes had stayed out of trouble and survived the uprising.  Hindus now ruled the political debate first dominating the upper house of Parliament and then the popular assembly while the principal Muslim ruler had been destroyed.  

As a result of these events India progressively went from from being Muslim to Hindu, culminating in partition in 1947 and the creation of Muslim Pakistan (West and East - now Bangladesh).

The British were not entirely happy either.  On the whole they got on better with the Muslims who, for example, later supported the Empire in two world wars, than with the Hindu leaders, some of whom had to be interned and silenced to prevent them supporting the enemy.

Badadur himself was arrested for treason and brought to trial.  Now he had no heirs the old man, who was much admired as a poet and man of culture, was of no further threat. He was exiled to Rangoon with his wife and women of his court. When he died in 1862 the British afforded him full Islamic rights but his burial chamber was cleverly hidden under parkland against it becoming a focus for activism.   His wife shares his grave.

 

The tomb (Dargah) of Badadur Shah Zafar the last Mughal Emperor of India

 

Captain Davies was given the job of hiding the quite capacious mausoleum, appropriate to an ex-emperor, and did an excellent job.  He even left enough clues for it to be rediscovered in 1991. Good chap Davies.

 

History of the Tomb, its camouflage and discovery

 

Now there is a mosque on the site that has indeed been a focus of recent inter-religious violence. 

But it was very calm the day we went and we had some difficulty finding a driver who knew or admitted he knew how to get there.  I had to draw in the street on a map and name it from Google Maps on my phone.  It wasn’t on the local tourist map.  Once there, we were greeted by a charming Tamil man who was delighted that we were interested.  And yes, take as many photographs as you like.  I found it a fascinating time warp into the past. 

I found the adjoining mosque a relief from pyas and pagodas.  But then, an unbeliever, I can sit quietly and happily in a traditional western style church for long periods.  It goes back to childhood and the familiar.  Architecturally interesting mosques are second best.  I particularly liked the big ones in Damascus and Istanbul where you can sit on the carpet. 

 

 

The traffic

Everywhere in Yangon are Japanese cars in all conditions, some quite new. Petrol is cheap.  The roads are good but traffic jams are terminal. 

The road rules are partly responsible.  They use right hand drive cars as in Japan and in their principal neighbours, Thailand and India, but drive on the right as in China!  

Now, I’ve driven in Europe in an English car on several occasions and I can confirm that driving from the nearside requires considerably more caution than driving from the offside.  But these guys (I don’t recall seeing any women drivers) seem to think that the ability to stare down traffic on their left gives them permission to simply move into any gap they see in the oncoming stream when turning left, effectively blocking the flow in that stream. 

In addition, the traffic light sequences are interminable.  Drivers simply turn off the ignition and find something to read.  At least they can read.  Driving is regarded as a skilled profession.  One guide proudly told us that he was taking lessons so that one day he could take over if the driver was taken ill.  Wendy immediately offered to drive in that unfortunate event.

 

Fit another one in somewhere? - fasten your seatbelts?

 

In Yangon apparently a relative of someone in the Junta was injured by a motorbike and bikes are banned from the city.  I suppose it’s the same guy who work up one morning and said: “Hey, why don’t we all drive on the other side in our right hand drive cars?  That could be fun!” 

It was clear from old photos that they still drove on the left in the 1960’s.  But no one could tell me when they swapped.  I looked it up on-line.  1970.  It must have been chaotic.

While the absence of motorbikes results in substituting cars and does nothing for traffic flow, it is much more peaceful than elsewhere in Myanmar where motorbikes outnumber cars dozens to one. 

 

The museum

The National Museum in Yangon is substantial, with four floors of galleries dedicated to Burmese culture and history.  The pre-history section was interesting, making the surprising claim that modern man arose in or around Myanmar and not in Africa.  But otherwise it was in line with currently accepted science as to the evolution or the species.  I was wondering how they might treat this touchy point as it is obviously at odds with their religion or at the very least raised some very big question marks.  “Who’s reincarnated from a tyrannosaurus, and can one return to that state if naughty?”

There is a vast collection, including valuable gold and precious stones locked in secure vault-like display cases.  But this is one of two museums we went to that applied a ‘no camera’ rule with the rigour of an airport body scanner operative.  

There were a lot of historical garments, hollowware, jewellery, musical instruments and so on,  from the imperial period but nothing apart from native fishing nets, tribal dress, folk artefacts and so on, attributed to the period after King Thaibaw’s abdication and exile in 1885.  As this was the period I was particularly interested in I was disappointed.

Apparently civilisation in Burma ended in 1885.   No one possessed a camera or a telephone or a record player or a motor car.  But hang on, in his book Cosmopolitan Rangoon Tyler Cowen states:

…In the early twentieth century, Burma enjoyed a higher standard of living than India and was far less densely populated.  And as the economy grew, there was a need for cheap labour as well as entrepreneurial and professional skills…  this came from India...  By the late 1920s Rangoon exceeded new York as the greatest immigrant port in the world and this influx turned Rangoon into an Indian City, with the Burmese reduced to a minority.  There was a mingling of peoples from every part of the subcontinent, from Bengali schoolteachers and Gujarati bankers, to Sikh policemen and Tamil merchants...  Steamships fastened Rangoon to Calcutta and then, with the start of air travel, Rangoon became a hub for all of Asia… World-class schools and a top-notch university helped create a cosmopolitan and politically active middle class.

 

Surely this was worth recording?  The museum seemed less interested in the past and more concerned with enumerating the many tribes and races that make up Modern Myanmar and to represent them as a harmonious whole all pulling together, in the common interest.  Propaganda, yes, interesting, nevertheless.

Much of the built infrastructure in Burma, as in India, dates to the days of the British Raj.  In Yangon the magnificent Victorian central railway station lies in ruins.  The vast and architecturally impressive Secretariat Building, the equivalent of the Writer’s Building in Kolkata, is also abandoned and apparently in worse condition.

 

Part of the old Rangoon Central Station

 

Both it seems, are victims of deliberate vandalism by the Junta. But the old High Court building, and the General Hospital along with dozens of other fine colonial buildings are still in active use, even though many have been allowed to decay from their former glory.

At least the main water supply has been maintained with its impressive Kandawgyi (Great Royal) and Inya (once Lake Victoria) Lakes.  But any acknowledgement of their benefits, or their Colonial origins has been obscured, in part by the name changes and decorative gardens with the beds spelling out slogans.

One day we took a car out to Bago an outlying place of tourism interest that turned out to feature a couple of reclining Buddha’s, one golden and bejewelled and under cover, another in the open with a Buddha-building factory next door – concrete and plaster of paris blanks for later decoration. 

In addition there is another large golden pagoda and a monastery. 

 

 

Bago's bejewelled Buddha, posing monk, outdoor big Buddha, monastery and distant large golden pagoda

 

There is also a paya consisting of four seated Buddha’s that we didn’t visit because by that time we were Buddha’d out for the day. You can see it on-line, if you have the vaguest interest. 

About this time I started to wonder just how much all this Buddha-building is costing this struggling society.  More about that later.  But I was glad that we had gone beyond Yangon.  The people in the country were obviously very poor but not obviously starving, the children playing happily, and the trip in and out was interesting.

For example I’m not sure how the electricity stays on.  The grid is similar to that in many parts of the world.  They have plenty of oil and gas so I suppose that’s how they generate the power. 

But it is all showing signs of terminal disrepair.  The High Tension grid, probably 330KV, has wires drooping so low in places that I almost expected to see dead cows or horses under them, killed by an arc from above.   

Local distribution, 11KV down to 240/220V on three phases,  is overhead on concrete poles but these are often tilted at crazy angles and in paces the wires are gone completely.  Are there whole streets without power or do they have some DIY grid of extension cords?

I looked out in amazement.

 

A bit of DIY here I think

 

I saw a number of large back-up diesel generators around the city but there was no evidence of a blackout in our hotel or in our ‘Annex’ next door. 

About our Annex. We had a nice recently built room with a view and a large modern en-suite that might have been in a four star hotel, until  we went to the single lift.   There were absolutely no hotel facilities, apart from a combined reception breakfast room on the third floor of the otherwise ramshackle building.  So we went to Traders, the considerably more upmarket adjacent establishment that featured quiet music, deep-pile carpets and a grand staircase.  It offered excellent coffee, 2 for 1 happy hour cocktails and very acceptable, generous and surprisingly inexpensive bar meals. 

It was also easier to have a cab drop us there than in our grubby one-way street around the corner.  The Traders door staff were initially peeved after they had helped us from the car and held the hotel door open only to have me declare, “just going for a walk, back later”.   But so we were.  Every evening.  Initially one remonstrated but after the second or third time they seemed to accept that we were guests.  But how did we return from our walk in different clothes?

The bar life was interesting too. One night a trio of obvious hookers were climbing all over a group of young, well-dressed, fit looking, Frenchmen.  The girls went from one to another.  Eventually I went over and asked one of the men why they were travelling together.  We had dismissed a sporting team as they were far too dissimilar in build,  perhaps military officers.  I got no satisfaction.  His reply: “we’re on a sex tour”.  That’s what I get for being nosey.

 

 

 

Inle Lake

Inle Lake is a sort of tenth scale Titicaca and one of Burma’s principal tourist attractions. 

 

Inle fisherman posing for us tourists

 

Many of the hotels, all built on wooden piers, were apparently built back before the 1962 military coup.  They are now dusting off the cobwebs for a new round of tourism.   I have to say that it is very picturesque but it is also very isolated.  Our hotel, although well appointed, with a pleasant bar and even a sort of coffee shop, a shop that sold ‘sort of coffee’, was not exactly a hub of exciting nightlife.  Maybe there is one that is among the dozens of almost identical establishments that dot the shoreline? 

Tour groups from a variety of European countries and Japan turned up around mid-morning and were off again the next morning early. 

 

 

Hotel - part raised part id the bar, room, night over the lake, Wendy WiFi

 

We spent a couple of nights, hired a boatman on the intervening day and got around to the local ‘manufacturing villages’ a larger farming village and a couple of restaurants.  

The farmers mainly grow vine fruit like tomatoes on trellises on mounds in the lake, picking and tending from boats.  

The manufacturing villages are not really so. They are tourist traps, similar to tourist traps all over the world. “The bus will stop here for a break.  There are free toilets and you can watch the local crafts people making wigwams for goose’s bridles.  You will get an excellent price on the genuine article, not like those cheap fakes you may see in the local markets.”   Women on looms, men at the jeweller’s bench or here in Inle on a forge, busily making one or two items that could conceivably be among those displayed in the show room.  But actually these are recently shipped from the real forge, from the NC milling machines or from a digital loom in the real factory.

A couple of times they didn’t even bother to start weaving and on another occasion later in our trip the young girl managed to add three entire threads to her fabric and had given up and gone back to chatting when we walked back that way. 

But it is often quite interesting to see how things used to be done by hand.  For example the blacksmith’s forge had an interesting bellows that consisted of two 6” dia tubes pumped with plungers on long sticks like two bike pumps.  One in each hand - one down then the other.  It would have been a trivial matter to fix a beam to create a more practical device.  As it stood it was not as good as an old blacksmith’s bellows.

 

Loom, traditional weaving, cheroot making, forging steel

 

Three guys with sledge hammers then hammered out a piece of red hot steel.  But they had it nowhere near hot enough for high carbon steel and hardly made an impression, except to demonstrate practiced timing, like bell ringers, and a lot of wasted energy.

I loved watching the complex looms.  When you watch the pattern repetition in the depression of the foot treadles selecting the warp, and the operator shuttle selection, you can see how Jacquard came up with the idea of programming the sequence to generate any given pattern, first demonstrated in 1801.  In retrospect it seems obvious.  He became the father of automation and digital programming and the inspiration for the later piano roll and punch cards.  I’m afraid I kept several women weaving for way over the usual three minute demonstration time.  I had no interest in the showroom that kept Wendy occupied for 20 minutes.

The show room contained about three hundred years’ worth of fabric, had it all come from their looms, running 24/7.  But you don’t need a sweat-shop-worker when a 1000 watt motor and an automated loom will do ten times more in half the time with fewer mistakes.  The skilled worker, and one or two are truly skilled, can now have a good life amusing tourists and taking long breaks between groups.

Inle Lake boasts a large shore-side temple, a monastery, with young and old monks and smitten Europeans and, needless to say, numerous pagodas. 

Among the most interesting objects are ball of gold to which men may apply more gold leaf.  Women may not approach.

 

 

Great balls of gold - Women may not approach. Would you let strange women near your balls?

 

From a building adjoining the temple there came an unusual cacophony.  Shoes off, up the stairs.  It was a kind of pop concert.  A well-dressed local woman, some kind of celebrity, had the microphone.  The performers and audience all sat on the floor,  men and women in separate clusters, like preschool.  It’s rude to stand when others are sitting.  We sat.  There was traditional accompaniment.  Unfortunately the soundman had no concept of top-end distortion - just loudness.  The audience didn’t seem to mind.  I just wanted to fix it but got out instead.

Wendy went to the adjoining markets. I took more photos.  Bored in hell.

I went and sat by a large bell, in the shade of its little gazebo. But then a wizened old bloke, with a huge toothless grin, came along and started demonstrating the bell to me by softly striking it with a large lump of wood. He seemed to mean well, apparently assuming that I didn’t understand the function of a bell and would find it interesting. I think he wanted me to applaud him for his genius at each gong.  But by that stage my amusement quotient was perilously close to zero and to me demonstrating what else could be done with a large lump of wood. I kept smiling unnaturally, insanity approaching.

I was quite enraptured by the motorised boats.  They are long and narrow and are all fitted with the same, distinctive, combined steering and propulsion system, that uses the boat propeller as a water pump to cool the engine.  It’s very clever. 

 

15-20HP single cylinder diesel motor, combined steering, propulsion and cooling system,
boat at full throttle 15+ knots, boats in line past pagodas

 

The mechanism allows the boats to raise the propeller to avoid chopping up the water hyacinth that clogs the channels and is a real menace in the lake.  They can move along at a very good speed, often throwing up a mighty mist of spray behind but generating little bow wave as they are flat bottomed and plane.

They all use a version of the standard agricultural single cylinder, four stroke, diesel engine seen everywhere, from vehicles to pumps and generators.  I googled the motor back at the hotel.   They are typically 15-20 HP made in China by several companies.  I did not see a single boat of any age or build that did not use this same mechanical configuration. I was impressed that the local boat builders have achieved this level of standardisation.  Someone clever in the background.

We were dubious about the roadworthiness of the car back.  It’s a long way back to the Airport at HeHo over some demanding hairpins.   And it seemed to struggle to get up the first hill.  But somehow we made it.

The road passes some impressive Victorian railway engineering.   It’s the old Rangoon to Mandalay railway built during the British-Indian period.  The railway was partly pulled up by the Japanese as they withdrew during WW2 but was restored in 1948 as the first great project after Independence.   It’s narrow gauge like the section of ‘death railway’ we travelled on in Thailand.  Full width carriages balance on metre wide track.  It’s a bit like a fat man on a tightrope and feels quite unstable.  So top speed is limited.  But they still manage to average 25mph from Yangon to Mandalay.  

 

 

 

Bagan

This place is famous for its 2200 temples and pagodas, the remains of some ten thousand at its peak.  Maybe we should have come here first.  By this point in our trip this was all getting a bit much. 

Some say Bagan is the equivalent of Angkor Watt but I couldn’t see it, except that it is much larger in overall scale.  Individually the structures are not impressive. 

 

Bagan - much the same in every direction

 

There is an old city wall and the remains of a moat but it is nowhere near as impressive as huge and the still functioning moat at Angkor Wat.

Bagan was built over hundreds of years on individual commissions.

We climbed to the top of a smaller semi-ruined pagoda near the hotel that provided a panoramic view well into the distance.  My father-in-law and his mate could have knocked a small one up in a month or two.  At some time not too long ago this one had been extensively repaired with modern materials and it is alleged that many have been growing in this manner since Bagan became a tourist attraction.  30,000 coming up.

 

Two others climbing up, original construction detail, panorama from the top, very similar one nearby

 

Angkor was built by a true tyrant.  It required the combined efforts of tens of thousands of craftsmen and unknown numbers of slave labourers for his lifetime.  And it remains unfinished. Even the stones lining the moat are works of art.  

This is the work of dilatants. Sure, like Angkor it’s a vast monument to man’s hubris, or perhaps a vain attempt to avoid hubris.  It’s the detritus of hundreds of years of futile construction attempting to secure a life after this.  It’s  akin to the Moai on Easter island and just as pointless. 

I gave it a chance.  But where is the craftsmanship?  I looked in vain for huge stones polished to a mirror or cut so fine a hair could not fit between or for stones covered in carvings of detailed subtlety.  What I got was a standardised brick and mortar structure, four big Buddha’s facing the points of the compass and numerous little ones in the connecting corridors. 

 

Numerous golden Buddhas - some very big

 

The largest structure in town is the modern Cultural Museum built in a couple of years, albeit with modern methods.  Even the largest of the historical structures would take a hundred brick layers next to no time.  Most of the detail being in the brick design, repetitive clay moulding. 

Architectural they are repetitious and boring with no particular merit except that one of the more recent ones features properly arched buttresses, unknown at Angkor.  This gave it the air of a western church.  It was far too small to be likened to a cathedral.  We both remarked almost simultaneously on how light and airy it was in the general heat and agreed that this was the nicest we had seen.  Good architecture does impress.

We walked a lot, caught a horse cab, not much faster but a lot easier on the legs, and a taxi to go further out.  I caught the strange bug that troubled me off and on for the rest of the trip and made me quite ill ‘til this moment. 

But the hotel was nice, overlooking the Irrawaddy.

 

 

 

The Irrawaddy (Ayeyarwady)

We left Bagan by boat heading for Mandalay.  It took 14 hours against the current. 

The travel guide had described the boat as 'nice'.  It was certainly preferable to 12 hours in a bus. It was possible to roam about and there was a sort of tea room on board with a free breakfast. But to call it 'nice' suggests a vessel that is ship-shape and well maintained.  That it was not.  The consolation was that it hadn't far to sink.

The river is monotonous, the only excitement being the really shallow spots where two crew members went forward and poled for the bottom, calling the depth, often less than two metres.  Commercial traffic consists of barges and low draft tugs and these are led by a small boat checking the depth ahead in the shallow reaches.  Several times our boat took advantage of this path finding.

 

On the boat: above:  two views of the morning coastline
below: seeking the bottom; and why is there a bowl of
dead vegetable-matter on the binnacle, good luck charm?

 

The river fisher-folk use quite sophisticated long symmetrical boats, built of planks with a distinctive stern and brow post. They are traditionally poled or paddled but, in this modern world, a proportion have been fitted with a small petrol motor on the stern with a long propeller shaft that drives them along quite quickly.

 

Riverside encampments and fishing boats

 

There were occasional riverside encampments for fishers but the true banks are way off in the distance. It was reminiscent of the Nile.

A highlight was the Pakokku Bridge, an enormously long (3.5 km) combined road and rail bridge that was opened with great fanfare in January 2012.  It has a nominal clearance of 16 metres but the maximum river height is clearly evident on the concrete pylons which, I guess, reduces the clearance to around eleven metres, still ample for most river traffic.  It’s a conventional riveted steel truss bridge that might have been built in the 1930’s. Riveting is very labour intensive. 

Conventional and labour intensive or not, it is obviously of considerable future economic significance as it provides one of the few modern crossings of this river. The Irrawaddy together with its tributaries historically defined Burma, as a distinct from the communities of the other great river systems, the Ganges and Mekong, separated by mountainous regions to the West, North and East.

 

Pakokku Bridge - road and rail - the longest in Myanmar

 

 

Mandalay

In his book  Burmese Days  George Orwell said of Mandalay in the 1930’s:  ‘it is rather a disagreeable town — it is dusty and intolerably hot, and it is said to have five main products all beginning with P, namely, pagodas, pariahs, pigs, priests and prostitutes’.

Eighty years later and the priests are now monks.  The pariahs, people of mixed race and accepted by neither community, and the pigs, are no longer obvious but have have be replaced by another P - pollution.  This is generated by wood burning, thousands of motorbikes and now more than a few new expensive cars. 

 

Nissan Z sports, new Honda and Toyota - note the dust that has settled on the parked cars

 

Much of the city still resembles a war zone with decaying infrastructure piles of rubble and many unpaved or once paved streets.  But Myanmar is recovering economically and commerce is on the rise even in Mandalay.  There are a lot of new cars in the street and thousands of motor bikes, all contributing to the haze, along with the wood smoke from cooking.

 

The back street seen from one of our hotel windows and two more streets nearby
note the worker towards the top of the building scaffold - no harness, no shoes

 

Mandalay is recovering as the religious, commercial and administrative centre of Central Myanmar on the mighty Irrawaddy.  It owes this status first to King Mindon and then to the British who kept it as an administrative centre and built the first modern bridges here.   The ‘old flotilla’ of the song, and original poem, refers to a fleet of paddle steamers that the British used to steam up the river to take Mandalay and to overthrow the new Burmese king who had been accused of a massacre to come illegitimately to the throne.  

Actually it was not him. It was his mother-in-law. 

 

Mandalay Fort

Mandalay was established by King Mindon a Buddhist prince who was reincarnated from a woman who cut off her breasts for the Buddha on top of the hill that dominates the town.

In 1857 he established the city as the site of his court.  Near the city centre centre he enclosed the huge square area 2.5 km on each side, now known as Mandalay Fort.  It is surrounded by 8 metre high walls and a giant moat 230 ft. (70m) wide. 

 

Left: a section of the moat around The Fort (to its right) - seen from The Hill through the smog,
Right: the view of The Hill along the moat 360 degrees the other way - photo from Google Maps

 

At the centre of the enclosure he built a large royal palace compound.  It resembled the wooden palace buildings in the forbidden city in Beijing.  It housed himself, 62 queens and their 110 children, as well as the other women and the eunuch’s of his household.   Public pavilions included several large audience chambers in which to conduct the affairs of state.  It must have consumed an entire forest but it is nevertheless dwarfed by the surrounding parkland.

 

A section of the recreated palace - the little kennels on top are lookouts for non-castrated men sneaking in.
The white building with the pool is real - from the British period - as opposed to recreated in concrete.

 

In many respects King Mindon was a modernist, reforming the public sector, supporting free trade and press freedom.  He encouraged one of his brothers who was very enthusiastic about introducing new technology and his kingdom made rapid economic progress.  Unfortunately his court was a hot-bed of intrigue and the good brother was murdered by a couple of the bad ones. 

When he was dying one of his wives, Hsinbyumashin, claimed that he wanted to see every possible heir one last time.  As they arrived she had them killed, except her daughter and son-in-law, her daughter's half-brother Thibaw, who became king and queen.

King Thibaw ruled for seven years, evil queen Hsinbyumashin pulling the strings behind the throne.  He took several more wives presumably all selected by Hsinbyumashin.   There are photographs in the museum that now stands on the site.  She had good taste.

 

One of several reception halls, the main reception, historic photos of  King Mindon and some wives, outdoors

 

At this period the photographic record began to grow and there are also surviving clothes and household effects, including a crystal bed imported from France. 

The old British East India Company had expanded its influence across the sub-continent and secured its commercial interests through a series of accommodations with local princes under which they continued to rule locally but had their territorial ambitions and their military powers curtailed.  But after the Indian Mutiny the Company was disbanded.  And in 1877 Queen Victoria became Empress of India and southern Burma.  From that time onwards the British, in Rangoon were looking for a reason to absorb the northern kingdom into greater India. They continued to dispute Thibaw's legitimacy.  In 1885 they used the ‘old flotilla’ to force him to abdicate and sent him into exile, thus securing control of the whole of Burma.

They took over part of the palace as a Governor’s residence.  Other palace buildings became an officer's club and the surrounding grounds, within the moat and walls, a military fort.   It remains so today, although not too many armies would be proud to put it on display.  The quarters of the married troops were a sight to behold.  Although they were two story buildings laid out in military style, as one might see in other military bases all around the world, these looked like a giant over-populated squat.

 

The Japanese

In May 1942 Mandalay fell to the Japanese when the British withdrew after heavy air raids and the loss of air superiority.  The fort was targeted and the nineteenth century wooden palace caught fire.  It was largely destroyed.  Two more masonry colonial brick buildings on the site and numerous small decorative walls survived, as can be seen in the photograph above.

Under Colonial rule, Indian and Anglo-Indians had begun to dominate commerce. Rangoon had become and Indian city with a higher living standard than any in India.  Growing urban wealth contrasted with relative rural poverty, much as in Thailand today. 

The country was undergoing a resources boom based on timber and oil.  Rural people and local tribes, of which there are many, felt left-out and saw their country being exploited by foreigners.   So initially the Japanese were welcomed by much of the indigenous population. 

But it did not take long to discover they had gone from frying-pan to fire.  This was not helped by Japanese racism, that made the British pukka sahib look like a loving uncle, the Japanese proclivity for taking reprisals, like the massacre of 600 at Kalagong village, and their enslaving local tribes to work on the Thai (Siamese) - Burma railway.

When the British-Indian army returned, regional fighters threw their support behind the ‘liberators’.

The Japanese were removed from Mandalay with considerable additional collateral damage to the town and fort and the loss of 112 troops, predominantly from an Indian Army Gurkha battalion that retook Mandalay hill.  They are still memorialised there.  The number of Japanese who died is not recorded.

The Japanese held The Fort for some time.  It’s actually an excellent fortification against ground troops, with its wide moat and solid walls quite infantry and tank proof.  The Indian regiments shelled it.  More damage was done.

So some time in the late 1960’s it became a matter of pride for the Junta to restore the old palace and with it the memory of the glorious days of the Burmese Empire.   A replica was built in fireproof concrete, with corrugated steel roofs, painted to look like the original.  Allegedly they used slave labour, which was probably quite true to the original.  The whole site is essentially a museum and has the more formal museum within it.  Most of it is unused and much beloved by the birds that nest in it.  But for some reason they still insist that you take off your shoes to wonder among the droppings.

 

Mandalay Hill

The faithful climb the Hill barefoot via long covered staircases. We ascended by cab. The view from the top is panoramic but it was obscured by the smog and dust that blankets the city side.

 

Bottom of the steps, steps at the top, view away from the city, memorial to 4th Gurkha Rifles March 1945

 

The cab returned us to the centre where there are markets and restaurants catering to backpackers.

Sitting over lunch I realised that I no longer had my camera.  Shit!  It must be in the cab.  OK, we got the cab from the Fort.  Maybe he went back there? 

I grabbed a motor bike taxi guy jumped on the pillion and asked him to go like the wind.  Long story (that involves a second taxi-bike, a long walk and one guy giving the other his lunch) cut short - I recovered my camera.

 

 

Religion

In Burma there are tens of thousands of Buddhist paya, temples and pagodas. The latter typically contain multiple Buddha statues so there must be hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps millions.

The economic impact of all this pagoda building and idol fabrication is intriguing.  Burma has its own gold and except for imports most consumption on religion is keeping the local economy turning.  But there is an opportunity cost in diverting the physical resources and human time and energy.

Boys spend part of their youth as monks or acolytes. Wealthy families can afford to sponsor them longer than the poor. But any boy can and should go. It is voluntary but all religious study and sacrifice counts towards a better life next time ultimately reaching Nirvana, perfect happiness and grace(?).

Lack of good works and/or religious practice and a failure to earn merit will result in being reincarnated lower next time as an animal or a woman. Similar to Muslim and Christian hell except you can buy out, by earning merit, and upgrade again next time. It's an eternity of incarnations not just an eternity of whatever.

Actually the status of women seems to be under revision. In Burmese Days Orwell remarks that in the 1930’s women were lower ranked than animals.  But now there are even female monks.

If you have done something particularly bad, coming back as something unpleasant can be avoided by a grand sacrifice like constructing a pagoda.

Small sacrifices include buying gold leaf and applying it to various Buddha images or balls of gold. Women are precluded from these particular practices.

 

Gold-leaf merit is not available to women

 

But a noble soul can also intercede on your behalf as did the Buddha himself on behalf of a women who cut off her breasts for him up Mandalay Mountain way. She came back 2400 years later as Prince Mindon.

The combined economic implications of these practices are vast. So it comes down to values. Many people are desperately poor.  But is material wellbeing more important than the spiritual? 

People seem to be fed and relatively healthy. There is a certain charm to very well behaved little boys with shaven heads in burgundy togas sitting about studying scripture.

On the whole the Buddhist religion, like most, espouses values that few could take issue with. They are steadfastly good, if a little puritanical. But unlike some other religions they are universally embracing, welcoming people of all beliefs equally to their buildings. They don't exclude unbelievers.

One could argue that by mobilising that part of the economy presently dedicated to avoiding coming back as a frog to more commercial activity they could improve overall material wealth and well-being in this life.

Maybe not everyone truly believes this but it's Pascal's Wager:  is it worth the risk of coming back as a frog?  If they are right, it’s they who will have the last laugh, as Pascal might have argued. But of course he foolishly cast his lot with Christianity. He is presently calculating the area of a lily-pad and the pressure it exerts.

With lower population growth in Buddhist countries where celibacy is encouraged, poverty is not as evident as elsewhere in the old India.  On the other hand male celibacy results in a surfeit of single women and encourages the exploitation of women and prostitution. But unlike some the religion, nor any interpretation of it, does not call for women to be put to death or to be ritually raped for not complying with some bizarre ritual or custom.

In Burma there are few beggars, if you don't count the monks. I suppose that it's difficult to compete with them. Technically the monks are not begging, they are offering you the opportunity to make a personal sacrifice to gain merit towards your next incarnation. 

But all is not rosy,  average life expectancy is not much more than 60, partly due to failure to control AIDS, mainly for religious reasons.

 

 

Religious minorities

The main religious minorities are Christian and Muslim.

The Christians seem to have coalesced.  In Yangon, although there is a substantial Roman Catholic church, the Anglican Rangoon Cathedral holds a Roman Mass in addition to Holy Communion. It has some hastily added laminated stations of the cross hung around the walls of the nave.  Maybe the Catholic church is undergoing renovations?  Pukka sahib turning in his grave!

But there is still a residual or perhaps recently arrived Hindu minority and some villages still retain various animist beliefs so that there are strange things being worshiped all over the place, like twin ceramic cobras with dog faces at the Buddhist temple at the top of Mandalay Hill. Buddha turning in where-ever!

 

Ceramic cobras with dog faces - you can feed them money - for merit luck - intervention?

 

 

A personal view - to be skipped if you have traditional religious views

As I have said elsewhere, continuing to believe something that is demonstrably wrong means that you are making decisions based on faulty data and those decisions are very likely to be wrong.  The following propositions are among those believed by the ancients that are demonstrably wrong:

• life is recreated anew with each living thing
• a man carries the seed that gives life to a baby
• the heart is the centre of our emotions and other qualities
• there is a being in each of us separate to our body
• there is a life force
• there are such things as ghosties and ghoulies and long legged beasties and things that go bump in the night (from a Scottish prayer)

 

Theocratically based cultures could improve their decision making by rejecting any of these false propositions they still adhere to and by accepting two simple propositions:

1   Physical, sensory, evidence is the only evidence any of us have of anything in the Universe. All else is just unfettered human imagination.

2   The overwhelming accumulated physical evidence is that the two cells that combined to form us were both alive before we were conceived. They were part of a continuum of cells that has continued to divide and stay alive, evolving in many directions, for nearly four thousand million years on Earth.  We inherited that life from our parents and may hand it on if we have children.  In due course, like every living animal, bacterium and plant, including the colony of cells that is us, we will cease to function viably and we will die.  Living cells and cellular colonies die by loosing organisation.  It is a one way process: life to death - disorder. There can be no return to life from the constituent chemicals or cellular components once their order is disrupted.  Further, our consciousness is an artefact of our individual and unique physical brain and the way it is ordered.  Sentience is a phenomenon supported by cellular ordering. This becomes obvious when consciousness degrades as we age due to cells not being replaced in our brains or to other neural dysfunction. Consciousness certainly ceases altogether with bodily death.

Thus any belief in a ‘life’ after death, reincarnation or communications with ancestors is based on misinformation - imagination allowed to go wild.

There is nothing wrong with imagination in its place. It makes us human and sustains us all.  Creativity, story telling, fantasising, even lying are fundamental to both our inner life and social existence.    But as a result, our imaginative flights are very influential and need to be restrained and verified by actual tests, experiments, when applied to physical reality.

To reframe the question I put earlier:  Is material wellbeing more important than the intellectual life of the imagination? 

For me the answer is both are important. Individually it's about maximising our enjoyment of this 'brief candle' we've unexpectedly had thrust upon us. The balance between the physical and the intellectual varies between individuals but there is always a balance. 

So there, I agree with Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha, in at least one central respect - the middle way.

At its best Religion is the accumulation of past wisdom, including sensible precepts for social relationships.

Unfortunately religion may also engender a tendency to revere certain leaders and ideologies, leading to periodic periods of despotism, as Burma has repeatedly experienced.

Scepticism about people and their abilities, and particularly about their divine authority to rule, is not a bad thing.   

In the land of the gullible and naive the thieves and sophisticates rule.

It is much healthier as people do in Australia, many religious alike, to expect our leaders to behave like the man or woman next door, with no more brains or ability or honesty.  Thus many Catholics are just as likely to find fault with the local priest, his cardinal or the Pope as anyone else.  They just pray he will improve.

 

Goodbye once noble Burma!  You’re not the nicest place I’ve been to but hopefully you’re struggling to your feet once again.

 

More Photos of Myanmar