East Asia

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:

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.