Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (3 page)

The French had similar dreams. A generation earlier, the explorers Ernest Doudart de Lagrée and Francis Garnier had travelled from Saigon up the Mekong in the hopes of finding a viable route to the Chinese interior, but they returned disappointed, Doudart de Lagrée dying from exhaustion and the formidable diseases contracted along the way. On a map the Mekong looked promising, but the French discovered that deep gorges and treacherous rapids would block any significant upriver traffic from their coastal bases in Indochina.

The British too eventually grasped the enormity of the physical challenge. A direct overland route from Calcutta was deemed impossible. From Bengal the Brahmaputra River ran for hundreds of miles northeast, but hundreds more miles of thickly forested and malarial mountains separated the upper Brahmaputra from the headwaters of the Irrawaddy and then China. The costs would be astronomical.

But what about going by the Irrawaddy itself? This seemed more promising. Ships could sail from Calcutta and Madras to newly conquered Rangoon and then off-load their cargo somewhere up the river. Railways could then connect these upriver ports with China. In 1885, British forces had utterly defeated the army of the last king of Burma, Thibaw, and soon a railway line was being extended north and east from Mandalay, through the Shan Hills to within a stone’s throw of the Chinese frontier.

The French explorer Prince Henri d’Orléans saw the potential and tried to warn his countrymen of the prize that he believed was coming within British reach. He was a grandson of King Louis-Philippe of France and a virulent anglophobe, famous in Europe for his sword duel against the Italian Prince Vittorio Emanuel (after Prince Henri had called the Italian soldiers in Abyssinia ‘cowards’). In the 1890s Prince Henri had travelled from Siberia to Siam and then to Africa before returning to Asia and trekking along the China–Burma–India borderlands. He felt certain that this region, situated as it was between the world’s two most populous regions, would one day be of huge significance, and only hated the fact that Britain and not France held the strategic land bridge–Burma–that lay in between.

The British, though, would find turning concept into reality far harder than anticipated. The problem was partly geographical and partly political. Yes, the last British outposts were now close to the Chinese frontier, but ‘China proper’ was still a long way away. Across the border were not the big cities of the Chinese interior but the wild and rugged province of Yunnan. Mountains, torrential rivers and deep ravines running a distance equal to that from Paris to Rome would still need to be traversed.

There were monumental political challenges as well. In China, a series of blood-soaked uprisings had left literally tens of millions dead, and the Manchu or Qing dynasty that had governed China for centuries was hobbling on its last legs. In the 1850s and 1860s, the Taiping Rebellion, led by a charismatic quasi-Christian leader named Hong Xiuquan (who believed in God, Christ, and himself as Christ’s ‘Little Brother’), had shaken Manchu rule to its very foundations. Meanwhile, in the southwest, Muslim rebels had grabbed control of Yunnan, the province next to Burma, and held the borderlands for years. Beijing’s authority over its distant provinces was weakening fast; warlords were replacing mandarins.

Burma was not going to be a back door to China, not yet.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, prospects of a road to China had been forgotten, and Rangoon, as the capital of British Burma, developed instead as a port for local exports–rice mainly, but also timber and petroleum oil. And in this way Rangoon grew rich. The Shwedagon remained at the centre of the new, sprawling city, with its tree-lined avenues, lakes and gardens, and the many and handsome homes of its official and business elite. Along the river to the south was a modern downtown, carefully laid out on a grid pattern, with its government and commercial offices, colonnaded shops and hotels, and rows of apartment blocks. A largely English administrative class presided over the colonial apparatus; Scots dominated trade. The big companies of the day–Steel Brothers (rice), the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation (timber), Burmah Oil, and the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, were all in Glaswegian hands. And millions of Indians, from every part of the subcontinent, streamed into Rangoon in search of new lives and new opportunities.

The British had initially hoped that Burma might be a back door to China. But for the Burmese, British rule led instead to a much closer connection with India than ever before. Rather than making Burma a separate colony (like Ceylon, now Sri Lanka), the one-time kingdom was annexed to British India, and governed as just another province, no different than, say, Bengal or the Punjab.

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. All this came from India, with movement into Burma unchecked and for a long time positively encouraged. By the late 1920s Rangoon even 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. There were Chinese too, and smaller communities of Europeans, Americans and even Latin Americans (the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda lived in Rangoon briefly in the 1920s). The Cambridge political economist and long-time Burma civil servant J. S. Furnivall invented the term ‘plural society’ to describe Rangoon’s mix of nationalities. Steam ships fastened Rangoon to Calcutta and then, with the start of air travel, Rangoon became a hub for all of Asia. Flights to Sydney from London on British Imperial Airways, or to Jakarta from Amsterdam on KLM, were all routed via Rangoon. World-class schools and a top-notch university helped create a cosmopolitan and politically active middle class.

But then this world came crashing down. First came the Japanese invasion and four years of bitter fighting, including the aerial bombing of Rangoon. Hundreds of thousands of Indians fled. Then in 1948 came independence from Britain, followed immediately by civil war, Rangoon itself at one point being besieged by rebel armies. And finally came the military take-over of 1962, which overthrew the last elected Burmese government and promptly shut off the country from the outside world. Many in the remaining Indian community, in particular the professional and business class, were expelled. This period of self-imposed isolation would last for a quarter of a century, and in the process Rangoon was remade in spirit from global entrepôt to backwater village, its stately if decrepit architecture the only sign of more affluent days.

Rangoon was my introduction to Asia. I first visited in 1974, on the occasion of my grandfather’s funeral. I was then eight years old and was living with my family in New York. The country was in the full grip of General Ne Win’s ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’, isolated, impoverished, with his army fighting little insurgencies in the hills. I would go back most years after that, sometimes for just a week or two, sometimes for the entire summer, spending time with my many relatives, in Rangoon and elsewhere in the country.

Rangoon in those days–in the late 1970s and early 1980s–seemed entirely cut off from the late twentieth century. There were few telephones or cars on the streets, almost no television (broadcasts were limited to a couple of hours a day), no supermarkets or modern shops of any kind. It was easy then to imagine the days of the British Raj. There was the big red-brick High Court along Fytche Square and the Holy Trinity (Anglican) Cathedral nearby, the massive Secretariat complex further to the east, and the whitewashed neo-Palladian Customs House. There was the derelict building that had housed Rowe and Co., once a fashionable department store favoured by English and Scottish housewives. And the Empire Theatre, where John Gielgud had performed
Hamlet
. The Minto Mansions, a sprawling hotel that had boasted ‘the only French chef in the Indies’, was destroyed during the Second World War, but its competitor, the Strand, was still there, charging $20 a night to the trickle of visitors who still came. And near the intersection of Phayre Street and Merchant Street were the magnificent Edwardian buildings that had been home to Lloyds and the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, Thomas Cook and the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, all remaining, together with other smaller offices in a mix of art-deco and local styles, in what was perhaps one of the best-preserved colonial cityscapes anywhere in the world.

Rangoon was like a big empty movie set, the Burmese themselves like supporting actors still hanging around after the main stars had left. It was a city waiting for a new role.

In 1988 nationwide protests came close to overthrowing the military regime, protests that saw hundreds of thousands take to the streets before they were brutally crushed. And in its aftermath a new junta was formed, maintaining an iron grip on power, but jettisoning the autarkic policies of its predecessors and beginning, tentatively at least, to open up the economy and the country to the outside world. General Ne Win, in charge since 1962, quietly faded into the background. A new leader, General Than Shwe, began consolidating his hold. Burmese socialism was dead. But what would come next?

New political forces had emerged in the aftermath of the failed 1988 uprising, and by 1990 these forces–united primarily by their hostility to military rule–had coalesced around the ‘National League for Democracy’, or NLD, led by Aung San Suu Kyi. At the height of the 1988 protests, the regime had promised ‘multi-party elections’ and in 1990 made good on their word. Why they did this remains somewhat of a mystery, given the enormous groundswell of opposition and talk of retribution. Perhaps they under-estimated the degree of public anger; perhaps they felt they had little choice but to proceed. The ruling junta likely hoped for a fractured parliament, one that the army could still dominate from behind the scenes. But when the NLD won a resounding 60 per cent of the vote, the regime prevaricated, without a clear plan, determined only not to cede power to their most outspoken foes.

The year after the election, the leader of the NLD, Aung San Suu Kyi, then in her mid-forties, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, propelling her to international stardom. A long-time Oxford housewife and the daughter of Burma’s nationalist martyr General Aung San, she had returned to Burma shortly before the 1988 uprising, and then moved assertively into the political arena. Her tactics were inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and she hoped that peaceful demonstrations would eventually melt military intransigence. She called for ‘national unity’ and spoke of a ‘second struggle for independence’. She also called for the economic embargoes that were subsequently imposed by Western governments whilst at the same time asking for dialogue with the top army chiefs. Over the next twenty years, hundreds of her supporters would be jailed, and she herself would suffer long periods under house-arrest.

During the periods that she was free, people flocked to hear her speak. And she spoke in clear and simple terms about the importance of political freedom and respect for basic human rights. I had met her in 1987 when she was living in Oxford and I was in my final year at university. We talked about movies and old family friends and she struck me even then, in her living room, with books all around and her younger son, Kim, playing on the floor, as charismatic and self-assured. By the mid-1990s she was a world-famous icon, a challenge to the notion that democracy in Asia was a Western import, and the main protagonist in a morality play that set her and her movement against a thuggish and shadowy tyranny.

The generals, though, were unmoved. Sanctions strained relations with the West but they did little to convince the generals of a need to shift direction. And so the regime settled into the kind of authoritarian crony-capitalism familiar in the region, trading less with the West and more with the growing economies of the East, oblivious to the ‘demands’ for change from far-away London or Washington.

Rangoon acquired a veneer of normalcy, at least for those who could afford it. By the early 2000s, there were several well-appointed hotels, as well as cafés and restaurants (‘Le Planteur’ and ‘L’Opera’), many set in renovated colonial bungalows and offering a range of world cuisines, from Italian to Korean. The new international airport was sleek and efficient, all light and glass and polished floors. New air-conditioned cinemas served up the latest Hollywood films and the first supermarkets and shopping malls sold the latest in international goods. There were even bars like 50th Street Bar and Grill, and Ginki Kids, with a big poster of Kurt Cobain on the wall, offering a selection of Thai snacks and draft beer. Satellite television was widely available and internet cafés sprouted up around town.

It was still, however, a poor city. There were many more cars but they were generally wrecks, old Nissans and Toyotas from the 1980s that almost anywhere else would have long ago wound up on the scrap heap. The pavements were potholed and whilst the old colonial buildings still seemed impressive, the newer ones tended to look mean and ill-made. Away from the city centre were poorer neighbourhoods still, with few social services and for many hours a day no electricity. It was not a grinding poverty. There were few beggars or homeless people. And people carried on as in any big city, walking to work or taking the bus, enjoying themselves with friends at a local teahouse, parents collecting their kids from school. But it was a poverty that seemed increasingly pointless, in what was a naturally rich and bountiful land.

And then came the tragedy.

On 2 May 2008 the city and the vast expanse of low-lying countryside to the west were battered by a cyclone of unprecedented size and ferocity. Cyclone Nargis swirled around the Bay of Bengal and then careered slowly across the flat delta of the Irrawaddy River, its 130 mile per hour winds driving a wall of water across the little villages and towns, much like the Boxing Day tsunami that had devastated Aceh in 2004. The results were catastrophic, by far the worst natural disaster in the history of Burma, killing over a hundred thousand people and making homeless and leaving utterly destitute millions of others. In Rangoon itself few people were killed but over ten thousand old trees were downed, roofs blown away and power lines destroyed.