Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (5 page)

This has worried the bureaucrats and politicians in New Delhi, Asia’s other rising power. After a few years of all-out support for Burma’s pro-democracy opposition, India reversed course in the mid-1990s, alarmed at China’s growing influence with the junta. US- and UK-led sanctions had essentially dealt the West out of the game, but for Washington and London Burma was not particularly important and the price of failure not very high. For India, however, the costs of a Chinese-dominated Burma were unacceptable, and Delhi began to compete with Beijing for access and influence.

To many in Burma, India is in some ways a much more familiar place than China, in large part because of the ancient bonds of religion. An old aunt of mine recently spent a considerable part of her life savings to travel to India on a Buddhist pilgrimage, flying to Calcutta and then taking a bus with many other pilgrims to the sacred sites in Bihar related to the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment and teaching. It was a dream of a lifetime. There is a natural or at least historical pull towards India that perhaps is not there with China. But it is unclear whether this will be a major factor going forward. The Indian government too has promised roads and new investments and trade has expanded considerably, but nothing on the scale of what is moving in from the northeast. The momentum for now is coming from Beijing.

The tea shop was on the ground floor of an old art-deco office building from the 1920s. Next door was a bookstore, with a bill board in front advertising Burmese translations of Obama’s
Dreams from My Father
, Fareed Zakaria’s
The Post-American World
, and Thomas Friedman’s
Hot, Flat and Crowded
. And out front on the pavement was a man selling DVDs, the DVDs neatly arranged by category on a little folding table, and a woman next to him with ancient copies of
Life
and
National Geo graphic
stacked up on a dirty blanket on the ground. There was a smell of diesel from the ramshackle buses that passed by, as well as an occasional whiff of apples, from two large baskets, fresh from the Shan Hills, that were going for around 50 US cents each.

I was meeting old friends. Like nearly all men in Rangoon, they were avid followers of English Premier League football, and every now and then glanced at the Arsenal–Manchester City match showing on the small television screen at the far end of the shop. After a while I brought up Burma’s relations with India and China. They said China was definitely a growing influence, on the government and on the economy, but that it was difficult to say exactly what impact both countries were having now. One was an academic. He said: ‘I’ve read as well about all the different plans but it’s not made any difference in Rangoon. We still don’t even have proper electricity or running water! Being in between India and China should benefit us, and hopefully it will, but we have so many of our own problems to sort out first.’

Distance and Burma’s long isolation meant that the great changes taking place at the other ends of Asia were not yet strongly felt. The Indian presence was like a relic of British times, far from the India of world-dominating software firms and Booker prize-winning authors. And the Chinese community in Rangoon was linked to a past diaspora, only tangentially tied to the rising superpower next door. The Burmese could still focus inward, but this inwardness, always before an option, would soon, I felt, no longer be possible. It seemed inevitable that the power and energy of the new China and the new India would eventually close in, for better or for worse, even if for now they remained like ocean swells far from shore.

Everybody, though, mentioned Mandalay. ‘Mandalay’s like a Chinese city now,’ they said. I found this difficult to believe. I had been to Mandalay many times, as recently as 2004. It had been the seat of the last Burmese kings and about as sleepy a place as one can imagine. ‘You won’t believe the changes, the Chinese have taken over,’ I was told. I had already planned to visit Mandalay and over the next couple of weeks would travel there, and then across the Shan Hills to the Chinese border, along what had once been called the ‘Burma Road’.

When I was growing up and visiting Burma on holidays with my family, we would often take the train from Rangoon to Mandalay. The trains were old diesel trains with hard wooden seats, the windows kept open to let in the breeze. And from the windows we could see the villages in the distance, villages that looked like islands of tall trees, the little bamboo and wooden houses barely visible as we passed by, clusters of dark green set here and there amongst the fields. At the different stops men and women in faded
longyis
crowded beneath the windows to try and sell snacks and cups of tea and we would sometimes buy a simple dish, like biriani rice served on a banana leaf. It took at least fourteen hours to travel the 500 miles inland to Mandalay, but there must have been even slower trains, as the one we always took was called ‘The Mandalay Express’.

This time, in early 2009, I went on a small propeller plane, run by Air Mandalay, one of the new private airlines. On boarding, I noticed that there were two uniformed army officers already in front and a Buddhist monk, sitting alongside them. These are the two special classes of people in the world of Burmese travel, who always receive an automatic upgrade. At least a few others on the flight were Chinese (I could hear them speaking Mandarin) and one was a Burmese girl in her twenties, with blue dyed hair and wearing a mini-skirt, a strange sight in a country where people still tend to dress fairly conservatively. Others looked like businessmen and were carrying attaché cases. We all sat silently during the flight, as air hostesses in smart maroon outfits handed out copies of the government-run
New Light of Myanmar
and offered tiny sandwiches and a choice of Coke or Sprite in little plastic cups.

Burma is a fairly big country, the size of France and Britain combined, and from the plane I saw the wet paddy fields of the Irrawaddy delta fade away, replaced first by forested hills, and then the savannah and scrublands of upper Burma.

After about fifty minutes, we made an uneventful landing at Mandalay International Airport. ‘International Airport’ was a statement of ambition. Empty shops lined the big empty terminal and there were three baggage carousels, all to service just me and the two dozen or so other passengers. No other arrivals or departures that day were listed on the overhead information board. And as the rest of us waited for our luggage, I saw the Chinese men from the plane collecting a large crate of Johnny Walker Black Label whisky together with two sets of golf clubs, before speeding away in a waiting black Toyota Landcruiser into the dry and dusty landscape outside.

At first, Mandalay appeared reassuringly the same. From the airport I took a taxi to my hotel, a small place down a quiet residential street, and from there started on a long walk along the old palace wall. Mandalay is set on a plain, with the Irrawaddy to the west and the Shan Hills to the east. The palace complex itself was destroyed during the Second World War but the great walls still remained, a perfect square a mile long on each side, surrounded by a wide moat and then by whitewashed pavements and big trees. I remembered from my last trip that there had been a big red sign along the moat declaring in both Burmese and English the ‘People’s Desire’ (with points like ‘Crush all Internal and External Destructive Elements’ and my favourite: ‘Oppose Those Holding Negative Views’), but this was now obscured by greenery.

A giant chess board had been set up near one corner of the moat, and as I passed a small crowd was sitting and standing around watching a game. A few cars and bicycle rickshaws meandered along the adjacent road and nearby were old homes, in varying states of disrepair, as well as a few newer-looking restaurants and shops. The red-brick Methodist church looked unchanged as did the larger Anglican church, where in the 1860s King Mindon had sent some of his sons to be educated. A couple of dark, wiry men, shirtless and in kickboxing shorts, were jogging. Later that morning, a grand procession rolled past, led by a flat-bed truck with three little boys dressed like princes perched on top. On the next truck were a dozen or so traditional musicians, playing horns and drums, their music amplified by a loudspeaker. They were all on their way to a monastery (I presumed) where the pretend princes would be ordained as novice monks, probably for a just few days or weeks, a rite of passage for all Buddhist Burmese boys. Their parents, family and friends followed behind in a dozen or more slow-moving cars.

Just to the north, a few miles away, was Mandalay Hill, older than Mandalay itself. The hill is nearly a thousand feet high and rises like a cone above the otherwise entirely flat topography; 1,729 wooden steps go all the way to the top. Along the way up are many platforms and pavilions; some have pagodas, others monasteries and areas for quiet prayer and meditation. Women behind little tables sell flowers and pennants for visitors to leave at the many Buddha images, as well as savoury snacks like fried Indian samosas, and postcards for the few tourists who come. There are flame trees with blood-red flowers and rest areas with paintings, mainly from the nineteenth century, including some depicting the various Buddhist hells in gory detail, cartoon-like images of people being boiled in a vat or made to climb up cactus-like trees. And, close to the summit, there is a big statue of the Buddha, standing with an outstretched arm pointing towards the city below. According to legend the Buddha himself came to the hill and prophesied that a great Buddhist capital would one day be built.

There are many other historic and sacred sites within a day’s drive of Mandalay, for the city was built in what was, for hundreds of years, the heartland of successive kingdoms. Early Burmese history is still hazy. But we know from recent archaeological work that this middle part of the Irrawaddy valley has been continuously inhabited for a very long time and that as early as the second millennium
BC
people in upper Burma were already turning copper into bronze, growing rice and domesticating chickens and pigs, and were among the very first in the world to do so. By around the fifth century
BC
the first signs of ironworking had appeared and a few centuries later came the earliest attempts to irrigate this parched land. Big settlements and little walled towns were followed by the first kingdoms. Two hundred miles down the Irrawaddy from Mandalay, along a bend in the Irrawaddy River, are the ruins of Pagan (also spelled Bagan), where literally thousands of temples still remain, strewn across miles of near-desert terrain.

There were influences from many directions, and through the first millennium
AD
the links northward, towards what is today Yunnan in China, were strong. The Chinese, at least by the time of the Tang dynasty (roughly contemporaneous with the Dark Ages in Europe), knew of the kingdoms along the Irrawaddy, and Tang archives record that at the very beginning of the ninth century, a visiting troupe of musicians from Burma travelled to the Tang court and performed songs entitled ‘The Victory of the Ram’ and ‘The Peacock King’. And the Tang were great connoisseurs of exotica, delighting in strange things, from dark-skinned dwarfs from the South Seas, to beautiful Turkish and Japanese dancing girls, to these outlandish performers from faraway Burma.

These early ties with China were important, but it was knowledge of India that would quicken and transform Burmese civilization. Today, in an age when many of us have flown or driven long distances by car, but have never ventured far by ship, we forget that in early times travelling by ship was often much easier and faster than going overland. Until very recently, the great cities of China lay months away from central Burma, an arduous and often fatal trek on foot or by mule. The overland road to India was equally difficult. But India was also across the sea, its vibrant eastern ports a quick and simple sail away. And it was from these ports, in Bengal, Orissa and the Coromandel Coast, that new ideas and innovations, from mathematics and astronomy to notions of kingship to Buddhism itself, were eagerly imported. To this day, the Burmese word for university is
tekkatho
, a derivation of Taxila, a long-disappeared city in what is now the Swat valley, today a hotbed of Taliban activity, but once a great centre of Hellenistic and Buddhist learning.

It is important also to remember that these early Burmese kingdoms had nothing like the country’s present borders. On a map today India, Burma, and China all meet up. But until the onset of British rule, no state power controlled the vast upland regions that separated the centres of Indian and Chinese authority. The Burmese kingdom was a little state in the middle of a thousand-mile stretch of peoples without any state, small chieftainships or tribal groups that owed no allegiance to a higher power.

The link with Indian ideas gave Burmese kings a leg up on their unlettered highland rivals. And a sense of being part of a wider world. Over the nineteenth century, Indian influence gave way to British colonialism, and then the long period of post-independence isolation. As the country opens up again, the question is whether China, rather than India, will become Burma’s primary link to the wider world?

I met an old family friend, a teacher in his fifties, looking more haggard than his years, with a dark weathered face and light brown eyes, a descendant of an old aristocratic family, his ancestors having served in the court of the last king. He was living in poverty, as he had much of his life, on a schoolteacher’s salary of about $30 a month, making some extra money, perhaps another $100, by providing private tuition in physics and chemistry. He lived in a tiny house, just steps from the old palace moat, and when I arrived he was with a student, both sitting cross-legged on a wooden platform, underneath a tree out side. The student left after a few minutes, and we moved into the house to talk over tea and biscuits. The floor was of hard dirt and an electric fan and a broken television set were the only modern appliances he had. A rickety bookcase was filled with dog-eared Burmese and English paperbacks, the spines of many of them held together with masking tape.

I asked him about the Chinese in Mandalay and he said Chinese immigration had led to lots of changes, more shops and economic activity generally, but that many native Burmese like him had not seen any improvement at all in their own lives and felt passed over:

The Chinese have moved in and the Burmese have had to move out. Very few other than the Chinese can afford to live downtown any more. They’ve bought land, torn down the buildings that were there and have built their own compounds. They prefer to live apart.

I had seen the enormous new houses on the way from the airport. They were all surrounded by high walls, many with coils of shiny new barbed wire on top. Through some of the front gates, I could also see impressive-looking satellite dishes sitting on neatly manicured lawns.

The Chinese sometimes arrive poor. Some started by just selling noodles on the street. But they work hard and move up. Most, though, came with many advantages, with money and contacts or easy access to loans through their own banks and networks, but the problem is not them, the problem is that we don’t have a level playing field.

The better-off Chinese sent their children to English-language schools, he said. The Burmese teachers there were not even allowed to speak in Burmese. I had seen advertisements for these schools in a local magazine. One course was called the ‘Cambridge Young Learners Programme’. Another the ‘Pride International Education Centre’ or ‘PIEC’. The ‘PIEC will led us to success! [
sic
]’ said the advertisement. ‘Singapore syllabus!’ There was a cartoon drawing of Kipling’s Mowgli alongside a picture of the school. ‘We can’t afford anything like this for our own kids.’ He didn’t blame the Chinese, but felt the entire system was unfair. I remembered an observation of a British visitor in the 1870s: ‘There is a good deal of wealth in the commercial town, but it is in the hands of Chinese and Moguls, with whom the king was afraid to meddle. No Burman could get rich with safety.’

Mandalay had a certain energy that wasn’t there in Rangoon. Away from Mandalay Hill, towards the old commercial centre, the shops were bustling with activity. Multi-coloured jeeps zipped around the streets and whereas scooters and motorcycles were banned in Rangoon, here they were allowed and they were everywhere. There was a north Indian look to many of the people, almost Middle Eastern or Mediterranean, and in general an amazing variety of racial types, from some that I might have guessed were Koreans to those with a more southern European look, to a couple who could have passed for native Australians. Police men in white gloves directed traffic. There was a group of Buddhist nuns carrying lacquered parasols, Sikhs in bright orange turbans, and a wizened old hermit like someone out of a medieval fairy-tale, in threadbare coffee-coloured robes and a scraggy white beard.

The main market was crowded and dirty. In the mid-nineteenth century, when Mandalay was founded, this area had been the favourite camping ground of mule caravans coming down from Yunnan, bringing silver and silk in exchange for Burmese cotton. Then, around the start of the last century, a beautiful covered market was built, by an Italian architect, and though this ornate structure would survive war and fires, it was pulled down in the 1990s and replaced by the ugly concrete construction that now loomed over the dusty stalls and small shops below.

On a side street vendors were selling pots and pans and fresh vegetables. There was a row of shops piled high with construction material with names like ‘Golden Lion Wire and Cable’, ‘Asia Metal Company’ and ‘Myanmar Wood Coating’. There were also four little stalls, all in a row, selling condoms and various sexual paraphernalia including blow-up dolls and herbal aphrodisiacs. Some of the devices were in worn cardboard boxes and several had, inexplicably, pictures on them of Harry Truman.

There were also many stores selling CDs and DVDs. I peeked into one and saw that in addition to Burmese and Western music, there was also a big section for monkish sermons. Mandalay is the monastic centre of Burma and there are still huge Buddhist monasteries both in Mandalay and in nearby towns, like Sagaing across the river. In Sagaing, the biggest monastery (where I had been on an earlier trip) has grown into a complex of training and research centres and even has a hundred-bed hospital, as well as the more traditional preaching and meditation halls. Some of the abbots who head these more important monasteries are sort of super-monks, well known across Burma and amongst the Burmese diaspora, travelling internationally, their lectures and sermons available on CDs. They are often on television. I saw one once at an airport terminal being greeted by well-wishers like visiting royalty, many of the waiting passengers and even air port staff coming around excitedly to pay their respects.