Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (6 page)

From the old commercial centre, the city had spread southward for several miles, along 78th Street. It had once been the neighbourhood of artisans and craftsmen, silversmiths and bronze-workers, some the descendants of captives from the court of Siam, brought over during the eighteenth-century wars. The area had become a Chinese preserve. There were no signs of any crafts men now. Instead 78th Street had been transformed into a four-lane avenue, and was a mix of new developments and building sites, red dust billowing around, trucks and buses rumbling past. In place of the little wooden shops that I remembered from the 1980s, there were multi-storied concrete buildings, generally window less with blue-tinted glass fronts that looked terrible and must have only magnified the heat inside. One of these buildings was the Great Wall Hotel. Unlike the hotel I stayed at, this big hotel had no Western tourists at all and many of the signs were written in Chinese. Several receptionists were crowded behind the counter and one told me the rooms were $22 a night and came with a free ‘foot massage’ at the ‘foot massage centre’ adjacent to the lobby. Across the street, a China Eastern Airlines bill board advertised a new direct flight–three times a week–from Kunming to Mandalay, starting soon. Another much more massive billboard advertised a condominium and retail complex that would be completed in late 2010. The billboard stretched a block long and hid the big hole in the ground that had been dug behind. It had a picture of the planned complex, with an immaculate street and pavement and little sports cars parked out in front. And beyond this commercial area were warehouses and small factories, almost all the way to the airport, about a 45-minute drive away. Mandalay wasn’t quite the ‘Chinese city’ I was told it would be. But here, much more than in Rangoon, China’s growing presence was plain to see.

There were three new shopping centres–an unheard of thing anywhere in Burma just a few years back. One had several floors, all air-conditioned and connected by escalators. On the top floor, past the clothes shops and food court, there was an internet café (Net Addict) where I was able to check my emails and catch up on the news. And on the ground floor was a very well stocked and brightly lit supermarket. In a country where most people have no electricity or running water and for whom shopping is a trip to an open-air market, these are novelties. The supermarket was like any normal supermarket in the US or UK, with many brands of cereal and canned soups to chose from, a large section for fresh meats and vegetables, and even a corner selling books and glossy fashion magazines. Unlike any supermarket in the US and UK, however, there was also a section selling monks’ robes, neatly folded and wrapped into little wicker baskets. Monks themselves don’t come in to buy these robes (they are not supposed to handle money at all, much less spend their days at the mall); they are meant for ordinary Buddhists who want to make an offering at a monastery. I saw one being sold, together with a six-pack of Diet Coke.

It was at a small café next to the supermarket that I had arranged to meet one of the older Chinese residents of the city, born in Burma to Chinese parents, a slender soft-spoken man in tortoise-shell glasses, and a distant relative by marriage. He was a doctor and had been in Rangoon at the time of the 1967 riots. He feared a backlash:

I would guess that Mandalay is at least a third Chinese now. [Mandalay has a population of about a million.] Twenty years ago we were perhaps 5 per cent of the population at most, and our families had been here for generations. We have close Burmese friends and relatives and love this country. Some of the new Chinese come from the border towns, others from inside Yunnan. Many others come from further away, from the southern provinces like Fujian and Jiangxi, but they come overland, not by sea like in the old days. A lot of the small factories are now owned by them, making sugar or pots and pans, you know, very basic things.

He smirked to suggest that there were none of the factories making robots or supersonic planes.

Many others are involving in logging and mining. The newcomers, from inside China, especially the ones here with proper papers, they don’t really mix with us, let alone with the Burmese.

We ordered cappuccinos instead of the ‘Iced Coffee and Blueberry Cheesecake’ that was the $2 ‘special of the day’.

In Mandalay some of the top businessmen are still Burmese, not Chinese. One for example owns the two big hospitals here. There are also several important Indian businessmen, some Marwaris and Punjabis, and Tamils from South India whose families have been here for over a hundred years. But I think that will change; there is more and more money coming from inside China. And the new businessmen from China, they know how to work the system, because the system here is now almost the same as there. The Chinese like to say that we and the Burmese are
pauk-phaw
, cousins, descended from the same ancestors. But I’m not sure we are acting like good relatives. I worry that something will happen, and that the Burmese will turn against us.

Even our cappuccinos would have been beyond the means of ordinary Burmese in Mandalay. $2 was about the average daily wage in Burma and though my friend the teacher made more than that, a visit to a new café like this one would have been an unimaginable extravagance. The new Mandalay was an unequal place, with the new Chinese immigrants at the top of the pyramid.

It was also a mix of old and new. That evening, walking back to my hotel, I passed a brightly lit Nokia mobile phone shop, filled with Chinese punters carefully examining the newest models. But just a few feet away the paved road turned to a dirt one, and any signs of the twenty-first century disappeared amongst the candle-lit wooden houses. A young woman with a wet sarong tied across her breasts was bathing next to an outdoor well, stray dogs nearby.

It was all a far cry from what I knew was taking place in any medium-sized city in China, where shopping centres like the ones in Mandalay were being built almost literally by the day. But it was, in a way, an extension of what was happening in China, a spill-over from across the hills. And a spill-over from China was like a tidal wave in Burma and in Mandalay. The effects had been magnified as well by the complete absence of Western companies, the result of official sanctions and unofficial boycotts, as well as by the poor state of the Burmese economy more generally. There were no Starbucks or McDonald’s or stores selling Apple computers, no Sheraton hotels, no Shell petrol stations. There were also few Burmese competitors. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with what the Chinese were doing. But the Chinese were entering a vacuum, and this once proud capital of a little kingdom, and later a city of British India, was being transformed into an outpost of the world’s biggest industrial revolution. They were helping create an unequal society. It wasn’t clear at all what the consequences might be.

Mandalay had been built as an act of defiance. In the 1850s, after two bruising wars against the British, Burma’s penultimate ruler, King Mindon, had violently seized the throne from his half-brother. His ambition was to modernize what was left of the kingdom and in this way preserve its independence. He sent students to study abroad in India and Europe, imported steam ships, built the first modern factories, laid telegraph lines and even developed a Burmese Morse code. He tried to create a professional army and reform government institutions, abolishing the old fiefdoms and taking the first steps towards a salaried bureaucracy. Embassies were dispatched to the West seeking treaties of friendship. It was all very similar to what was going on in contemporary Egypt under Mohammed Ali, in Japan under the Meiji, and in next door Siam (now Thailand) under King Mongut (the king of
The King and I
).

Mindon was not an anglophobe, but through his reforms he wanted to ensure that his country remained free of European aggression. Early in his reign, he decided to build a new capital–Mandalay–much to the shock of his ministers, who were happily ensconced in the old capital, Amarapura, about a dozen miles to the south. It was partly a military decision. Amarapura was right on the Irrawaddy, whereas the future site of Mandalay was two miles inland, just out of the reach of British gunboats. The moat and the massive earth-backed walls, walls that would with stand artillery and aerial bombardment nearly a century later, were designed to deter a British siege.

Mindon the modernizer was also Mindon the traditionalist. A devout Buddhist and a great patron of the faith, he is remembered best by Burmese for his innumerable acts of merit, from his sponsorship of monasteries and the building of pagodas, to his convening of an international Buddhist synod and the resulting review of ancient texts. He carefully performed the ceremonies required of a Burmese monarch and in the costumes and rituals of his court there was no hint of Western modernity. Mandalay was laid out according to age-old custom, as the best-ever rendering of a distinctly Burmese tradition, in a hope that this tradition might survive the Victorian age.

It was not to be. In 1885 a British expeditionary force annexed the kingdom, defeated a surprisingly robust guerrilla resistance, and abolished the ancient monarchy. Rangoon became the capital of all Burma and the focus of commercial attention, and Mandalay became a backwater, an upcountry town of no particular strategic significance. The walled inner city was renamed Fort Dufferin and became home to a small British garrison and the ‘Upper Burma Club’. Within a generation, the old aristocracy withered away as a class and British judges, tax collectors and police superintendents were appointed in their place.

George Orwell lived in Mandalay in the early 1920s. He was fresh from school at Eton and had just joined the Imperial Police. He spent time collecting intelligence on the criminal gangs operating in the area (Burma had the highest crime rate of any part of the Indian Empire; some blamed the demise of religious education, others the ‘wilful character’ of the Burmese) and famously dismissed Mandalay as a rather disagreeable place. ‘It is dusty and intolerably hot, and is said to have five main products all beginning with “P”, namely pagodas, pariahs, pigs, priests and prostitutes.’ Another denizen of Mandalay at the same time was a man named Captain Herbert Reginald Robinson, known as the ‘most disreputable Englishman in Mandalay’. He and Orwell were friends. Robinson was a former military man who had become an opium addict and an occasional Buddhist monk. During his many opium-induced trances he believed he was discovering the secrets of the universe, but had a hard time remembering them later on. Once, he managed to scribble down one of his insights while still in a trance, but when he looked at the piece of paper the next morning all it said was ‘The banana is great but the skin is greater’. Destitute, Robinson later tried to shoot himself in the head but managed only to blind himself. He eventually returned to England, retrained at the Massage School of the National Institute for the Blind, and ended his life as a physiotherapist in Tooting.

Today, there is little left of either Mindon’s Mandalay or the Mandalay of George Orwell and Captain Robinson. On 4 April 1942 Japanese bombers turned the old city into a blackened ruin. The Japanese had invaded Burma three months before, part of their general assault on the Asian mainland, forcing a long British retreat over the mountains into India. Clare Boothe, the wife of Henry Luce, publisher of
Time
and
Life
magazines, and then a reporter in Burma, visited Mandalay two days after the bombing. She wrote:

Every house was burned down or still flaming and smoldering. A terrible stink arose from 2,000 bodies in the ruins of brick, plaster and twisted tin roofing. Only the smoke-grimed stone temple elephants on the scarred path were watching guard over the Road to Mandalay, while buzzards and carrion crows wheeled overhead. Bodies were lying on the streets and bobbing like rotten apples in the quiet green moat around the untouched fort

The British left Mandalay without a fight, but three years later were back, the Fourteenth Army under General Slim battling fierce Japanese resistance. The Fourteenth Army was a combined force of British, Indian, Gurkha and African troops–the African troops included Idi Amin, the future tyrant of Uganda, as well as a grandfather of the future President Barack Obama. The Allied air forces pummelled the Japanese while three divisions of the Fourteenth Army encircled Mandalay and then fought street to street, the now desperate Japanese snipers aiming straight for the heads of British officers.

After independence, Mandalay was partly rebuilt. But under General Ne Win’s ‘Burmese Road to Socialism’, Mandalay, like Rangoon, deteriorated fast. There was no real development and no new infrastructure and much of Mandalay came to resemble an enormous rural community, with low wooden buildings and mean dirt roads. When I first visited in the 1980s, Mandalay seemed entirely forlorn, the great moat choked with water lilies, the Buddhist monks on foot far outnumbering the few antique cars and World War Two era Willys jeeps. There were no taxis and we often walked for miles from place to place or hired horse-drawn carriages (now all gone), the iron-rich dust covering the streets in a reddish hue. Around the same time, two big fires struck the city in succession, destroying thousands of homes and shops and what little architectural heritage was left.

And then, some time in the early 1990s, Mandalay’s military rulers had the idea to build a facsimile of the old palace on the site of the original. The palace had been situated within enormous square walls, a mile long on each side, and was actually a tightly packed warren of pavilions and other buildings, each housing an audience hall or the private chambers of the king or other members of the royal family. Nearly all the structures were made of teak and other dark wood, intricately carved with ornate multi-storied roofs, the interiors decorated with gold leaf, lacquer, Persian rugs and glass mosaics. Everywhere were the markings of sovereignty and in the time of Mindon, and his successor Thibaw, the palace area would have been crowded with men and women in silk costumes and velvet slippers, walking here and there over the little footpaths and gardens. A British visitor in the nineteenth century remarked on the ‘assembled lords in their brilliantly coloured clothes and tall rounded hats seated before their king like a field of wind-stirred tulips’. Another described the scene during a royal audience: