Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (8 page)

BOOK: Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia
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And so, over eighteen months, thousands of civilians and soldiers laboured day and night, in torrential rains, battling swarms of insects, leeches and deadly diseases, to build what would be known as the Ledo or Stilwell Road, a road that would skirt the base of the Himalayas and again provide direct access from India to China. Most of the soldiers involved were African-Americans, tasked with this gruelling and thankless job in part because their white superiors believed they had a natural ‘night vision’ that would allow them to work in dark jungle conditions. They were probably the first people of African descent ever in those remote hills and amongst the first Americans; for a while, the local Naga tribesmen assumed that all Americans were black.

Meanwhile, under the brilliant leadership of General Slim, the British Fourteenth Army pushed east from Manipur. At the August 1943 Quebec Conference of Roosevelt and Churchill, authorization had been given to reopening the Burma Road, but not to any specific re-invasion of Burma. But in 1944 the Japanese launched their own massive attack along the Burmese–Indian border, and Slim turned this potentially disastrous development into an opportunity, defending the Manipuri capital of Imphal, smashing the Japanese while their supply lines were overstretched, and then chasing them, first across the Chindwin River and then the Irrawaddy. Mandalay was encircled and then taken. Maymyo itself was recaptured in a dawn raid by a Gurkha battalion and part of the Welsh Regiment. Before they left, the Japanese rather gratuitously destroyed Government House in Maymyo, the stately summer home of British governors.

The Stilwell Road was finished and the Burma Road reopened, but only in time for this first (and so far only) direct passage from India to China to become redundant. In May 1945, the 17th Indian Division entered Rangoon unopposed and within three months the first atomic bombs were exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese Empire was no more.

The British quit Burma less than three years after the end of the war. With India’s independence, Burma’s strategic value as an eastern buffer was gone. The economy had been devastated by the war and all major infrastructure was in ruins. Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong seemed like better bets for future profits. Even then, the British would have stayed and helped to restore the economy had it not been for an extra element: the emergence of a powerful and radical nationalist movement, determined to see the British out at any cost. Some were communists. Many others had collaborated with the Japanese, before turning against them towards the end. The country was awash in weapons and the young nationalists were armed and prepared for violence. With massive problems in India, Palestine and elsewhere, including at home, the British were in no mood to fight an insurrection in Burma. Pandit Nehru, India’s new prime minister, had made clear that Indian troops would not be available to quell a Burmese nationalist revolt. The Labour government of Clement Attlee decided to do the prudent thing and on 4 January 1948 Burma became an independent republic. Soon the country was at civil war, and within twelve years a military junta would seize power, the beginning of decades of army rule.

By the 1960s, India, Burma and China had all turned inward. The Stilwell Road relapsed into jungle. The Burma Road led nowhere, with the border between Burma and China effectively closed. Nearly half a century would pass before it was resurrected, by the new and growing economies of Asia.

 

From the Candacraig it was about half an hour’s walk to the town proper, where there was first a red-brick hospital, once run by the American Baptists, and then an Anglican church. Inside the church, a great tablet read:

 

To the Glory of God And In Memory Of The 10th Regiment Gurkhas Formerly First Burma Rifles This Sanctuary Has Been Presented By Their Brother Officers Relatives And Friends

 

Other British Army regiments–the Durham Light Infantry, the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, the Border Regiment–and the Royal Air Force all had smaller plaques with their insignia on the wall. Around the back, a group of parishioners were preparing for a church tea later that day. One of them, a small man in a floppy hat and sandals, said that the church had been built in 1912. He estimated that about seventy people still came to service every Sunday. Most, he said, were Burmese, but many were also of mixed ancestry, Anglo-Burmans and Anglo-Indians. He said he himself was of mixed Irish and Indian ancestry.

The church was at the top of the high street, called the Mall, about a mile long. I had seen an old postcard of the Mall in British days, with low wooden shop-houses, horse carriages, and a clock tower in the centre, and the Mall today looked almost exactly the same, except much more crowded, with several newer and taller buildings behind the original shops. The clock tower–‘the Purcell clock tower’–was still there as were the little horse carriages and a sign that must have been at least a century old that read ‘Fancy Goods’. Together with the dusty streets and wooden buildings, they gave downtown Maymyo a Wild West atmosphere.

A large Sunni mosque stood to the side of the Mall. There was a northerly feel to the jumble of appearances on the street, decidedly not southeast Asian, as one might find in say Bangkok or Jakarta, but more north Indian, Nepali and Chinese, as well as Burmese. The Nepalis were partly descended from Gurkha soldiers who had been stationed there by the British and partly from the more general Nepalese diaspora that has extended from the Himalayas across Assam to Burma. A European strain was also sometimes visible as Maymyo had been a favourite place of retirement for the country’s once sizeable Eurasian community.

Maymyo was famous for its strawberry fields (just outside the town) and there were baskets of strawberries on sale as well as apples and other fruits exotic in a country of mangoes, papayas and durian. ‘Drink Cow’s Milk Every Day for Good Health’ read a sign at a milk shop. The Burmese generally don’t drink milk and this too–a Nepali-run enterprise–was some thing unusual. It was now close to noon and there were lots of people filling the shops and walking up and down the pavement or speeding by on scooters and bicycles. A billboard advertised Iron Cross’s upcoming ‘Alpine Tour’. Iron Cross was the country’s best known (heavy metal) band, and Alpine was a local bottled-water company that I assumed was sponsoring their concerts. Stalls offered tiny packets of things like instant coffee or washing powder and at one corner of the street a group of Indians huddled conspiratorially around what looked like the top of a fax machine. This was more familiar. It was a key part of the economy in every town: parts were sold, resold, mended, and sold again. There was a certain air of relative prosperity to Maymyo, at least seen here from the Mall, but there were also many destitute people. A couple of tiny street urchins wandered around begging for money. And women with Himalayan faces, in dirty and threadbare tribal costumes, sat on the side of the street, nursing their babies.

After a couple more hours of milling around, I decided to head back to the Candacraig. And instead of walking back I went to the clock tower and climbed into a horse carriage, powder-blue on the inside, with a driver who told me his family were Pathans, originally from what is now the Pakistan–Afghanistan border. The horse’s hooves clattered on the cobblestones and soon I was back on the balcony of the hotel. I had told the receptionist that I would like to eat dinner in. Twenty years ago, the Candacraig was still run by a Mr Bernard, an Indian Christian who had worked there since colonial days, and I had enjoyed a meal of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding in the dining room. But Mr Bernard had died long since and the Burmese staff could only offer a simple meal of rice and curry, which I ate early, at sundown, the only sound a distant call to prayer from the mosque in town.

It was only on the second day that I noticed some of the more recent developments in Maymyo. To the north of town, away from the Candacraig, were a few fancy new hotels, including the ‘Governor’s House’, a reproduction of Government House, where the British governor had lived during the ‘hot weather’, and which claimed to ‘resurrect the legendary charm and grandeur of the 1920s and 1930s’. It was set on a hilltop and as there were no guests staying at the time, I persuaded the hotel staff to let me have a look around. The reproduction had been done well and though only a year or so old looked appropriately worn and weathered. There were framed black and white photographs from earlier times and a big room that I presumed in the original had been used for other purposes was now an indoor swimming pool. And in the foyer were life-sized mannequins of past British governors, like Sir Harcourt Butler and Sir Charles Innes, in frock coats and top hats, together with a fierce-looking Japanese soldier crouching a few feet away with a bayonet. Burmese people I later spoke to said many avoided the place, as it was rumoured to be haunted, with a ghostly old Englishman wandering around at night in the hall.

Nearby was a trendy-looking café (the Golden Triangle) serving excellent coffee, including coffee made from Burma’s first coffee farms. And further away from the town centre, there were also bigger, newer homes, not unlike the Chinese houses in Mandalay, and ‘resort’ hotels, offering ‘weekend spa packages’. Maymyo’s salubrious climate was becoming increasingly attractive to well-off Burmese–army generals, businessmen and even the movie stars who often filmed here as well. A big draw for the holiday crowd were the Botanical Gardens. There was a man-made lake and paths that curved through the grassy slopes of flowers and trees. On the 150-acre site were said to be hundreds of different types of plants including more than 300 species of orchid. It was modelled on Kew Gardens and had been designed early in the last century by the amateur Irish botanist Lady Charlotte Wheeler Cuffe, though the construction work was done by Turkish prisoners captured during the First World War.

My last day in Maymyo was a Sunday, a day off for cadets from the Defence Services Academy, which sits just on the outskirts of town. They were everywhere that day, all in their neatly pressed forest-green uniforms and gleaming boots, skinny teenagers in crew cuts, many carrying little black attaché cases, their metal heel taps clicking as they walked by. I saw some getting haircuts and others having their pictures taken at the photographer’s studio. They were in the little shops that offered long-distance phone calls and I saw them queuing up to call home. They examined the army kits (especially shoe polish) that hawkers were selling on the pavement. Others went to the cinema. I had lunch at a Chinese restaurant and I saw a few of them there, laughing and talking. There was a notice that said ‘Cadets will absolutely (absolutely) not be allowed any alcohol’, perhaps a sign of some recent disciplinary problems. But they all seemed polite as well as self-confident, enjoying their day off.

The enormous Defence Services Academy is the Burmese military’s premier training facility, a sort of West Point or Sandhurst of Burma, offering a university-equivalent degree to aspiring officers. It had the look of a suburban American office complex, the headquarters of ‘Acme Industries’, with manicured lawns and well-scrubbed concrete and glass buildings. There was an imposing steel and granite gate in front, with a sign (in English) that read ‘Training the Elite of the Future’. It was a reminder that, at least in the eyes of the Burmese officer corps, whatever happened, they were here to stay.

 

Burma’s is the longest-lasting military dictatorship anywhere in the world. It is also a uniquely isolationist state that has gone through several different incarnations since the military coup of 1962 overthrew the last elected government. In its early years, the generals at the top, led by General Ne Win, were organized as the ‘Revolutionary Council’, overseeing their singularly disastrous ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’, cutting off nearly all contact with the outside world, expelling the Indian middle class, and nationalizing most businesses. At a time when parts of Asia were starting to zoom ahead, Burma fell far behind. Then came a new constitution, in 1975, based on those of the Soviet bloc, making Burma a ‘Socialist Republic’. General Ne Win resigned his army commission but remained very much in charge, as ‘Chairman of the Party’, jettisoning some of the more extreme xenophobic policies. After the failed 1988 uprising, any pretence to socialism was thrown out the window, together with the constitution, and a new junta was formed, first calling itself the ‘State Law and Order Restoration Council’ (or SLORC, a James Bond-style acronym to rival Stalin’s SMERSH), and then somewhat more demurely the ‘State Peace and Development Council’ (or SPDC).

It was this new SLORC/SPDC junta that began to unwind decades of isolation. General Ne Win, the tyrant of Burma since 1962, was fading into the background (he would later lose all power and end up under virtual house arrest before his death in 2002). And the new generation of generals, including several who had received military training in the US and UK, were eager at least to test out a more market-oriented, Western-leaning approach. They were not democrats. But they wanted to steer away from the ruinous economic policies of the past.

The state’s finances were in dire straits. Foreign exchange reserves were close to zero and only a fire-sale of natural resources, mainly logging rights to Thai firms, avoided collapse. But soon, trade and investment policies were freed up, and a new wave of investment came in, from American and European companies, as well as from the region. Tourism was encouraged for the first time in decades, and hotels sprouted up everywhere, some owned by foreign businesses, others set up by local entrepreneurs. This was in the early 1990s when there was much talk of ‘Asian Tigers’ and other countries like India and Vietnam, still then no more prosperous than Burma, were also liberalizing their economic relations with the world.

But then things hit a brick wall. The government’s own policies were partly to blame. The move to a free-market system was still half-hearted. More importantly, the generals at the top distrusted their own civilians, including and perhaps especially those educated overseas. This was in stark contrast to military regimes elsewhere in the region, South Korea for example, or Indonesia, that had followed the economic advice of civilian technocrats. But a big part of the problem was also the Western boycott calling for an end to any business dealings with Burma. Many in the US and Europe were keen to show support for the country’s fledgling democracy movement and some argued, without much evidence or logic, that this was the best way to pressurize the generals, despite the fact that the generals were only starting, tentatively, to emerge from their own self-imposed isolation. As part of an official sanctions regime, all development aid was denied, making any moves towards greater economic reform much more difficult. By the mid-1990s the few Western companies that had waded in had begun to withdraw and prospective investors shied away. Momentum was already fading fast when, in 1997, there came both a formal US government ban on new American investment and the Asian financial crisis. Outside money dried up.

BOOK: Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia
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