BURMA HOLIDAY 2015
DAVID AND JOAN travelled with two of Joan’s sisters, Ann and Mary, starting and ending in Bangkok in Thailand, the highlight being a seven-day cruise down the Irrawaddy River in Burma. Holiday modes of travel vary greatly. We labelled some elderly Americans we met as “mothball travellers” while Ann entertained us with an account of her and a scuba-diving “buddy” with goggles, black rubber and flippers interrupting a mass baptism by surfacing in the middle of it. In Burma we arrived by jet, to then travel much of the time barefoot. A ride in a horse-drawn bullock cart proved very bumpy but at least, like the Surrey, the cart had a fringe on top,
THAILAND and the long-tail boats. We preferred the safety and, at our age, the comfort of the Skyrail, taxis and a more conventional and slower river boat to the ”long-tail” boats which are a high speed version, with a much larger propeller, of the timid ones we later saw up and down the Irrawaddy. The design is simple but ingenious. A long shaft carries a propeller at one end, a swivelled motor in the middle, and a courageous driver hanging on to the steering shaft at the other end. I never found where the accelerator was, but it seemed to have only two speeds, flat out or idle. Flat out was held in place by a rope looped over part of the roof, idle by another loop over a bench seat. Steering was done by swivelling the whole contraption from side to side. When sight-seeing in town we were carried like froth on a huge human wave surging through the Wat temples and the royal palace, which I would rank among the great wonders of the world. A short flight then took us to Mandalay, on the Irrawaddy river in Burma. Thailand also borders Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. A revolution in 1932 ended the absolute monarchy and Siam became Thailand. But few economic reforms have succeeded.
BURMA, now called Myanmar, is rich in natural resources (gas, oil, teak) yet the poorest country in SE Asia. Main problem is land confiscation by the military and corrupt officials. Main religion Buddhism. Main ethnic group Bamar or Burman, with minorities Chin, Intha, Katchin, Karen, Naga. The Burmese empires of feudal kings were conquered by the British from 1824-1885. It is twice the size of Germany, and we found it a country of smiling, polite, kind and delightful people who do not deserve their sad history. Once the richest country in South East Asia, this natural wealth was diverted to the Mongols, then to the British, and now to “the generals” who confiscated the teak trade and who run the place essentially for their benefit. And, throughout Burma’s history, a large slice of GDP has gone to the construction and maintenance of thousands upon thousands of gold plated stupas, temples and shrines. The town of Bagan, for example, had 2237 stupas. On the boat we saw two films, one about general Aung San who said “the British treated us like bullocks but the Japanese treated us like dogs”, and one about his famous daughter Aung San Suu Kyi, for years locked in a battle of liberation with the generals. And then, in 2011, cyclone Nargis blew away 700,000 homes and killed three quarters of their livestock.
Burmese astrologers wield huge influence, causing kings to arbitrarily relocate entire capital cities (This is not uncommon. An attempted coup in Moscow so annoyed the Czar that he relocated his government to a frozen swamp that became St Petersberg). One Burmese general received astrological advice to insist that all left hand vehicles drive on the right. One entrepreneurial astrologist would ask “do you (not) have a banana tree?” If (no/yes) you must (grow one/cut it down). Buddhism itself is very powerful. The story goes that a statue of the Buddha fell off a truck headed for China. The driver escaped trouble by saying he had had a dream in which The Buddha told him he did not want his statue to go to China.
We saw two puppet shows, a set of dances from the different dynasties, and were once woken at four a.m.by heavily amplified but rather beautiful traditional singing drifting from across the river. We saw many dusty villages that reminded me, Tim, of the Demerara East Coast Road, with scrawny yellow dogs sprawled asleep in the dirt (I was once told that property boundaries in poor countries are defined when one dog stops barking and another starts). We watched a procession of 1600 monks with begging bowls setting out to receive their gifts of food from the markets. We ourselves were fed very well, delicious beef and chicken curries, rice and vegetables, sometimes okras.
THE IRRAWADDY RIVER starts in the Himalayan region of Burma, and seasonal melting snow raises its level 15 feet. We joined our seven day river cruise at Mandalay, left it at Prome, and coached to Rangoon (Yangon) for two nights before flying home. Our ship is flat bottomed, blunt at both ends, three decks for passengers, one at the waterline for crew, and we were taken on a tour of it. Looking at the propeller shafts down in the basement reminded me of the shiny rotating shaft of our ship’s propeller in 1942. In that particular tour we crouched in its tunnel and gasped when the second engineer closed the bulkhead door, sealing us in, explaining that, if a torpedo hit and flooded the tunnel, our sacrifice could have been worthwhile. We were glad to get out. Our cabin contained prints of paintings, like Chenery’s pale watercolours of Macau, except these river scenes contained square riggers and schooners flying the English red ensign. Our balcony looked across the river to huge yellow sandbanks busy with short season cultivation until the river level rises again. Right now the sandbanks are dotted with microscopic figures, boys running, women cooking, and men fishing, as they have done for thousands of years, but always with those slight variations that make river life fascinating, There is a lot of river traffic, hundreds of long tails, oil barges flat and low-slung, edged along by tugs, freighters riding higher with lighter cargo, and the occasional three-storey cruise ship like ours. At night we tie up against the bank, and once, something resembling a decrepit Chinese junk nestled in between us and the bank. Out of its small shell came 25 people followed by several tons of pebbles out of the bilge, carried laboriously up the bank in buckets. Occasionally we scrape the bottom and even the long tails sound the depth with bamboo poles.
Our shore visits include stupas and temples every day, and occasional schools and markets. Once, a lacquer workshop, once a long necked lady carrying 6 Kg of brass around her neck, once a golf course and post office built by the British, and once a cock fight in a ring hurriedly scratched in the dirt. The owners lick and suck the blood away between rounds. Beyond the shore stretches a large flat landscape, sprinkled with pagodas of all sizes, some as large as a small European cathedral, some with murals of the life of Buddha, and all requiring extensive barefoot walking. .
DAVID’S UNCLE JACK
I was probably about five when my uncle Jack, also my Godfather, treated me to a large ice cream and a horse and carriage ride around Georgetown. He insisted it was my birthday. That is my only memory of him, but a lovely one. Then on the 9th February 2015 we happened to be travelling in Burma near where Jack is buried and we called in. Tim had supplied me with the grave location code, which I gave to Joan and Ann who located the grave among 6 thousand, while another sister Mary found a hibiscus flower which we placed on the grave. Joan recorded the inscription:
Captain A. J. Waterfield, 1st Royal BN, 9th JAT Regiment, 10th May 1942, Age 36
Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt,
He only lived but till he was a man
Tim thinks Granddad Waterfield would have supplied the quote from MacBeth. Joan found many Indian, Burmese and British names in the beautifully kept Commonwealth War Graves Commission site. Tim thinks I am probably the only family member to have visited the grave. We had previously passed the entrance to the Chindwin river where, in 1942, Jack had been killed. As a captain in the 9th Jat regiment covering the retreat across Burma, he was trying to help a group of refugees in white that turned out to be Japanese soldiers in disguise. They killed him.
I was very glad of the support of the three Hogan sisters, it was a moving experience to stand by his grave in the middle of that large, sunny and peaceful field of remembrance. We caught a taxi to Rangoon (Yangon) and were soon back with our Irrawaddy cruise group.
SOUTH AND EAST ASIA. If I could define world history in two sentences they would be these. “A series of dynastic squabbles over real estate” (anon.) and. “The difference between rich and poor countries depends not on endowments in land, labour and capital as suggested by neoclassical economics, but on differences in their institutions.” (economist Mancur Olson) . All my textbooks in economic development suggest the major institution in poor countries is the ownership of 80% of the land and natural resources by 5 to 10% of the population. Test these against Thailand and Burma. The dynasties have included the Mongols, feudalism, war lords, the Japanese, the British and now in Burma the generals. The institutions include private monopolies over land and natural resources, and the diversion of too much GDP into the building, excessive adornment, and maintenance of many thousands of stupas, pagodas and temples.
LAOS dynasties include princes, generals and communists, the institution is civil war. As a result Laos is one of the poorest countries in the world.
CAMJBODIA was occupied by the Japanese in WW2, suffered much collateral damage in the Vietnam war, and then the Khmer Rouge institution murdered 20% of the population. There is now a constitutional monarchy, but rampant corruption and a non-transparent government.
JAPAN, until after WW2 was a feudal society. After WW2 general MacArthur was given carte blanche to prevent the invasion of communism from the north by breaking the feudal system. He did this by redistributing land from the rich to the poor.
KOREA. South Korea also received a land reform package at the hands of General MacArthur, leading, for some time, to a much more egalitarian and prosperous society. North Korea’s version of communism led to the death by starvation of some 20 percent of the population.
INDIA is hampered by a caste system which, in conjunction with corruption, has held back social and economic reforms. Attempts at land reform have always been foiled by lawyers acting for the powerful Brahmin land-owning caste.
CHINA’s experience is unique in world history and so worth a longer note. Its dynasties have included feudalism, war lords, European and Japanese occupations, and various corruptions of communism and capitalism. Mao Tse Tung’s failed experiments called collectives, cooperatives and communes led to mass starvation. .Later, after Mao died Deng Xiaoping wrote “Almost immediately, and perhaps spontaneously, the peasants began to divide up the land themselves and grow food as they thought fit instead of following state directives.” Two years later Deng was smart enough to formalise this popular movement into his Household Responsibility Units (HRUs). Later on he said that “what took us completely by surprise was the development of township and rural industries.” The HRUs and these new Town Village Enterprises (TVEs, microcapitalism) kicked economic growth from zero to an astonishing ten percent per year, the TVEs then evolving into the giant Special Economic Zones (SEZs) exporting around the world. As the vice chancellor of the University of East Asia told me proudly when I was working there “China is at last standing on its own feet.” Unfortunately, since then, the absence of effective taxation against urban land speculation and corruption is now reversing the march of China’s, and perhaps the world’s only really successful revolution.