Burma’s story has not always been quite as unhappy as recent history suggests. When in 1957 Frank Sinatra recorded “On the Road to Mandalay”, his version of Rudyard Kipling’s popular poem, the old imperial images of the “Moulmein Pagoda” and the exotic-sounding “Burma girl” were still strong. The impressions of the kite-shaped country, bordering India to the west, China to the north and French Indo-China and Siam to the east, were of great Buddhist statues, of temples, silk-clad women and yellow-robed monks, tigers and tiffin, ox-wagons and steamers happily transporting goods and people across the country.
“They loomed, huge, remote and mysterious, out of the mist of the early morning like the vague recollections of a fantastic dream,” wrote Somerset Maugham after visiting the Bagan pagodas in 1935. “They are like bizarre and monstrous flowers turned to stone.” Today, books such as Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner tap in to the west’s fascination with the unknown east; and Burma continues to be a source of curiosity – even since its name changed to the Union of Myanmar in 1989, a move that is not recognised by exile groups.
However, such romantic views are at odds with other accounts of the country. George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days, which drew on his experiences in the imperial police there, reminds us that although conditions are terrible today, life under the colonisers was harsh, too.
What is clear is that under the British, who incorporated the whole of the country into the Raj in 1887, Burma flourished economically. It became the world’s leading exporter of rice, and the Burmah Oil Company helped keep the wheels of empire turning.
Infrastructure was developed, including a railway the length of the Irrawaddy River, which flows through the country, and schools were built. In the two decades before the Second World War, Burma had a shockingly high crime rate, but nevertheless was one of the richest countries in south-east Asia.
The early years of independence were chaotic, and as early as 1949 most of the country was controlled by rebel groups. At one point it looked as though the government would surrender to communist insurgents, but a fragile democracy survived, and in 1961 Maha Thray Sithu U Thant, a Burmese diplomat, became the only Asian thus far to serve as UN secretary general. The next year the generals seized power.
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