Thou, Burma, art fair and beauteous to see (8)

Part VIII - Vestiges of the empire

When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who then was the gentleman?

“I was too shamefaced to utter the imperial platitudes that fall so trippingly from the mouth of those who make it their business to govern empires. – WSM, The Gentleman in the Parlour

Kalaw. Former colonial hill station popular with the British during colonial rule and nowadays with high-ranking military officials for its pleasantly cool temperatures, the grand villas ‘English style’ occupied by many a general in summer residence. Surrounded by pine forests and misty blue mountain ranges, it is a peaceful and quiet, small town located at an altitude of 1320 metres, 50 km from Inle lake.

See Burma by train...

“Burma is not noted for the attractiveness of its regime, to put it mildly, but things are now improving”. I’m quoting The Man in Seat 61. “www.burmacampaign.org.uk used to tell tourists not to go to Burma at all, but it changed this advice in 2012.  If you decide to go, you'll find a fascinating country which is easy and safe to visit, with friendly and honest people.  Paradoxically, the lack of mass tourism due to the boycott of the regime has preserved Burma from westernisation, making it one of the most interesting places to visit now, before it's too late.  Burma's British-built railways are less developed than others in Southeast Asia, but you'll find the trains are a wonderful way to get around and experience the country at ground level, avoiding unnecessary domestic flights and cramped buses.  The journeys are as much an adventure as the country itself.”

Quite right. The slow train from Shwenyaung to Kalaw is an adventure indeed that takes two long hours of your life. “Worth adding is that the train and tracks are not in a very good condition and thus the ride is far from comfortable.” The trains themselves seem to stem right from the colonial era, as do the tracks that by the look of them have hardly been maintained since the building of the bridge over the river Kwai. The ride itself feels like the hand that rocks the cradle and visions of The Cassandra Crossing and Sophia Loren’s terror-stricken eyes came vividly to mind. But the views are unsurpassed, I admit.
Shwenyuang station has a station master proper and buying a ticket for the grubby first class is an administrative showdown the likes of which would not be unbecoming at Checkpoint Charlie in the Cold War. Luckily we colonials had our servant Té deal with it.

The Seven Sisters

“'I’ll tell you. If I married her I’d have to stay in Burma for the rest of my life. Sooner of later I shall retire and then I want to go back to my old home and live there. I don’t want to be buried out here, I want to be buried in an English churchyard. I’m happy enough here, but I don’t want to live here always. I couldn’t. I want England. Sometimes I get sick of this hot sunshine and these garish colours. I want grey skies and a soft rain falling and the smell of the country. I shall be a funny fat elderly man when I go back, too old to hunt even if I could afford it, but I can fish. I don’t want to shoot tigers, I want to shoot rabbits. And I can play golf on a proper course. I know I shall be out of it, we fellows who’ve spent our lives out here always are, but I can potter about the local club and talk to retired Anglo-Indians. I want to feel under my feet the grey pavement of an English country town, I want to be able to go and have a row with the butcher because the steak he sent me in yesterday was tough, and I want to browse about second-hand bookshops. I want to be said how d’you do to in the street by people who knew me when I was a boy. And I want to have a walled garden at the back of my house and grow roses. I daresay it all sounds very humdrum and provincial and dull to you, but that’s the sort of life I want to live myself. It’s a dream if you like, but it’s all I have, it means everything in the world to me, and I can’t give it up.’
He paused for a moment and looked into my eyes.
‘Do you think me an awfool fool?’

‘No’.”

The reverse of Kipling’s sailor’s Come you back to Mandalay, There's a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o' me.

The progenitor of the Seven Sisters in Kalaw may have forgotten about some such dream and given way to marry the local girl after all in the end. His offspring, the seven sisters, serve meals in the dining room of the distinctively British ancestral cottage on Union Road. With old photographs of dear papa and his Burmese wife adorning the walls.

“It is an error to think that because you have no train to catch and no appointments to keep your movements on the road are free. Your times for doing this and that are as definite as if you lived in a city and had to go to business every morning. Your movements are settled not by your own whim, but by the length of the stages and the endurance of the mules. Though you would not think it mattered if you arrived half an hour sooner or later at your destination, there is always a rush to get up in the morning, a bustle of preparation and an urgent compulsion to get off without delay”. 

Our guides were our lodestars, our eyes and ears and tongue’s sweet airs in our midsummer night’s dream; our drivers our faithful mules man’s best friend without whom we would hardly have been able to cover a mile without having died at least five times.

The one exception being the guide in Bagan, who was in need of a career change. Too long in the business. “He marshalled his facts with precision and delivered them with the fluency of a lecturer delivering a lecture he has repeated too often. But I did not want to know the facts he gave me. What did it matter to me what kings reigned there, what battles they fought and what lands they conquered. I was content to see them as a low relief on a temple wall in a long procession, with their hierarchic attitudes, seated on a throne and receiving gifts from envoys and subjugated nations, or else, with a confusion of spears, in the hurry and skelter of chariots, in the turmoil of battle.”

Té in first class on the train to Kalaw

Mandalay - UD and our driver, who invited us to his humble home in Sagaing

'Five hundred miles away from home' behind the steering wheel on the death road from Yangon to Pyay 

 Envoi

“The days followed one another with a monotony in which there was something impressive. In the life of cities we are conscious but of fragments of days; they have no meaning of their own, but are merely parts of time in which we conduct such and such affairs; we begin them when they are already well on their way and continue with them without regard to their natural end. But here they had completeness and one watched them unroll themselves with stately majesty from dawn to dusk; each day was a flower, a rose that buds and blooms and, without regret but accepting the course of nature, dies. And this vast sun-drenched plain was a fit scene for the pageant of that ever-recurring drama. The stars were like the curious who wander upon the scene of some great event, a battle or an earthquake, that has just occurred, first one by one timidly and then in bands, and stand about gaping or look for traces of what has passed.”

The End

   

v

With thanks to William Somerset Maugham and 'The Gentleman in the Parlour'

Dining room, Seven Sisters, Kalaw

First class, Kalaw slow train

Green Haven Hotel, Kalaw

Green Haven Hotel, Kalaw

'English style' houses, Kalaw

Kalaw

Original British colonial house - Kalaw

Kalaw railway station

Kalaw

Pyay - 1830s

Pyay - 1830s

Zawgyi House cafe, Yangon - 2013
when in dire need of a cappuccino

Thou, Burma, art fair and beauteous to see (7)

Part VII - It's a dog's life

"The position and treatment of animals in Buddhism is important for the light it sheds on Buddhists perception of their own relation to the natural world, on Buddhist humanitarian concerns in general, and on the relationship between Buddhist theory and Buddhist practice.

Animals have always been regarded in Buddhist thought as sentient beings, different in their intellectual ability than humans but no less capable of feeling suffering. Moreover, the doctrine of rebirth held that any human could be reborn as an animal, and any animal could be reborn as a human. An animal might be a reborn dead relative, and anybody who looked far enough back through his or her infinite series of lives would eventually perceive every animal to be a distant relative. The Buddha expounded that sentient beings currently living in the animal realm have been our mothers, brothers, sisters, fathers, children, friends in past rebirths. One could not, therefore, make a hard distinction between moral rules applicable to animals and those applicable to humans; ultimately humans and animals were part of a single family. They are all interconnected." – Animals in Buddhism, Wikipedia

Thou, Burma, art fair and beauteous to see (6)

Part VI - Different colours, different creeds, different people have different needs

 “At its foot [of the fort in Mandalay] is a broad sward planted quite thickly with tamarind, cassia and acacia; and here in the evening you see the Burmese in their coloured skirts and bright handkerchiefs wander in twos and threes. They are little brown men of a solid and sturdy build, with something a trifle Mongolian in their faces. They walk deliberately as if they are the owners and tillers of the soil. They have none of the sidelong grace, the deprecating elegance, of the Indian who passes them; they have not his refinement of features, nor his languorous, effeminate distinction. They smile easily. They are happy, cheerful and amiable.” – WSM, The Gentleman in the Parlour

They are. As a whole, the Burmese look remarkably happy, content and at peace. They are the most cheerful, hospitable and amiable people I have ever met. Is it the sun that beats down from the clear blue sky, the colours of the earth, the flowers in the grass or the permeating effect of centuries and centuries of Buddhism, I cannot tell, but look at their radiant smiles and you start smiling yourself, perhaps for no other reason than the social device called mirroring which scientist have identified as a way of bonding to create rapport and avoid aggression. Whatever. It works.

There is something paradisiacal about their life stance and one is all too easily tempted, if one is an incurable romantic like I am, to idealise the handicraft version of ‘simple living’ and laud the pastoral delights of the farmer’s life. I have always had a soft spot for it, to be compared with the alluring charms slow cooking held for me while leaning back in my comfy armchair. Freely translated it means it is all very well until you have to do it yourself and your day runs out of hours and your wallet out of money.

Our Shan guide Té, who likes gaming on his Samsung Galaxy 2 tablet, also seemed to harbour some nationalistic say ‘enthusiasm’ for the Shan cause and some pressing social issues. He told us a few facts. It’s all very well for the cheroot girl to roll and cut cigarettes in what looks like the picturesque Inle Lake version of a factory. The view is incomparable, the water gently laps the jetty, the sun daintily plays with its own pinprick spots on the teak floor, you are sitting cross-legged and you can chatter all day with the other village girl ‘colleagues’. But they work eight to ten hours a day, rolling and cutting thousands of cigarettes incessantly, for which they are paid 2000 kyats. This is the equivalent of € 1,72. Per day. Meanwhile, the woman who owns the cheroot factory and some three others in neighbouring villages, is thinking of building a second luxury hotel. “She is not a nice woman”, says Té. I believe him.

Té also has a theory why so many ancient pagodas are crumbling ruins: the Shan people have no time to spend on the conservation of monuments because most of them are farmers and they work very, very hard. This seems to be corroborated by the words Maugham puts in the mouth of an Italian priest: “They work. Men and women work together. It is a constant round of unceasing toil. Believe me, life is not easy in the jungle villages up in the mountains. They sow their rice, and you know what time and trouble it takes, and then they reap it; they cultivate opium, and when they have an interval they go into the jungle to gather the jungle produce. They do not starve, but they only save themselves from starvation because they never rest.”

In a country where no-one has a refrigerator, fresh produce has to be bought daily. Hence the vibrant, hectic, colourful markets in nearly every village. Buy local, spin your lotus threads, weave your clothes, lacquer your cups and plates (a necessity to prevent rot), bake your sesame rice crackers, build your own stilt house.

Pas cher, as some women said trying to sell home-spun handkerchiefs to embarking French tourists.

Definition

Simple living encompasses a number of different voluntary practices to simplify one’s lifestyle. These may include reducing one's possessions or increasing self-sufficiency, for example. Simple living may be characterized by individuals being satisfied with what they need rather than want. Although asceticisism generally promotes living simply and refraining from luxury and indulgence, not all proponents of simple living are ascetics. Simple living is distinct from those living in forced poverty, as it is a voluntary lifestyle choice. 

By clicking the pictures below, they open up in a gallery.