DOWN THE RIVER IN SEARCH OF THE RAJ

Alistair Home evokes a troubled, beautiful

country with which he has an especially personal connection

Mandalay IT WOULD be hard to think of a country which has been more 'favoured by nature' — as the saintly and beautiful Aung San Suu Kyi puts it in her memoirs — than Burma. Its soil is incredibly rich, yielding three crops of rice a year and growing valuable teak forests; it is also packed with oil, rubies and jade. Some of the great rivers of Asia, like the 1,300-mile-long Irrawaddy, irrigate it and offer limitless cheap hydro-electrics.

Yet Burma remains the poorest country in the area, blessed by geography but cursed by history, as down through the ages rival kings and countless wars kept the Burmese in a state of backward feudal- ism. As recently as the mid-19th century, when Albert the Good was renovating Windsor, King Mindon was burying alive carefully selected pregnant women beneath the foundations of his new Xanadu in Mandalay to deter evil spirits. Such carry-ons gave the imperial British a sequence of (pretty flimsy) pretexts for moving in. Though it was always a poor relation under the Indian Raj, for the next couple of generations Burma enjoyed a rare period of peace and prosperity.

Then came the second world war and the Japanese. In the terrible retreat of 1942, the British left an efficiently scorched earth behind them, firing oil wells and blowing up bridges. The Japanese' repeated the process in 1944-45, while the RAF bombed what remained. `When buffaloes fight', say the Burmese, `the grass gets trampled.' The two grisly campaigns cost the British and (mostly) Indian army 74,000 casualties; but nobody has bothered to count the dead Burmese, of whom some 100,000 slave labourers are said to have perished while building the death railway.

When peace came, the one hope for the ravaged country was Suu Kyi's father, Aung San, who was murdered together with all his Cabinet. There followed years of civil war and a special brand of inward- turned socialism which augmented the ruin. Then entered the current nasties, Slorc (it stands for State Law and Order Restoration Council, an unfortunate acronym that might have been invented by the late Ian Fleming), who still keep Suu Kyi virtually penned up and deter many would-be tourists from visiting Burma. (She has in fact urged foreigners not to come, until Slorc mends its horrible ways.) But last month an irresistible temptation came to us in the shape of an invitation from the remarkable American The last time we were here it was infested with dinosaurs.' entrepreneur of the Orient Express, Jim Sherwood, to float down the Irrawaddy on his super-deluxe 'Road to Mandalay' river boat. Knowing the Sherwood reputation for perfection in all things, it was hard to resist. We were not disappointed. To watch a blood-red sun sink behind the 2,001 pagodas of ancient Pagan has to be among the experiences of a lifetime.

I just missed being sent to Burma in 1945 (thanks to Hiroshima), but I had a special reason for wanting to see it now. I reckon I was probably conceived there — a matter of some significance to the sibylline Burmese. How do I know? Because my mother was one of those rare creatures of her time, a female foreign correspondent (writing under the name of Auriol Bar- ran), and she published articles in the Sunday Times from Burma exactly nine months before I was born. She kept all her cuttings, and much of what she and my father had seen we saw too — unchanged by the passage of seven decades: teak rafts floating down the vast, glassy river that lollops down from the Himalayas, the timeless villages with their gentle Buddhist tranquillity.

What my mother did see, and we didn't, was, en passant, an itinerant snake-charmer whose 12-foot-long cobra got out of control and ran amok in the crowd, biting a girl `savagely on the arm'. They evidently revived her 'by spitting into her ear — a new form of first aid!'

She also met an old lady who had been lady-in-waiting to the last queen, Supyalat, wife of King Thebaw. Deposed by the British in 1886, Thebaw put his brothers and sisters in red velvet sacks and had them `respectfully beaten to death'. Of his sump- tuous palace in Mandalay, the old courtier recounted, 'You cannot imagine what a sight it was; the carpet was of pure beaten gold, and the dresses were magnificent all gold and silver.' (Alas, the palace my mother visited is no more. It was burnt down in 1945 either by Slim's Fourteenth Army gunners or the defending Japanese.) During my parents' trip to Burma, the bachelor Governor — Sir Harcourt Butler — seems to have been (respectfully) smit- ten by my mother, and kept up a barrage of letters (which she kept) over the next three years, supplying her with marginalia of such agreeable political incorrectness as: `I have recently been on the Chinese frontier among wild people. I am not sure that I like savages. They spend so much time delousing themselves in rather unpleasant ways. [But] my efforts about human sacrifice are being crowned with some success'; and: 'I have just finished the emancipation of slaves in Burma — an interesting durbar of savages. Very dirty, very reluctant to give up their slaves.'

In 1926, he reported another little local difficulty with an almost modern ring to it (shades of Waco):

A man called Aung Ze started a society of young men and women with pretentious mys-

tical ceremonies. Free love was one of the attractions. The society was called Yin-ngwe- hlon [relying on the chest-steam] and gave out that any woman who received his chest- steam might hope to give birth to a minlaung [heir to the throne].

Five or six of the leaders have now been bound over under Section 107. The move- ment is thoroughly Bolshevistic in appear- ance, though of course there is no real connection with Bolshevism, [opined His Excellency]. Men and women roam about at night singing songs with what is probably a seditious refrain. They sleep together under big blankets and as the Subdivisional Magis- trate remarked in one of his cases, 'What goes on under the blanket, God only knows.' One of Aung Ze's women is now in the fami- ly way by him and the people are so incredi- bly stupid that she will want watching.

I badly wanted to see what remained of my parents' Burma, to find traces of the Raj. They were not always obvious. Sir Harcourt Butler's Government House now shelters the head of Slorc. The roads and railways are those left by the British with little done to them. Rangoon and Mandalay still bear traces of the rectilinear grid that laid them out like a humbler Delhi. But much of what the war failed to destroy of old gas-lit colonial streets is now being bulldozed to make way for hideous concrete hotels financed by French and Japanese money.

Down on the Rangoon waterfront, where the overcrowded ferries ply busily back and forth, the Customs House still holds up its grandly imperial head. Next door to it is the Strand Hotel (where I feel sure my parents lodged), most felicitously refurbished by the Aman chain of hotels. Electric fans stir the potted palms as the sound of a xylophone drifts towards resi- dents partaking of tiffin just as the planters of Somerset Maugham would have done. The General Hospital and the High Court building still stand in unashamed Victorian grandeur with Mogul towers; but the City Hall is a nearby pastiche built by the Rus- sians in similar style in the 1960s. Today, five sinister-looking tanks lurk menacingly outside it — just in case.

During their brief flirtation with socialist Burma, the Russians also built the Inwa Lake Hotel, where we stayed, a square, soulless block in Cancer Ward style — now revamped as Rangoon's number one hotel. Perhaps one of the best preserved relics of the Raj is the British Residence, formerly headquarters of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, where a portrait of Mountbat- ten of Burma surveys the entrance, and where Aung San once stayed during the war under Japanese patronage. Mandalay struck George Orwell, who didn't much fancy Burma, as 'a rather dis- agreeable town — it is dusty and intolera- bly hot, and is said to have five main Products, all beginning with P, namely Pagodas, pariahs, pigs, priests and prosti- tutes!' Bashed by the war, and further ruined by subsequent jerry-building, Man- dalay has even less now to offer. The Dia- mond Jubilee clock-tower stands isolated in its nondescript centre; a half-hidden white church has now become a telephone exchange, though the red-brick Methodist Memorial Chapel still faces the moat of Thebaw's vast palace, of which sadly only the mile-long crenellated walls and one wooden pagoda still exist.

Above, on Mandalay Hill, where Slim expended so many lives to reconquer the city in 1945, sits discreetly one of the few visible memorials to the second world war — a small tablet put up with Gurkha funds to commemorate those 'who lost their lives in that gallant and fierce assault'. Below is a new French Novotel, a truly horrid blot on the landscape.

Towards the legendary Burma Road to China, and much more engagingly British, is Maymyo — once reckoned to be per- haps the best hill-station of the Raj. Up and down an agreeably dilapidated main drag, reminding one of old-time Nairobi, trot covered gharries with inscriptions like `Catch Me a Tiger'. The Canda Craig Hotel (`founded in 1904'), an immaculate- ly clean red-brick building, offers seven bedrooms at $35 each, 'with 20 per cent discount for foreigners'. Nearby is an advertisement for the more modern- sounding 'Hotel Sweety Mattress'. We had a sumptuous picnic in the very English botanical garden, under a monkey puzzle tree and amid a bed of municipal red salvia. Across the way is a golf course ringed by bungalows with tin roofs and verandahs with little ornate turrets — a blend of stock- broker Sunningdale and Penang. Tenzo, our guide, pointed out All Saints Church, where last year he brought two elderly British Legion veterans: 'I was very emotioned.'

We too felt 'very emotioned' on leaving Burma. Despite its unpleasant regime, there is something about the country and its proudly handsome, sweetly welcoming people that grabs one, just as it did Kipling's British soldier. Our trip had begun with a call on Suu Kyi in her beleaguered compound. But, for all my admiration for this gallantly heroic lady, I am not quite sure whether she is right to tell foreign tourists not to come. If I have a guilty conscience, it is about what the Raj's war did to her coun- try — not about disregarding her plea now. For open windows let in air and light. More not less exposure of Burma to the world must eventually make even Slorc give way.

I have travelled in, and written about, nasty countries like Pinochet's Chile, Honecker's East Germany and Brezhnev's USSR — and where are they now, all of them?

The author's most recent book is How far from Austerlitz; Napoleon 1805-1815 (Macmillan, £20). He is writing a study called Seven Ages of Paris.