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From Our Own Correspondent
BBC World Service FOOC
00:09:03
The Road to Mandalay Owen Bennett Jones introduces an archive despatch from 1984.
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You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. We make an edition of the program for BBC Radio 4, but this is a download of a special edition broadcast on the BBC World Service. It's presented by Owen Bennett Jones.
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Reporters based abroad have to accept they're on call 24 hours a day, but it can be wearing. The story goes that one former correspondent Bob Jobbins got a call at 4 in the morning. Not because of some major story breaking, it was just a query about how to spell a name. From his bed he growled, I'll get back to you. Then he got hold of the producer's home number and called him with the spelling at four in the morning, UK time. Perhaps that's why he went on to become newsroom editor. Anyway, in 1984, he was in Burma.
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Sometimes you arrive in a country knowing virtually nothing about it except perhaps a few random out of date statistics or half remembered quotations, and you stumble on a scene which sets the mood for the rest of the trip. In Rangoon, it was a young girl sitting on the steps of a pagoda, looking across the river. The wind was blowing flurries of rain through the palm trees and the endless tinkling of the golden bells on the pagoda took on a brief vigor. It was a scene I was to see repeated with variations throughout the country, a constant reminder of the importance of religion, the charm of the people and the almost tangible serenity of Burmese life. Burma has deliberately cut itself off from the outside world, preferring isolation to what its leaders fear would be the destruction of its traditional way of life. So it's not easy to visit. Certain people are just banned, academics and journalists among them, and even tourists are allowed visas for only seven days. Arriving in Rangoon is still like being lost in time. You enter a modern aircraft in Bangkok and get out in a city which visually at least, is still in the 1950s. The Baroque American made taxis, the bulbous British cars of the immediate post war years, have become a cliche for Burma's refusal to allow consumer goods into the country. It's a capital city which has stayed essentially unchanged for the past 30 years. Almost everybody, men, women and children, wear the national dress, the the longy, the Burmese sarong, an article which bestows considerable grace on the wearer in spite of the constant need for adjustment, retying and hitching up whenever almost any exertion is required. The people and the buildings have a harmony which seems designed for postcards and snapshots, and they pose demanding attention. Rangoon is, by Burmese standards Quite modern, it was founded in the mid 18th century, but the heart of Rangoon, the Shui Dagon Pagoda, with its great golden dome, is much older. And a first glimpse of the pagoda gleaming in the watery light between the trees, takes the breath away. My guide told me that the gold on the dome was worth three and a half million dollars and that thousands of precious stones are set near its tip. As in most pagodas, there's a bustle of hawkers selling food for offerings, flowers, joss sticks and soft drinks. And in the shade of the sanctuaries, parents kneel in prayer with perhaps a flower pressed between their palms as children play or sleep around them. But tied to the wheel of that seven day visa, the tourists can scarcely afford to linger. The first task is to try to book the next stage of your journey. For centuries, the main road from the coast to Mandalay was the Irrawaddy river. And the British owned Irrawaddy Flotilla Company once had a fleet of 650 vessels plying the river. But with only a week in Burma, such a voyage is no longer practical. Even the train takes too long. And so it's back to that least romantic form of travel, a plane. Mandalay is one of those names which for the English seems to epitomise the mystery of the east, to conjure up images of ancient splendor. But Mandalay is in fact only 125 years old. Burma's last but one monarch, the good King Mindon, transferred his royal capital there to fulfill an ancient prophecy and built pagodas, a magnificent palace complex, a golden city. But within 30 years, his son and successor was in exile. Mandalay was an outpost of the British Empire, and his palace, modeled on the Buddhist tradition, representing the center of the world, was an army base renamed Fort Dufferin. Mandalay is dominated by the hill. Its 1729 steps, covered by nearly a mile of roofing, lead from pagoda to pagoda. The occasional tourist panting resolutely towards the summit passes young monks pacing in deep meditation and girls smoking large cheroots as they try to persuade you to buy sweets or soft drinks. And from the top, you can see the glistening domes of the pagodas, the broad sweep of the river and the sheer size of the thriving city below. Mandalay is both a major religious center for Burmese Buddhists and the heart of one of Burma's most important industries, smuggling black market goods. The night market, which stretches through a warren of back streets, concentrates on the essentials that are just not available in the government shops. Toothpaste from Thailand, medicines Toilet paper and cheap clothes. Their road to Mandalay crosses mountains, rivers, jungles, officially illegal and yet officially tolerated as a kind of economic safety valve. The black market in Mandalay is an example of rampant free enterprise which survives in spite of the centralized economy of socialist Burma. In Mandalay, horse carts are still the most common form of transport, but given the pressure of time, most tourists prefer to do their real sightseeing by jeep, again of World War II vintage. We drove out of the town across the British built Ava Bridge, the only one across the Irrawaddy to the old capital at Segang, today a religious centre with more than 600 monasteries among the hills and valleys. The jeep drivers run a tight schedule. They know the best spot for every photograph, the precise amount of time available to contemplate each view. It was during one such brief pause that I was gently rebuked by a Buddhist abbot for looking at the world through the lens of a camera. There were more pagodas to see, the Mahumuni with its Buddha so coated in layers of gold leaf that the features are distorted. There were craftsmen to watch beating silver making the gold leaf, silk weavers, wood carvers, stonemasons, all pouring out the artifacts to enrich the temples and pagodas and to enable the faithful to acquire merit. South of Mandalay, a 30 minute flight following the rough course of the river, is what must be one of the world's great religious cities and one of the most extraordinary archaeological sites. Pagan was a mighty capital between the 11th and the 13th century, when, because of what appears to have been a fairly disastrous misunderstanding, Kublai Khan felt obliged to sack it, and Pagan was left to decay again. I was fortunate with my guide. He spoke good English. Indeed, he seemed to have devoted his whole life to studying English. He said he listened to the BBC World Service, English by radio. He had cassettes. And he badgered me with complex questions. Please. What does yearning mean? He asked. Wanting something very much, I said. But doesn't it mean something to do with sadness? Well, yes, I conceded. Wanting something, you can't have so much, it makes you sad. He seemed to yearn for all sorts of things. A proper job not to have to get married to the girl his family had chosen for him, and, of course, more money. But he had also studied Buddhism and seemed very much aware that while he had problems, they weren't ultimately very important. Back in Rangoon, it was still raining. Not the blasted English drizzle, but the wild, pounding rain of a monsoon that set for another four months. Rain which throws up a spray as it hits the road, and the taxi drivers peer through the mist and rain, their one windscreen wiper flicking ineffectually at the torrent of water. In seven days I'd seen so much traveled, if not the road to Mandalay, at least to Mandalay itself. Kipling paid a brief visit to Rangoon and Moulmein, further down the coast, where he left his Burmese girl, thinking of the soldier. But in a poem which encapsulates an English soldier's nostalgia for Burma, he gives a lyrical romance to a name to Mandalay, a city which, ironically, he never visited. As I drove out to the airport, I could hear the temple bells in spite of the roar of the rain. Perhaps they were calling me back to Mandalay, too.
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A rather lyrical Bob Jobbins in Burma. And tomorrow, another noted former BBC correspondent, Martin Bell, puts TV news under the spotlight in another edition from our own correspondent.