Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia by Thant Myint-U

Mandalay was founded, this area had been the favourite camping ground of mule caravans coming down from Yunnan, bringing silver and silk in exchange for Burmese cotton. Then, around the start of the last century, a beautiful covered market was built, by an Italian architect, and though this ornate structure would survive war and fires, it was pulled down in the 1990s and replaced by the ugly concrete construction that now loomed over the dusty stalls and small shops below.
    On a side street vendors were selling pots and pans and fresh vegetables. There was a row of shops piled high with construction material with names like ‘Golden Lion Wire and Cable’, ‘Asia Metal Company’ and ‘Myanmar Wood Coating’. There were also four little stalls, all in a row, selling condoms and various sexual paraphernalia including blow-up dolls and herbal aphrodisiacs. Some of the devices were in worn cardboard boxes and several had, inexplicably, pictures on them of Harry Truman.
    There were also many stores selling CDs and DVDs. I peeked into one and saw that in addition to Burmese and Western music, there was also a big section for monkish sermons. Mandalay is the monastic centre of Burma and there are still huge Buddhist monasteries both in Mandalay and in nearby towns, like Sagaing across the river. In Sagaing, the biggest monastery (where I had been on an earlier trip) has grown into a complex of training and research centres and even has a hundred-bed hospital, as well as the more traditional preaching and meditation halls. Some of the abbots who head these more important monasteries are sort of super-monks, well known across Burma and amongst the Burmese diaspora, travelling internationally, their lectures and sermons available on CDs. They are often on television. I saw one once at an airport terminal being greeted by well-wishers like visiting royalty, many of the waiting passengers and even air port staff coming around excitedly to pay their respects.
    From the old commercial centre, the city had spread southward for several miles, along 78th Street. It had once been the neighbourhood of artisans and craftsmen, silversmiths and bronze-workers, some the descendants of captives from the court of Siam, brought over during the eighteenth-century wars. The area had become a Chinese preserve. There were no signs of any crafts men now. Instead 78th Street had been transformed into a four-lane avenue, and was a mix of new developments and building sites, red dust billowing around, trucks and buses rumbling past. In place of the little wooden shops that I remembered from the 1980s, there were multi-storied concrete buildings, generally window less with blue-tinted glass fronts that looked terrible and must have only magnified the heat inside. One of these buildings was the Great Wall Hotel. Unlike the hotel I stayed at, this big hotel had no Western tourists at all and many of the signs were written in Chinese. Several receptionists were crowded behind the counter and one told me the rooms were $22 a night and came with a free ‘foot massage’ at the ‘foot massage centre’ adjacent to the lobby. Across the street, a China Eastern Airlines bill board advertised a new direct flight–three times a week–from Kunming to Mandalay, starting soon. Another much more massive billboard advertised a condominium and retail complex that would be completed in late 2010. The billboard stretched a block long and hid the big hole in the ground that had been dug behind. It had a picture of the planned complex, with an immaculate street and pavement and little sports cars parked out in front. And beyond this commercial area were warehouses and small factories, almost all the way to the airport, about a 45-minute drive away. Mandalay wasn’t quite the ‘Chinese city’ I was told it would be. But here, much more than in Rangoon, China’s growing presence was plain to see.
    There were three new shopping centres–an unheard of thing anywhere in