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

candle-lit wooden houses. A young woman with a wet sarong tied across her breasts was bathing next to an outdoor well, stray dogs nearby.
    It was all a far cry from what I knew was taking place in any medium-sized city in China, where shopping centres like the ones in Mandalay were being built almost literally by the day. But it was, in a way, an extension of what was happening in China, a spill-over from across the hills. And a spill-over from China was like a tidal wave in Burma and in Mandalay. The effects had been magnified as well by the complete absence of Western companies, the result of official sanctions and unofficial boycotts, as well as by the poor state of the Burmese economy more generally. There were no Starbucks or McDonald’s or stores selling Apple computers, no Sheraton hotels, no Shell petrol stations. There were also few Burmese competitors. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with what the Chinese were doing. But the Chinese were entering a vacuum, and this once proud capital of a little kingdom, and later a city of British India, was being transformed into an outpost of the world’s biggest industrial revolution. They were helping create an unequal society. It wasn’t clear at all what the consequences might be.
     
    Mandalay had been built as an act of defiance. In the 1850s, after two bruising wars against the British, Burma’s penultimate ruler, King Mindon, had violently seized the throne from his half-brother. His ambition was to modernize what was left of the kingdom and in this way preserve its independence. He sent students to study abroad in India and Europe, imported steam ships, built the first modern factories, laid telegraph lines and even developed a Burmese Morse code. He tried to create a professional army and reform government institutions, abolishing the old fiefdoms and taking the first steps towards a salaried bureaucracy. Embassies were dispatched to the West seeking treaties of friendship. It was all very similar to what was going on in contemporary Egypt under Mohammed Ali, in Japan under the Meiji, and in next door Siam (now Thailand) under King Mongut (the king of The King and I ).
    Mindon was not an anglophobe, but through his reforms he wanted to ensure that his country remained free of European aggression. Early in his reign, he decided to build a new capital–Mandalay–much to the shock of his ministers, who were happily ensconced in the old capital, Amarapura, about a dozen miles to the south. It was partly a military decision. Amarapura was right on the Irrawaddy, whereas the future site of Mandalay was two miles inland, just out of the reach of British gunboats. The moat and the massive earth-backed walls, walls that would with stand artillery and aerial bombardment nearly a century later, were designed to deter a British siege.
    Mindon the modernizer was also Mindon the traditionalist. A devout Buddhist and a great patron of the faith, he is remembered best by Burmese for his innumerable acts of merit, from his sponsorship of monasteries and the building of pagodas, to his convening of an international Buddhist synod and the resulting review of ancient texts. He carefully performed the ceremonies required of a Burmese monarch and in the costumes and rituals of his court there was no hint of Western modernity. Mandalay was laid out according to age-old custom, as the best-ever rendering of a distinctly Burmese tradition, in a hope that this tradition might survive the Victorian age.
    It was not to be. In 1885 a British expeditionary force annexed the kingdom, defeated a surprisingly robust guerrilla resistance, and abolished the ancient monarchy. Rangoon became the capital of all Burma and the focus of commercial attention, and Mandalay became a backwater, an upcountry town of no particular strategic significance. The walled inner city was renamed Fort Dufferin and became home to a small British garrison and the ‘Upper Burma Club’. Within a generation, the old