Tuesday, December 23, 2014

On the Boat from Mandalay

Rudyard Kipling, who never visited Mandalay, immortalized it as a dreamily exotic place where "the dawn comes up like thunder." George Orwell, who did, was less flattering, calling it "rather a disagreeable town--it is dusty and intolerably hot, and it is said to have five main products all beginning with P, namely, pagodas, pariahs, pigs, priests and prostitutes." I'm afraid Orwell was a little closer to the mark--Myanmar's second largest city is a noisy, stinky, dusty grid of mostly forgettable architecture, most of it thrown up after the city was heavily damaged in the Second World War (but in December at least the weather is tolerably warm)--but it also has a lot to offer to visitors, and I've had quite a nice--and quite a busy--time here. 

Mostly for astrological reasons, Burmese kings had a habit of moving their capital about--a habit perpetuated by the country's military leaders when they spent billions relocating the capital in 2005 from Yangon to the built-from-scratch Nay Pyi Taw in the middle of the country. (There were also no doubt strategic reasons for moving the capital to the heart of the country and away from prying eyes, and no doubt similar motives supplemented the astrological ones back in the royal period too.) Mandalay was Burma's last royal capital before the British took over, but three adjoining towns--Sagaing, Anamapura, and Inwa (aka Ava)--have also taken turns as the royal seat, making the Mandalay area historically significant from at least the 14th century. 

I had two days here, so I split them so that my first day was a day of excursions from the city and the second day I spent in the city. Let's see if I can get through the highlights. 

For my day of excursion, I hired a young guy to drive me around on the back of his motorcycle. I'd met Mo Ye the evening before (a bevy of would-be motorcycle taxi drivers hang around outside all the major tourist hotels) and the following morning he met me still in his traditional longyi and with red betel-stained teeth, but wearing a white button-up shirt and a worn black blazer--here was a man who took his job seriously. And indeed, one reason for hiring him is that the ride I'd had with him the evening before had felt reassuringly safe. Mandalay is nothing like as traffic-choked as many Asian cities--I suppose poverty keeps many people off the roads, and by far the dominant mode of transport are cheap, stinky motorcycles--but it still has the same worryingly "anything goes" approach to traffic: just put yourself in other people's way and trust they have enough time to slow down or dodge you. But that said, I haven't felt too imperilled on the roads. People drive fairly slowly here (it helps that the motorcycles top out at about 50 klicks) and seem genuinely concerned not to kill the people they're sharing the road with. 

Our first stop was Mahamuni Paya in south Mandalay. One of the holiest sites in the region, it focuses on a seated Buddha with an obsessively polished shining face atop a body grown thick and lumpy from all the gold leaf applied by devotees. (Rubbing gold leaf--which costs between $3 and $7 depending on the size--into sacred objects is a common form of devotion in Myanmar. Or at least, I've seen it practised in a number of places.) The reverence of the scene was very moving, with a long line of (only male) devotees waiting for their turn to apply gold leaf, while all around, men and women both bowed and prayed. 

Maybe even more fascinating were the surrounding marble workshops. Myanmar has more stupas and Buddha statues than you can shake an incense stick at, and the area around Mahamuni Paya houses many of the workshops where these statues are made. Row upon row of shop exhibited hundreds of seemingly identical Buddha statues, as well as half-finished ones, for instance with fully formed bodies but just a shapeless block for a head. As I watched the craftsmen work away at these blocks of marble with power tools, I reflected on the prayerful reverence given to the fruits of this muscular and noisy labour. I'm not sure how it works in Buddhism, but I assume there's some process of consecration by which a carved hunk of rock is turned into a sacred object. 

Our next stop was Sagaing, a bit south and across the Ayeyarwady (aka Irrawaddy) River from Mandalay. Sagaing had two runs as Burmese capital, once in the 14th century and once in the 18th, and its rolling hills contrast with Mandalay's flatness. The hills are dotted with stupas and small temples--even by Myanmar standards, Sagaing is stupa-mad--and the hills speckled with white and gold make an impressive sight from across the river. A series of covered walkways lead up and down the hills between holy sights, looking a little like a miniature not-so-Great Wall of China. Shaded benches along these walkways seem to be a prime spot for adolescent canoodling. Sitting shyly in pairs seems in general to be the most popular teenage pastime in Myanmar. Youths without much by way of prospects have little to do but "drink and dance and screw," as Jarvis Cocker puts it. Myanmar isn't exactly the land of opportunity, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of drinking and dancing among the youth. 

Our next royal town was Inwa, known as Ava to the British, which has taken four turns as royal capital between the 14th and 19th centuries. Now it's a quiet backwater of dusty tree-shaded streets and rice paddies set amidst atmospheric old structures and persistent hawkers. If crumbling stupas amidst rice paddies wasn't dreamy enough, I got driven around town in a horse cart by a spindly old timer who could probably remember Inwa's first turn as royal capital. The ancient red brick stupas gave me a foretaste of Bagan, but what impressed me most was Bagaya Kyaung, a 19th century teak monastery that's still in use. I'm a sucker for carved wood, and this was just the first of three ornate and delicately-proportioned teak monasteries I visited in Mandalay. 

And then our last stop was Burma's penultimate royal city of Anamapura, famed for U-Bein Bridge, which, at about 1200m, is the world's longest teak footbridge. The thing to do is to watch the sun set over Taungthaman Lake from the bridge, and half of Mandalay had come out for the sight. My dislike of crowds got my back up a bit as I jostled onto the bridge, but far enough along the crowds thinned out a little. And the sunset really was the kind to make you forget sharp elbows. Myanmar continues to be absurdly photogenic, and this is particularly so in the late afternoon light. It's a shame it lasts such a short time out here. Across the lake from the bridge stretch out damp, lazy grasslands partly cultivated with rice, with the occasional shrug of a stupa breaking up the otherwise flat horizon blanketed in a light mist. On the bridge I was approached by three novice monks, one quiet and pensive, one brash and extroverted, and one happy in the role of sidekick. The brash one was particularly keen to practice his English, and insisted that the sidekick get a photo of me with him and his pal using his smartphone camera in its Chanel-branded case. I confess I get a bit of a kick out of surprising monks by throwing a bit of Pali at them. Probably not exemplary of mindful speech. 

So that was my day of excursions. The next day was my day inside Mandalay itself. (You can tell this is going to be a very long blog post.) I hired a bicycle for the day, since Mandalay's too big to cover on foot, and hiring a taxi would give me less flexibility. If I'd been doing it for my health, I could have achieved the same effect on my lungs by staying in my hotel room and smoking a pack of cigarettes. The air in Mandalay is terrible, and my Q-Tips came out black after an end-of-day shower. 

Heading southwest from the tourist ghetto, it quickly felt like I'd left the city behind and entered a large village. I could only move my bike at walking pace through unpaved roads hosting bright and noisy markets. Eventually I made my way to the bank of the Ayeyarwady before circling back around to visit Shwe In Bin Kyaung monastery, the second of my teakwood delights. This one's a little out of the way and so had relatively little tourist traffic despite the exquisite wood carvings. 

Near the monastery is the sprawling jade market. The gems of the impoverished northern Kachin State are one of Myanmar's leading exports, especially to the Chinese market, and the jade mined up north is shipped down to Mandalay to be carved and crafted or sold in chunks. Kachin State is in the grip of a heroin epidemic, as overtaxed miners turn to drugs to see them through their grueling shifts. Many believe that governmental attempts to stamp out the drug trade are so half-hearted not only because they profit from it--Myanmar is also the world's second largest heroin producer after Afghanistan, and much of the north consists of essentially mini narco-states controlled by heavily armed ethnic militias--but also because a drug-addicted Kachin population is less able to carry on that state's struggle for greater autonomy. With all this as background, the Mandalay jade market was appropriately seedy. Dense alleys of shacks housed small workshops where youths polished bits of jade on foot-powered wheels, tea houses where shady-looking figures discussed business, and the occasional showroom where smiling ladies presented jade jewellery for sale. 

Leaving the jade market I cycled away from the quiet backstreets of the city's southwest and back toward the traffic-choked centre. The next stop was the gold pounders district, where I visited one of the workshops that produces the ubiquitous slips of gold leaf applied by the faithful to sacred objects. Muscular youths hammered away at anvils in a steady rhythm while women used thin buffalo bone instruments to lay slips of hammered gold onto sheets. 

I also dropped by a shopping mall near the gold pounders district. Consumerism is a recent import to Myanmar, and the mall was still under construction and only half full. Mostly Asian brands--although Adidas and DKNY are both represented--and mostly geared toward young women: clothes, perfume, and various accessories. Wandering through the mall, I was as much out of place by virtue of being a man as by virtue of being a foreigner. 

The afternoon saw me head east and north around Mandalay's gigantic 4 sq km fort ringed by imposing walls and a wide moat. The royal palaces on the inside were bombed to pieces in the Second World War, and while some replicas are still open to tourists, most of the fortress is a military barracks, as it was under British rule as well. An ominous bilingual sign outside the gates reads: "The Tatmadaw [the Myanmar military] shall never betray the national cause." Depending on how you understand it, that statement is either tautologous, since the Tatmadaw regards the national cause as the entrenchment and expansion of military control over the country, or plainly false. 

Near the fortress, I visited Shwenandaw Kyaung, the third of my nineteenth century teakwood monasteries, and perhaps the best of the bunch. Among the exquisitely ornate carvings were a series of dreamlike scenes from the Jatakas ringing the central altar. The Jatakas are folktales telling of earlier incarnations of the Buddha on his path toward Enlightenment. I read a collection of Jatakas a number of years ago--in a translation by Sarah Shaw, who I believe is reading this blog--and am ashamed of how little I remember. But I didn't need to know the stories to be enchanted by the various scenes playing out above, below, and around one another, not unlike some Medieval European paintings, except these were all carved delicately out of wood.

The penultimate stop on my city tour was Kuthodaw Paya, which, along with neighbouring Sandamuni Paya, holds 729 (that's nine cubed for those of you without mathematical instincts--nine is an auspicious number in Myanmar) large marble slabs on which are inscribed the entirety of the Tripitaka, the canon of Pali Buddhist texts. The collection is touted as the world's largest book, although that attribution depends on how important binding is to your definition of a book: each of the 729 slabs is housed within its own little stone pagoda. 

And then I joined the half of Mandalay that wasn't at U-Bein Bridge by climbing Mandalay Hill for the sunset. Mandalay itself is flat, but the 760 ft hill to the city's north breaks up the plain's monotony and affords spectacular views over the surrounding city and countryside, all the way out to the Shan hills rising in the east. Like in Sagaing, the climb takes place on covered staircases, meaning that the full view only suddenly becomes available at the top. On the way up there are various shrines and hawkers, as well as two imposing standing Buddha statues. I was joined for about half of the hike by Mo No, another novice monk wanting to practice his English. This seems to be a popular pastime among the young monks, as nearly half the tourists I saw also had a saffron-robed companion. 

The dawn might not come up quite like thunder here, but evening certainly falls with a crash. Having watched the solstice sun drop a little after 5:20, it was already black out by the time I returned to my bicycle at 6. Fortunately I'd brought my headlamp with me and had some illumination on the ride home through Mandalay's poorly lit streets. 

But wait! I've only told you about the day's events in Mandalay. I've yet to say anything about the evenings. During the royal period, Mandalay naturally attracted artists and craftsmen seeking patronage, and it remains the cultural capital of Myanmar to this day. Naturally, I had to sample the offerings. (But let's not get carried away in praising Mandalay's urbanity: it's also home to Ashin Wirathu, the outspoken monk who's at the forefront of the Buddhist supremacist 969 movement, which has been responsible for inciting discrimination and violence against Myanmar's Muslim minority, not just in the troubled Rakhine State out west, but also in Mandalay itself. I passed by Wirathu's monastery near the jade market, but declined to enter.) 

On my first evening in Mandalay, I went to see the Mustache Brothers, Myanmar's most notorious a-nyeint variety troupe, who offer a mixture of stand-up, dance, and slapstick. They gained international attention in 1996 when their politically bold satire earned stiff prison sentences for two of the three brothers. The senior member of the troupe died last year, but they still offer nightly shows in English for a tourist audience. Watching it felt more like visiting a tourist-oriented museum piece than politically relevant theatre, although what do you expect when the show's in English? A lot of recycled jokes (the government cracks down on thieves because it doesn't like competition) that was mostly redeemed by comedian Lu Maw's sprightly wit and wicked grin. 

Less political but also less moribund was the pwe I waded into a block away from the show. Pwe are Burmese street festivals, which are seemingly ubiquitous in Mandalay--we passed three or four on our twenty-minute drive out to see the Mustache Brothers. The one I saw centrally featured the odd juxtaposition of rebellious and over-sexed rock music amidst Buddhist paraphernalia. The rockers share the stage with more traditional dancers and other artists over the course of the evening. And there was also loads of street food, little pavilions depicting scenes from the Buddha's life, fortune tellers, and gossiping crowds huddled over tea. One of the pwe I passed on the way down even had a bouncy castle for the kids. 

And then on my second night I went to see Mandalay Marionettes, a troupe that also plays mostly for the tourist crowd in Mandalay, but has toured internationally as well. The marionette show I saw in Nyaungshwe held up against this one, although the show in Mandalay was certainly more polished, and had the added virtue of an accompanying band, which was heavily percussive with melodies hammered softly on a xylophone-like instrument or shrieked out on a manic horn. They also had a couple human dance numbers and the highlight for me was a human-marionette duet, where the curtain was lifted so that we could see the puppeteer controlling the marionette while another puppeteer stood above the human dancer and made as if she were controlling the dancer with strings as well. Like with Indian dance, traditional Burmese dance involves extremely intricate and stylized movements of the fingers, hands, and wrists. 

This overlong blog post wouldn't be complete if I didn't also mention that I finished reading Burmese Days, Orwell's first novel, during my time in Mandalay. (The joke is that Orwell didn't write just one novel about Burma, but rather a trilogy: Burmese Days deals with the colonial period, Animal Farm deals with the transition to military rule, and Nineteen Eighty-Four deals with the reality ever since.) It isn't as captivating as his later novels or his best essays, but it's engaging nonetheless, and Orwell's keen political vision, unpolluted by ideology or sentiment, is on full display. But it was also interesting to see how even Orwell displays a hint of colonial-era racism in this bitterly anti-colonial book. Critics have complained that the Burmese characters come off badly, but I don't think that's fair since pretty much all the British characters come off even worse. But I was struck by some of the animal imagery. In particular, two different Indian characters are described at different times as having the liquid eyes of a dog. And it struck me that, although Orwell and other European writers can and do frequently use animal similes to describe European characters, they would never describe a European as having the eyes of a dog. The eyes, after all, are the window to the soul, and it betrays an uncomfortable othering to describe those windows in terms of a subservient beast's. 

I'm now on the boat headed down the Ayeyarwady toward Bagan (I'm so glad I twigged to the fact that I can type up these blog posts while offline and then publish them later), which is a much more pleasant--and much more expensive--means of getting about than by bus. As if to reaffirm that Myanmar is a place of too-good-to-be-true visuals, we glided into Bagan as the sunset revealed the awaiting plain of numberless stupas. The Ayeyarwady is Myanmar's main waterway, with its headwaters in the mountainous north, and its mouth in a delta in and to the west of Yangon. (The delta region--which during the colonial period exported half the world's rice--took the brunt of Cyclone Nargis, which killed an estimated 138,000 people in 2008, and caused damage costing more than a quarter of Myanmar's GDP.) The ten-hour chug along the brownish river took me past large, sandy banks (this is the dry season and the already broad Ayeyarwady must swell considerably in the rainy season) with intermittent forests and cultivated land, along with occasional primitive villages with waving, smiling children (smiling seems to be the national sport in Myanmar). River traffic included a number of heavy barges as well as fishermen in dugout canoes and straw hats. The boat trip comes with a free tacky souvenir t-shirt. I might have preferred a slightly cheaper fare. 

I can tell that the tourist mentality has polluted my soul because, along with joy and relief, I felt a pang of disappointment when I read the news that America would begin normalizing relations with Cuba. I was hoping I'd make it there before McDonald's did, and indeed, I was thinking of going either next winter or the following spring. But I guess witnessing the transition of the country could be just as exciting. At least I got to visit Iran while the ayatollahs were still in power. Now may Allah deliver Iran from the ayatollahs posthaste. 

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