Thursday, April 06, 2006

Burma—Kipling’s ‘Land of Dreams’ No More

“On the road to Mandalay, where the flyin’-fishes play, an’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay….by the old Moulmein pagoda, lookin’ eastward to the sea, there’s a Burma girl a settin’, an’ I know she thinks of me

This was Rudyard Kipling’s Burma: a land filled with all the romance of the mystic orient of the 19th century.


In 1885 the British invaded Upper Burma, annexed it, and made it a part of India. The last ruling king, Thebaw and his Queen, Supayalat (along with her scheming, power hungry mother, Queen Alenandaw), were exiled to India.



In 1948, Burma got her independence from Britain. But prior to this, there were Round Table conferences in London, Paris, and Simila, where delegates from Burma, fought fiercely for Burma’s proper recognition by Britain as an independent country from India, and an acknowledgement of its ethnic groups, including a new race, the Anglo-Burmese, who were the children of British and Burmese unions. (The Anglo-Burmese, proportionately were the largest ethnic group of volunteers in both the World Wars).



The massacres at the Mandalay Palace in 1885 were just a shadow in Burmese history as compared to the thousands upon thousands who have vanished from the land of dreams, under the oppressive boot of Myanmar’s socialist agenda.

Burma is now on President Bush’s list as a terrorist nation--and Kipling’s Burma, where “temple bells [were] callin” has vanished like ether, into the mists of time. - http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=20468&catcode=13