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

bullet wounds. Dacoits were suspected, but the murder remains a mystery. In Jeffrey Archer’s recent novel Paths to Glory , Morshead appears as a character, killed in Maymyo in the last chapter, not by a mystery assailant, but by his wife’s secret ‘Pakistani lover’.
    I passed ‘Craddock Court’ and then ‘Croxton’, both now hotels as well, the latter once the ‘family holiday home’ of the same Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation that had built the Candacraig. I had seen pictures from this time, of black-tie dinners and fair-haired children in costumes posing at fancy-dress parties. There was polo and other sports at the Maymyo Gymkhana Club, amateur theatricals, and an endless round of parties during the high season. Standing in front of ‘Croxton’, with no one else around other than a very small Indian-looking man trimming the hedges, I had no trouble imagining that time, not as a glamorous Merchant Ivory film, but as real life, where the black tie dinner was followed by a climb up the wooden staircase to a rusty bathroom and an uncomfortable bed.
    For the British, Burma was not very interesting in itself, but held an important geographical location, guarding India’s eastern flank. In the 1820s an aggressive Burmese empire had threatened Britain’s own expanding Indian possessions, taking Assam and Manipur (what is today India’s ‘Northeast’) and menacing Bengal. The British were at first drawn in unwittingly, but then came to see control over the Irrawaddy valley and the adjacent hills as a vital part of their defence of India. Burma was a buffer against China as well as against the French, who were then moving up the Mekong River from Saigon.
    Burma was also about making money. In addition to the rice, teak and oil of the lowlands, there were many other natural resources here in the highlands as well, ready to be exploited, including tungsten, silver, lead, copper, and zinc. The Scots dominated business, but profit-seekers came from all over the world. One was Herbert Hoover, about twenty years before he became president of the United States, who arrived in Burma as an up-and-coming partner of an international mining company. With a young family in tow, he even lived for a time in Maymyo and set up his own firm to make money from the silver mines recently identified near the Chinese border. He would write that the Burmese were ‘the only truly happy and cheerful race in Asia’. He would also make millions for himself.
    In pre-colonial times, demographics and geography kept both India and China far away. There were mountains and jungle and few people in the vast spaces in between Asia’s big civilizations. But by the twentieth century this was changing. Populations were growing and filling in the landscape. And new technologies conquered once forbidding terrain. For most of British rule, the strategic and economic motives were still not there for Burma to become China’s back door. Then in the 1930s the situation changed, as Japanese armies closed in on China’s beleaguered Nationalist government from the east and Burma’s strategic position became obvious for the whole world to see. The Allies would build the ‘Burma Road’ and then the ‘Stilwell Road’, desperate to connect India with China and keep Chinese forces supplied. It is these same roads that are now being remade, but for very different reasons.
     
    For China the route that ran through Maymyo, from the Middle Kingdom to the plains of central Burma, had long been of some significance. Since ancient times Burma had been a source of precious commodities, like amber and jade. And under the final Burmese dynasty, large quantities of cotton and tea had also found their way to Chinese markets. Tea was indigenous to the hills just northeast of Maymyo, and the export of tea across the border was such an important part of the local economy that a Burmese minister in the early nineteenth century dismissed as ‘preposterous’ the British