FROM KIPLING TO SINATRA IN BURMA

Burma is a hidden country. Sandwiched between India and Thailand, it is essentially the drainage basin of the Irawaddy River, rising in the glaciers at the southeast corner of the Tibetan Plateau and flowing south for 1,350 miles to the Bay of Bengal.

Out of a welter of tribal regions and warring principalities, it emerged into history only about a thousand years ago with the Pagan Empire.  It established Buddhism throughout what is now Burma, and constructed over 10,000 Buddhist temples during the 10^th-13^th centuries.  2,200 remain in the plains of Pagan today, one of the world’s most wondrous sights — especially by hot air balloon as you can see by my picture above.

The Mongol invasions of the late 1200s wiped Pagan out. Various kingdoms warred, rose, and fell for the next 500 years until the Brits arrived, who in a series of Anglo-Burmese Wars from 1824-1885 colonized and created Burma as a Province of British India.

The capital was Rangoon, built by the Brits into a flourishing city known as The Garden City of the Orient, and way upriver on the Irawaddy was the city they were all lyrical about – Mandalay.

It was Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) who made Burma the ultimate of the romantically exotic with his poem Mandalay in 1890.

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea,
There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
“Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!”
        Come you back to Mandalay,
        Where the old Flotilla lay:
        Can’t you ‘ear their paddles chunkin’ from Rangoon to Mandalay?
        On the road to Mandalay,
        Where the flyin’-fishes play,
        An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!

Set to song as On The Road To Mandalay in 1907, the sheet music sold over a million copies.  Its recording by famous baritone Peter Dawson made it immensely popular.  Here is Dawson’s original audio of 1931 with old and new photos of Mandalay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5_M9kTBmug

So much so that Frank Sinatra performed it in 1961 at the Sands in Vegas – although he doctored it up a bit not grasping the poem’s poignancy:

Most every country in the world has changed dramatically since Sinatra, much less Kipling.  Almost nowhere can you find the romantically exotic for real, instead of a simulated tourist show.  Yet there are such places and Burma is primary among them.  There is an untouched purity of culture that goes back for millennia in Burma.

This is what we will experience together if you are able to join us this coming February to Hidden Burma.  Hope I’ll see you in Mandalay!  Jack