Myanmar’s beauty and troubles laid bare in A Savage Dreamland by David Eimer

A Savage Dreamland: Journeys in Burma by David Eimer Bloomsbury 3.5/5 stars Myanmar was a little-visited country until a decade ago, struggling under a military dictatorship that had curtailed individual freedoms, stunted economic development and made the Southeast Asian nation an international pariah. Then, in 2010, the junta loosened its grip on power, allowing parliamentary elections for the first time in decades. Later that year, democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi was freed from house arrest, an event that reverberated around the world and added to the sense that Myanmar – or Burma, as it was known until 1989 – was, at last, rejoining the global community. That initial euphoria has since subsided, notably due to Myanmar’s treatment of its Muslim Rohingya minority and ongoing armed conflicts in its borderlands, but visitor numbers have continued to rise. When David Eimer, then the China correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph, first visited Myanmar in 2010, only North Koreans had fewer mobile phones. By 2015, the year he moved to Myanmar, one could buy a Chinese-made handset on the streets of Yangon for US$20. Today, rural farmers spend their days talking on the phone while out tilling the fields. However, in other ways, little has changed, finds Eimer, the Southeast Asia correspondent for The Daily Telegraph and a South China Morning Post contributor. Corruption is endemic, and the illegal trade in jade and narcotics, worth a combined US$50 billion a year, according to various sources, is by far Myanmar’s most profitable industry. While Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won a sweeping victory in November 2015, in what is considered the first free and fair election in the country since 1960, a change in the constitution in 2008 means that a quarter of the parliamentary seats are reserved for army officers, who oppose any changes that would further weaken their position. Nationwide, Myanmar’s murder rate has risen by 40 per cent since the junta relinquished partial control, with a per capita rate second only to the Philippines in the region, and armed conflicts persist in many parts of the country. Even so, Myanmar’s stunning beauty and vibrant culture make it an enticing place to visit for its natural wonders and ancient temples. Eimer’s travels across the length and breadth of the country form the basis of A Savage Dreamland. In Yangon, the former capital, he wanders through the crumbling colonial-era buildings in search of relics of foreign rule. Britain took full control of Burma in 1886, after the third Anglo-Burmese war, and would govern the country until the second world war effectively ended British rule in the region. During the 1920s and 30s, Yangon’s port was the second busiest in the world, behind London. One of Burma’s more famous residents was George Orwell, who worked as an imperial police officer in the colony for five years, before returning to England to take up writing. Eimer seeks out the Pegu Club, which served as a meeting place for the British elite between 1882 and 1942. Once an unofficial seat of power, nowadays it is a “sorry looking two storey teak building”, its windows broken, gutters bent and loose, and washing draped over its long balconies. Occupied by the families of former Myanmese soldiers, the complex was once the exclusive domain of Europeans. Besides the European elite, Yangon, a city that became known as “a bolt-hole for chancers who had exhausted their credit elsewhere in Asia and were looking to roll the dice one more time”, was also home to down-and-outs. Eimer tells the stories of some of the more colourful characters who passed through the country, people like Herbert Robinson, an Indian Army officer who spent two years as a military policeman in a remote corner of the country before a dalliance with a local widow accused of poisoning her husband led to his dismissal and descent into drugs. “Before long Robinson acquired a reputation as the most debauched Englishman in Mandalay,” writes Eimer. After a failed suicide attempt and a brief period as a Buddhist monk, Robinson was eventually repatriated back to Britain by the authorities, where he wrote a memoir titled A Modern De Quincey: Autobiography of an Opium Addict (1942). For all its early focus on Myanmar’s colonial past, the strongest parts of the book are those that deal with the country’s more immediate history, and its harder-to-reach borderlands. The decades leading up to 2010 saw Myanmar almost in stasis, “a country marooned under the junta that had snatched power in 1962”, writes Eimer, with the military ruthlessly suppressing opposition. Yet, as Eimer points out, poverty is still rampant in the country. “Little has improved for ordinary people since Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD came to power, and there is no sign that it will change in the near future,” he writes. Eimer describes Myanmar as “the true melting pot of Southeast Asia, a place where over a hundred different languages have been identified”, and where minority ethnic communities make up a third of the country’s population of 55 million. Yet many of these groups have been fighting for regional autonomy since the country gained independence in 1948. While the British imposed direct rule on the central areas of the country, they found it harder to control the borderlands, and often left them in the hands of pliant local leaders, generating resentment and leading to armed conflicts between the majority Bamar ethnic group and the smaller groups. The hills of Kachin and Shan states, both of which border China, are home to vast mineral reserves, jade, oil and teak, all of which fund both the government forces and rebel groups. The fighting shows no sign of abating. Eimer sneaks into areas that are off-limits to foreigners due to ongoing conflicts, to meet some of the ethnic groups fighting for self-rule. At one point he spends a night sleeping rough with a group of Ta’ang National Liberation Army fighters in the hills of Shan State and avoiding government forces. He tries to get to the root of the tensions between Myanmar’s Muslim and Buddhist communities, which have led to deadly clashes in recent years, and the Rohingya refugee crisis that saw the Muslim minority flee en masse into neighbouring Bangladesh. He also visits the Christian-majority Chin state. For all its history and current affairs, A Savage Dreamland is at its heart a travel book, and Eimer paints a vivid picture of Myanmar today. Much of his travel involves worn-out motorbikes, or long and painful bus journeys on the country’s barely functioning road network. Readers are introduced to glorious temples, as well as seedy casino towns that have popped up on the border to cater to Chinese gamblers. The book is filled with intriguing characters Eimer meets along the way, from militant Buddhist monks, to militia commanders and the descendants of those who ruled the country before the British arrived. Early on, Eimer explains his own motivations for moving to Burma: “I knew it would be fascinating to witness this unruly country stir itself after being becalmed for fifty years.” He proves to be an able guide, and A Savage Dreamland explores the beauty but also the troubling realities of Myanmar, offering a vivid portrait of a country struggling to overcome its past, but where things may get worse before they get better.

Myanmar’s beauty and troubles laid bare in A Savage Dreamland by David Eimer

The writer travels to far flung corners of the country formerly known as Burma to better understand its present Although at its heart a travel book, Eimer fills the pages with intriguing characters to paint a vivid picture

The writer travels to far flung corners of the country formerly known as Burma to better understand its present

Although at its heart a travel book, Eimer fills the pages with intriguing characters to paint a vivid picture