To the Katha Tennis Club, in search of “1984”
Fly to Yangon, and then take a train to Mandalay and on to Katha, a small quiet town cooled by mists and generally suitable for tennis. When Burma gained independence in 1948, it was the first nation to successfully break free from the British Empire since the US did so in 1776. The name Myanmar means, “first people in the world.”
The Katha Tennis Club Building is the center of the plot in George Orwell's first book and influential travelogue Burmese Days, based on his time in Burma as a policeman. The building itself is now home to a government agricultural cooperative, but happily the tennis court remains just as it was. 
The club itself is a simple wooden building under a tin roof, surrounded by a lush garden of purple bougainvilleas. In the book, the hero shoots an elephant on the tennis court. Orwell felt that the setting illustrated the inequalities and injustice of Colonial rule. (Not the shooting of the poor elephant, the tennis court.)
Orwell is perhaps the most famous political travel writer of them all. Animal Farm was his witty yet powerful parable of the collapse of Communism into tyranny. Its lessons still haunt those who preach the “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” brand of socialism. Alas, this darker picture of a future totalitarian society has become fodder for reality TV producers, as a jovial “Big Brother” gives witless youth instructions on how to run their household.
George Orwell was a very serious fellow, and drew on just the kind of depressing travel experiences that we are trying to revive here. He spent time Down and Out in Paris and London, he visited Russia, and then he spent five “boring” years in Burma. There, just nineteen and fresh out of English public school, he was in charge of gathering intelligence on criminal gangs, watching while the then-British protectorate collapsed into violent crime and indiscriminate murders. It may have been this network of spies and informers that informed some of the sinister vision of 1984.
Mr. Orwell started his tour of duty in Mandalay at the Police Training School. In Burmese Days, the city is described as dusty, hot and famous for “Five main products all beginning with P, namely, pagodas, pariahs [that is stray dogs], pigs, priests and prostitutes.” Most of these are still there, although prostitution is discouraged. But in any case, he was soon sent off to the delta region of Burma, which is criss-crossed with steamy canals full of particularly nasty mosquitoes and (scarcely any better) armed gangs.
At the time Orwell visited, Burma had the highest rate of crime of all the colonies in the British Empire. Indeed, the largest prison in the whole of the Empire was built near Yangon at Insein. It housed both conventional criminals and political ones (those who campaigned for independence from the British, for example), a tradition carried on by the Burmese government today. Orwell wrote in his 1936 essay entitled “Shooting an Elephant”:
I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos—all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.
Yet in Orwell's time, Burma was at least relatively prosperous, the world's most important exporter of rice. Not so Myanmar today. Since the British left, the country has trudged sadly towards absolute poverty under the absolute power of “the generals.” In Myanmar, comment and opinions are officially required to be in “accord with the times” and facts are carefully checked not so much for accuracy, but rather, political complicity with the ruling class.
Orwell's literary efforts clearly defied these expectations. For example, this exchange between a member of the club and the club butler:
“Butler!”
“Yes, master?”
“How much ice have we got left?”
“'bout 20 pounds, master. Will only last today, I think. I find it very difficult to keep ice cool now.”
“Don't you talk like that, damn you—‘I find it very difficult!’ Have you swallowed a dictionary? ‘Please, master, can't keeping ice cool’—that's how you ought to talk.”
• The world's tallest bamboo (more than one hundred feet) grows in Myanmar.
• Myanmar still has the world's largest number of working elephants. The elephants work in the forests dragging logs, unless they are white elephants, which are worshipped instead. This makes them very expensive to own, hence the expression “white elephant.”
In those “Burmese days” George Orwell was known as “Eric Blair.” The pen name came later. The novel has never been translated into Burmese but is apparently sometimes referred to in the official government newspaper when a point needs to be made about how bad things were in colonial times.
Disinformation pointPublishers in the UK, who worried that it might attract legal action, originally rejected Burmese Days. Instead, Orwell had to publish it first in the US in 1934, but even then, only after modifications to make it less political. For instance, they changed the occupations of some of the characters from civil servants to businessmen. The book was immediately successful, and the British publisher offered to consider it again, if Orwell made the location less recognizable. To this end, Orwell offered:
With reference to the possible identification of the imaginary town of Kyauktada with the real town of Katha. I have been unable to obtain a map of Katha, but I have searched my memory and made out a fairly clear picture of it. It was something like my description of Kyauktada, except that (a) I had put the cemetery beside the church, which it was not in Katha, (b) I had put in a pagoda which did not exist at Katha, and (c) I had described the Club as having a garden that ran down to the river, whereas that at Katha, as well as I can now remember, was not actually on the river, though near it...
Vacationing in Myanmar holds some cachet, mostly due to its reputation as the world's most secretive dictatorship. Actually, though, the military leaders of Myanmar held elections in 1990, but canceled them after the results were both unsatisfactory and also not at all “in keeping with the times.” Ever since, the pro-democracy activist Aung-San Suu Kyi is periodically arrested and released as a kind of “democracy barometer” for the country. (At the time of writing she is back under house arrest again.)