Introduction

"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!"'

The lament of Kipling's private soldier, dreaming of the east in the cold and dankness of "the blasted English drizzle" evokes the charm of an eastern dream, a now unattainable fantasy to a demobbed soldier on the wet streets of London. The most popular of Kipling's ballads, the mood of 'The Road to Mandalay' mingled jingoistic pride in the British conquest of Burma (Myanmar), with a melancholy yearning for the colours and sounds of the east. This nostalgia-fuelled fantasy conjured an exquisite dream of oriental languor and beauty-the clang of temple bells, misty rice fields, the whiff of spices and the tender ministrations of cigar-smoking Burmese maidens "in a cleaner, greener land". For the common soldier tramping the dirty London streets and dreaming of "long ago an' fur away", Mandalay is the key to a land of stronger colour, intenser smells and, of course, erotic opportunity ("plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed her where she stud!"), a broadening of experience and a shrugging off of restraint, "somewheres east of Suez... where there ain't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst".

Rudyard Kipling's road to Mandalay was of course the great waterway of the Irrawaddy which carried invading British forces from Rangoon (present-day Yangon) to the heart of the Burmese kingdom in 1885. The vision, though, is shot through with irony, as the annexation of Upper Burma, which opened up the country to the west, inevitably undermined many of those aspects of the old Burma so attractive to Kipling and those who followed in his footsteps. But the greater irony of Kipling's poem lies in the very shortness of his own stay in the country: far from travelling up the Irrawaddy with the "old flotilla", Kipling's personal knowledge of the country was a one-day stop at Rangoon in March 1888 and a brief visit to Moulmein (Mawalamyine) across the Gulf of Martaban to the east, where the great pagoda inspired the ballad's most famous lines. But no matter that Moulmein lies far from the road to Mandalay, the sacrifice of topographical exactitude for poetic effect has fuelled the fantasies of many a traveller from the 19th century to the present day, for whom the lure of the river highway into the heart of Burma encompasses all the romance of an exotic tropical world.

Even though Rudyard Kipling only spent a very brief sojourn in Burma, his soldier's lament seems to epitomize popular conceptions of the country: the exoticism of the East, the nostalgia for better times and more than a hint of potential amorous conquest.

'A Girl Painting her Eyebrows', from a painting by J Raeburn Middleton circa 1900. V C Scott O'Connor wrote in his seminal guidebook to Burma, The Silken East (1903): "When she is young the Burmese woman is, after her own type, fair and attractive, full of laughter and fun and the enjoyment of life; witty and self-possessed; seldom if ever brazen-faced; frank to a degree. It is one of the wayside amusements of travel in Burma to see her at her toilette before the world, to see her calmly unwind tresses in her hair (itself generally luxurious and ample); to see her enamel her face with ingenuous thanaka, to follow her frequent contented glances at her mirror." Much taken with both the men and women of the country, O'Connor's description of Burmese maidenhood evokes his deep admiration for the country's fairer sex.

Willoughby Wallace Hoo per took this photograph of the Hampshire Regiment soon after the occupation of Mandalay. It depicts the Church service on Christmas Day in 1885. He commented, "The Regiment is quartered in some of the numerous Phoongyee Kyoungs, or monasteries, outside the city walls on the N E. These buildings make capital barracks for the men.... The service on this day... was held in the open air outside one of these buildings... the men being paraded fully armed, as in those days it was impossible for any to say when an alarm might be sounded. This, as well as other buildings of the kind, was erected as.'a work of me rit', but the builders little thought that one day the Christmas Hymn, ' Hark! The Herald Angels', would be sung by British soldiers in that place."

King Thibaw, Queen Supyalat and her sister in Mandalay Palace, 1880s. Western fascinalion with Burma was reciprocated by the Burmese royal family, who sent abroad for all manner of fashionable European toys. Photography was a particular favourite and for some years Thibaw kept a court photographer, a Frenchman with a staff of Burmese assistants. This photograph is from a negative found in the Palace after the British occupation. One of the Burmese assistants confirmed that the job had been profitable, if precarious: 'He was a very poor operator, and said that when he took a picture of the King, or more particularly when he took one of Queen Soopy-a-lat, it was an even chance whether he got a handful of rubies given to him or had his head cut off! The Frenchman gave up the situation! Note the studio backdrop propped carelessly in the background.

While Portuguese and Italian merchants were the first Europeans to visit Burma as early as the mid-15th century, the British connection with the country dated back to almost exactly 300 years before the annexation. In 1586 the merchant Ralph Fitch spent nearly a year in the country, looking for trading opportunities, gathering information and marvelling at the capital at Pegu (Bago), "a very great citie, strong and fair" and at that time larger than London. For the next two and a half centuries Britain maintained a precarious commercial foothold, first at Syriam (near the present site of Yangon), from where they were expelled in 1752 and later at Cape Negrais on the southernmost tip of the Arakan peninsula, whose garrison was destroyed by King Alaungpaya seven years later. The massacre of the Negrais factory virtually ended British contacts until the early 19th century. Then the activities of an increasingly expansionist and aggressive Burma under King Bagyidaw led to war with Britain in 1824-26, resulting in the annexation of the southern coastal provinces of Arakan (Rakhine) and Tennasserim (Taninthayi). A second war in 1852 saw the loss of the whole of Pegu and Lower Burma to Britain.

With these territorial gains and the rapid expansion of Rangoon as a port in the following decades, British commercial interests were soon looking longingly to the riches of Upper Burma (as the old Kingdom of Ava was known to Europeans). The commercial and political stranglehold tightened, and with the death of King Mindon (whose relationship with the British had been friendly, if distant) and the accession of King Thibaw in 1878, informed observers saw the acquisition of the Kingdom of Ava and the dissolution of the Konbaung Dynasty as inevitable. Hopelessly dominated by his cruel and capricious wife Queen Supyalat, Thi baw's relations with the British were immediately brought to crisis point by the execution of some 80 of the King's relatives in 1879; and for a further six years they simmered uneasily as the rapacity of Queen Supyalat and her corrupt inner circle dragged the kingdom towards chaos. Thibaw's diplomatic flirtations with the French, a long-running border dispute with the British and increasing agitation for annexation from the Rangoon merchants all kept the pot boiling, until in 1885 Thibaw's commercial dispute with the Bombay-Burmah Trading Company over teak exports provided a pretext for invasion. In November the steamers of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company started to ferry British troops up the Irrawaddy to Mandalay, at the start of a short campaign that saw Thibaw and his queen exiled in India and the last vestiges of the Burmese empire absorbed into Britain's Indian empire.

Thibaw's fall, which saw the extinction of an independent Burma for over half a century, was the dissolution of only the last of the dynasties which had risen to greatness and subsided along the banks of the Irrawaddy. The story of Burma for 1,000 years preceding British conquest was largely dominated by conflict between the settled Mons of Lower Burma and Burman invaders from the north; and while the creation of a unified Burma resulted from successive defeats of the Mons, it was their culture and influence-particularly the introduction of Buddhism-which was to be a defining element of Burmese culture. The first and greatest of the early kingdoms was the state of Pagan (Bagan), founded in the mid-9th century. Here, bounded at its western edge by the curving sweep of the Irrawaddy, a great city of temples stretches across the plain, witness to a vital architectural and artistic tradition, and material testament to a Buddhist polity centred on the merit-path to salvation. Pagan survived as a powerful kingdom for over four centuries, only falling to the Mongols and Shans at the end of the 13th century. While many of the temples have succumbed to decay, Pagan remains one of the world's great architectural sites. Barely known to outsiders before the mid-19th century, it excited the admiration of early European visitors unprepared for the elegance of a distinctive architectural heritage which reached its apogee in the 12th-century Ananda temple.

'The Begging Recluse', from a painting by J Raeburn Middleton. The giving of alms is a much practised form of merit-making in Burma both past and present. As A W Wills wrote in Sunny Days in Burma (1905): "One of the precepts of the Buddha to his disciples was 'Let your daily food be broken victuals given to you as alms', and in obedience to this order one sees any morning, when one is astir early, little processions of monks and their pupils, each bearing a bowl, shaped vessel with a lid to it; as they wend their way slowly and in silence along the roads, they will stop at intervals before each cottage which they have to pass, and stand opposite to it with downcast eyes. Then one of its inmates will come forward and drop into the ' begging-bowl' a contribution of rice, a portion of curry, a bunch of vegetables, or some fruit. Not a word is said, and the procession moves on to the next dwelling.... The food which has been collected in the morning round, now serves to supply the wants of the brethren of the monastery... and of any wayfarers who may avail themselves of the primitive accommodation of the rest-house. I believe, however, that except in remote villages where some few recluses maintain the simplicity and austerity of the original orders, a considerable relaxation of the strict rule is not unusual, and the Pongyi, at any rate, is not entirely a stranger to greater delicacies than are collected in the mendicant's bowl:'
Plates 1 and 2 from a private collection.

Other sites clustered along the banks of the river tell the story of succeeding dynasties, although the Burmese fondness for shifting capitals has led to a bewildering series of royal centres, much of whose abandoned magnificence is now lost. Little remains at Shwebo, where Alaungpaya, founder of the Konbaung Dynasty, ruled from 1750-60, or at Ava, which served as capital several times between the 14th and 18th centuries. And if few vestiges remain of the magnificence of Amarapura, selected as King Bodawpaya's capital in 1783, imaginative recreation is aided by the descriptions, paintings and photographs of the British officials who penetrated the secretive Burmese empire before annexation. Together, the remaining sites and documentary evidence paint a picture of a distinctive cultural style, whose predominantly brick and stucco architecture looks both towards India and Southeast Asia while remaining entirely individual.

Less concerned with leisurely sightseeing than later tourists, these officials nevertheless compiled exhaustive reports on the country. And if the tangible results of such missions were generally negligible (in 1795, Michael Symes, after a six weeks' journey up the Irrawaddy from Rangoon to Amarapura, was kept waiting four months before a brief audience at the royal court, at which he was merely observed in mildly curious silence for a few minutes before being ushered out of the royal presence), they provided valuable opportunities for gathering information. Thus, the mission which the governor-general of India sent to the court at Ava in 1855 to persuade the king to sign a treaty at the conclusion of the Second Anglo-Burmese War, included both an artist and a photographer, as well as officers who surreptitiously and assiduously observed and recorded statistics and facts, collecting information on every subject from language, folklore and architectural history to the presence of coal-bearing strata along the Irrawaddy.

With the incorporation of Burma into Great Britain's Indian Empire, Upper Burma saw an influx of Europeans. While the original campaign had been accomplished relatively swiftly, the pacification of the country as a whole was to take several more years and demanded a growing population of soldiers and civil administrators. Industry and commerce moved in to exploit Burma's natural wealth in oil, teak, rubies and rice. Trade, mail services and passenger travel were carried along the network of river routes maintained by the vessels of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, whose sleek paddle-steamers churned the mud of the Irrawaddy from Rangoon to Bhamo on the Chinese border. Founded in the early 1860s, the company had 40 steamers at the time of annexation, but such was the importance of its role in the commercial and administrative infrastructure of the country that, by the 1930s, it was running the largest river fleet in the world, with 270 steamers, as well as a greater number of flats and barges.

For the visitor to Burma with time in hand, the Flotilla's vessels were the obvious means of travel. Writing in Wanderings in Burma (1897), the most substantial early guidebook to the country, G W Bird noted that these handsome Clyde-built vessels, "of the most approved and modern type", offered the ideal means of travel, giving the voyager the benefit of viewing the unfolding panorama of Burmese life (both on the deck and on shore) from a vantage point of comfort in which "splendid saloon accommodation is provided, and the fixtures and fittings are most superb.... It is not a matter of surprise, therefore, that a trip from or to Mandalay is so appreciated by all who have the good fortune to seek a change in travel".

The 1890s proved to be a heyday for tourists to Burma. It spawned a host of travel books describing the attractions of a country now securely under British administration, but still providing a frisson of the excitement of the old days of oriental despotism. For these adventurous visitors, Rangoon was usually little more than a starting point, dismissed by many as a prosperous but uninteresting colonial capital. Indeed, Gwendolen Trench Gascoigne, who decided to visit Burma while making "the usual respectable, stereotype Indian tour" in the mid-1890s, at first found almost everything "ugly and unattractive", while the smoking chimneys of the rice mills reminded her "very unpleasantly of Birmingham, Sheffield, or Leeds". But she too was soon entranced both by the people and the beauty of the Shwedagon pagoda and set off for Mandalay, albeit by train, seduced by the country. But for most visitors, like Mrs Ernest Hart, author of Picturesque Burma Past and Present (1897), the river route was the only true approach to Upper Burma, a journey of tropical ease, as for the ten days of the steamer's journey "the idle day passed idly along", punctuated by the calls of the soundsman, the sights of Burmese village life and an unfolding pageant of natural beauty interspersed with crumbling pagodas and the ruined cities of ancient dynasties: Pagan, Ava, Amarapura and finally Mandalay. And at dinner, as the tropical night swiftly fell, "the small party of travellers gathers round the dinner-table in the bows, and until a late hour the captain entertains them with yarns about the stirring times of the recent past: tales of dacoity, and King Thibaw and his ruthless queen, of deeds of blood, violence, and heroism enacted in these very riverside villages".

Burmese paddy boats on the Irrawaddy, 1890s. The distinctive local craft was the paddy boat or laung-zat. These boats, immediately recognizable by their curious bipod masts supporting a long flexible yard on which an enormous spread of sail was carried, were used to transport the rice harvest down the Irrawaddy. The high stern quarters on which the helmsman sat were generally elaborately and intricately carved.

1890s' postcard view of the Rangoon landing stage shows the steamer 'Manwyne' at her berth. Built on the Clyde in 1887, she was one of the minority of the flotilla 's fleet that sailed out to Burma rather than being assembled in the Rangoon company dockyard.

Tourism advertisement and illustration.

The Strand Hotel, Rangoon, circa 1900. Opened in 1899, the Strand was part of the empire of the Armenian Sarkies brothers, who in the last quarter of the 19th century established a chain of luxury hotels to capture the growing tourist market in Southeast Asia.

The Great Bell at Mingun, late 1880s, the largest bell in Burma and reputedly the second largest in the world. Mingun, situated on the right bank of the river a few miles north of Mandalay, was a popular tourist destination. All Plates from a private collection.

Late 19th-century photographs of Burmese women. The independence and openness of Burmese women compared to Indian and other Asian races were traits remarked on by almost all European visitors. Major-General A Ruxton MacMahon notes in Far Cathay and Farther India (1893): "Even a casual traveller like [Lady Violet Greville writing in Nineteenth Century] notices that the independence of Burmese women is remarkable. They manage their own affairs, hold stalls in the bazaar with which no one interferes, marry when they choose, and divorce their husbands as soon as they please. No jealous veils cover their faces, no melancholy purdah seclusion prevents them from mixing with the male sex. They flirt, dance, and laugh with as many admirers as they choose, and, last of all, they smoke-not dainty little cigarettes... but cigars! cigars longer than men use in Europe; cigars a foot long.... [truly] Burma is the land of women par excellence!"

Painting in the Shwe-ln-bin monastery, Mandalay, by Hsaya Saw, 2nd half of 19th century. It depicts a colonial pulled up short by the beauty of Burma's girls.

But if the traveller on the Irrawaddy passed the overgrown ruins of former capitals, the romance of Mandalay itself was of a more modern sort, as it had only been chosen as the new capital by King Mindon in 1857. The belief that human sacrifices were buried at each corner of the new city may only have been a product of the over-heated western imagination, but of the select band of Europeans who had visited Mandalay during its period as the capital of the Kingdom of Ava, the city still presented a series of violent contrasts and excitement: Sir George Scott (of "Scott of the Shan Hills" fame) in the early 1880s found "jewel-studded temples and gilded monasteries standing side by side with wattled hovels... the busy Chinaman next door to the gambling scum of the low country... and over all hanging the fear of prison with its nameless horrors, and the knife of the assassin...". For such old Burma hands British rule in Upper Burma signified an inevitable dilution of the romance of old Mandalay and many indulged in unashamed nostalgia for more uncertain times when there was still a whiff of danger in the air. For Scott, Mandalay under British rule was "vastly less interesting than it used to be...." while "A, B and C roads testify to the unromantic stolidity of the Military Intelligence department". Worse still, the "agreeable scallywags" had now been replaced by "Cook's tourists", while the Palace, "instead of being tawdrily magnificent, smells horribly of bats".

For Mrs Hart, however, enough remained of the past to summon up the ghosts of earlier days. She particularly enjoyed the sight of the palace at dusk when, seen against the sunset, its "barbaric magnificence" was at its most impressive and induced a brooding and melancholy sense of human transience. "Now their glory is departed; the gold leaf is peeling off and is not being replaced, the looking-glass mosaics are grey with dust, the lofty halls have been rifled of their costly decorations, Queen Supayah Lat's audience chamber is the headquarters of the English Club... ".

And the city continued to exert its enchantments: by the 1920s it had become a standard point on the eastern tourist's itinerary, as the intrepid ladies of the 1890s were succeeded by other travellers. While the years of British military occupation had inevitably left a legacy of whitewash and corrugated iron in parts of the palace precincts, enough of the magic survived for the sensitive visitor to recreate, at least briefly, something of the gaudy magnificence of Thibaw's capital. One of the more eccentric visitors to city, Major R Raven-Hart even voiced his heretical regret in Canoe to Mandalay (1939) that the Burmese monarchy had not been retained, "so that the Palace would be a living thing today instead of an empty shell, and Burmese art and music and literature would flourish in its shadow".

Mandalay was once more to be the centre of historic events, when in March 1945 it was the scene of bitter fighting as General Slim's army recaptured the town from the Japanese. In the course of the struggle King Thibaw's palace was burnt to the ground, but in the evening light the restored buildings still summon up an echo of its former glory. For throughout all the vicissitudes of its history, Burma has managed to retain the power to impress its spell on even the most fleeting visitor. This Kipling realized from his first glimpse of the Shwedagon pagoda against the skyline: "Then, a golden mystery upheaved itself on the horizon... a shape that was neither Muslim dome nor Hindu temple spire... the golden dome said: 'This is Burma, and it will be quite unlike any land you know about'."

The hairy family of Mandalay, 1880s. The human curiosity of the Burmese hairy family had fascinated Europeans for many years and several of the early missions to Burma had encountered examples. John Crawfurd had met Shwe-maong in the 1820s and his daughter Maphoon was similarly presented to members of the British Mission to Ava in 1855, who described the hair covering her face as like "the wisps of a fine Skye terrier's coat". Despite her appearance, "Poor Maphoon's manners were good and modest, her voice soft and feminine, and her expression mild and not unpleasing". Plates 1, 2 and 4 from a private collection.