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Chapter 1 Rangoon: End of Strife Rainwater leaks through the rooftop. —Burmese proverb A prostitute lies in the mud under a bridge, a knife pressed to her throat. A teenage boy, the son of an army colonel, squats beside a major arterial road plunging a used syringe full of almost pure heroin into his ankle. A young mother sucks betel paste off a banana leaf and presses her shriveled nipple into her emaciated baby’s mouth while watching a Burmese romance in a video hut. These are images of Rangoon. Substitute the heroin for opium and a puppet show for the video hut, and these scenes could date any time from the latter part of the eighteenth century to the present. Throughout its history this port town has been the showpiece of whatever occupying army currently held lower Burma. Beneath and spreading out beyond the imprimatur of military and political dominance, Rangoon remains to this day a rigidly stratified society where hierarchical social relations slice through the topography of modern nationhood to reveal deep scars of social inequality. Rangoon is a reluctant capital of ‘‘unified’’ Burma. Its name means ‘‘end of strife.’’ It was founded by King Alaungpaya in 1755 and signified the end of Mon dominance of lower Burma and the ascendancy of the Buddhist kings of Upper Burma. This was a process begun at least as early as 1054 when Anawratha, king of Pagan, conquered the Mon kingdom of Thaton, now a dusty roadside town in Mon State between the Buddhist pilgrimage sites of Kyaiktyo and Thamanya. The demise of Thaton and the ascendancy of the Buddhist kings of Pagan eventually allowed Alaungpaya to ride triumphantly into Rangoon and thus ‘‘unify’’ the riverland plains and delta towns for the first time. Rangoon is now a city of over five million people that sprawls over the floodplains 2 Chapter 1 of southern Burma from its original location cradled on the northern bank of the turgid Rangoon river as it channels the Hlaing, Panhlaing, Pegu, Pazundaung, and Pagandaung rivers and streams and disgorges this great swollen flood of brown, silted water thirty kilometers farther south into the Gulf of Mottama. Back in Alaungpaya’s time, the town consisted of a wooden stockade surrounded by a moat and entered through one of five city gates. Social stratification was apparent at the outset. Rangoon housed elites with lesser-ranked persons living outside the defensive walls. Even in the eighteenth century there was a specified district for prostitutes, the precinct of Tackally. Rangoon’s architecture and external façade deteriorated and in the late 1820s it was described by Michael Symes, the British Ambassador to the Court of Ava, as dusty streets filled with swine, houses resting above pestilent and stagnant waters with the official buildings falling into disrepair. On December 20, 1852, Sir Arthur Purves Phayre declared Rangoon annexed to the British Government located in Calcutta (Hall 1955: 651). In the next two decades, British urban planners imposed a Victorian sense of order on the dusty tropical town. Foremost among these planners was a member of the Bengal Engineers, Captain Alexander Fraser, who was responsible for creating a city that could be a trading port for the British (McCrae 1990: 19). As Cangi (1997: 79–80) has remarked, ‘‘the laying out of colonial Rangoon was not an experiment in town planning but a well rehearsed process in which the symbol of the British Empire became neatly and irrevocably stamped on the map of Burma.’’ Despite the colonial mansions, Victorian institutions, roads that intersected at right angles, and residential land plots of precisely 40 by 150 feet, Rangoon remained a town in which the elite class lived in splendor while the majority urban poor ‘‘lived in squalor in mean alleyways and narrow side-streets. Crime, grinding poverty, and recurrent ethnic riots characterized life for most citizens in Lower Burma’’ (Cangi 1997: 87). Resistance to British rule was strongest among ethnic Burmans, and the Saya San revolt has become a key historical marker for such resistance . The incorporation of Burma into India ended in 1937. The invasion of Burma by Japanese imperial forces came at a time when there was organized and widespread resistance to British colonization (and communal rioting against Indian and Chinese mercantile interests). It was the Japanese who trained and enabled the formation of the Burma Independence Army by General Aung San, who had retreated to Japan in 1940. This army fought alongside the Japanese...

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