Free Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia by Thant Myint-U Page B

admire the view, a half-way point prosaically named ‘21 miles’, and I saw there a Burmese family, their car parked, snapping photographs of each other against the imposing background.
    Marco Polo, who never went to Burma but heard about it second-hand, described this area as ‘a very unfrequented country, with great woods abounding in elephants and unicorns and a number of other wild beasts’. The Burma of the lowlands had faded away, and in its place were pine trees and red azaleas, more prosperous-looking farms and white picket fences. The heat and humidity gave way to clear skies and a cool breeze.
    The Candacraig hotel looked exactly as I had remembered it from more than a dozen years before. An imposing mock-Tudor house with a gravel driveway and neatly tended grounds, it was probably not much different from how it was a hundred years ago, when it wasn’t a hotel but a ‘chummery’ or ‘bachelor’s quarters’ for the visiting (male) staff of the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation, an important Scottish logging firm in its day.
    There were elegant sliding doors and potted plants and a big teak staircase that led up to the six bedrooms upstairs. On the ground floor, there was a dining room to one side and a small bar on the other. Just outside (stepping out from the bar room) was a well-maintained tennis court, and later I would see four middle-aged Burmese men in whites enjoying a game of doubles. My bedroom was enormous, the size of a small Manhattan apartment, with newly made and not very attractive wooden furniture, a fire place, a rusty bathroom, and an old creaky bed. There were no modern comforts, no television or anything that suggested the twenty-first or even the late twentieth century. It was very quiet and through the open windows I could only hear the sound of rustling leaves from the very tall trees overhead. I was the only guest.
    I had arrived early and after some unpacking headed on foot towards the town centre, a couple of miles away. I walked down what had been Park Road, a winding road shaded by soaring pine trees, past homes whose owners long ago had named them ‘Oakhurst’, ‘Ranelagh’, ‘East Ridge’ and ‘Penzille’. Some of these names were still visible on signs. Others I looked up later on an old map of Maymyo. There were all very grand, mainly red-brick, some with a vague Tudor effect and set on an acre or more of land. Some looked well kept with freshly cut grass; others were in poor condition as if no one had lived there for years.
    A British writer a hundred years ago had written: ‘To the Burmans of the plains, the climate is unsuited, but natives of Northern India, Gourkas [ sic ], and Europeans, who pay adequate attention to dress and dwelling houses enjoy excellent health.’ I was a Burman (at least by ancestry) but to me the weather was perfect, sunny and cool, perhaps in the low sixties Fahrenheit. The British had tried very hard to evoke a sense of home but everywhere were reminders that this was not Britain–the eucalyptus trees and bougainvillea and the little lizards that were climbing up the walls at the hotel. And in this way, Maymyo seemed less like anything authentically British and more like attempts elsewhere to transport a sense of Britishness, say in North America, Australia or New Zealand.
    Very near to where I was walking was where a British army officer named Colonel Henry Morshead had been mysteriously murdered in 1931. Colonel Morshead had served in France and in Waziristan and had been part of early expeditions up Mount Everest. In 1931 he was serving in Burma as Director of the Survey of India. One day, when he was on holiday in Maymyo, he went out for an early morning pony ride. About an hour later his pony returned, riderless and stained with blood. A search was begun at once and an entire battalion of Indian soldiers, Dogras and Madras Pioneers, was later sent into the forests close by. Colonel Morshead’s body was finally found with two