The Long Road Back to Mandalay

In autumn 1970, Paul Theroux was 29 years old and living in Singapore, teaching English at the National University while writing fiction and reportage on the side. That was the year he first traveled to Burma — a journey he recounted, with characteristic acuity, in a dispatch for The Atlantic, published 53 years ago this month.

“The decrepitude of the buildings in Rangoon is almost grand. The surfaces are shabby, but the shapes are extravagant, and the workmanship is obvious…their dereliction has splendor,” he wrote in that November 1971 article. The city’s main hospital was a “a seedy palace with towers and spires, bridges and buttresses and yellow cornices,” Theroux noted. “Parked in front are three tongas, a 1936 Chevy, and fifty patients.”

Even early in his career, the trademark Therouxisms were already there: the eye for detail, the ear for absurdity. And Burma, for all its dereliction, wins him over, not least its people: “generous, hospitable, curious, so alert and quick to smile, neatly dressed in a place where all cloth is at a premium.” Foreign travelers, Theroux learned, were granted a host of (rather awkward) special privileges. “I was told that I needn’t worry about getting a seat on the plane from Mandalay to Nyaungu because if the plane was full I would be given the seat of a Burmese who would be ordered out and requested to wait for the next plane. This sounds much worse than it works out in practice: on the Fokker Friendship from Mandalay to Nyaungu I was the only passenger. The pretty stewardess spent the trip eating her lunch (which she invited me to share) from a palm leaf.”

Two years later, Theroux would return to Burma for a longer visit during the 25,000-mile trans-Asia train journey recounted in 1975’s The Great Railway Bazaar — a wildly entertaining book that woke up the world to what a travelogue could achieve. It was on that trip that Theroux met the delightful Mr. Bernard, proprietor of the Candacraig hotel in the former hill station of Maymyo, where the author spent a blissful retreat in the misty cool mountains. Three decades after TGRB, Theroux set out on another epic rail voyage, chronicled in 2008’s Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, retracing his route across Asia to chart how much had changed — and, in Burma’s case, how much had not. After years of tyrannical repression, Burma, now renamed Myanmar, seemed frozen in place, locked in a surreal stasis while so many of its neighbors had modernized at warp speed. Paradoxically, Myanmar was also now filled with international travelers, and Theroux’s beloved Candacraig hotel had become a favored stop on the tourist circuit, thanks to his affectionate tribute in TGRB.

Now Theroux’s long road from Mandalay comes full circle. His latest novel, Burma Sahib, published earlier this year, is a crackling, metafictional adventure about a real man, Eric Blair, in a quite fantastical place: 1920s Burma, still then a province of British-ruled India. Blair was a 19-year-old Eton grad when he landed in Rangoon to begin his training as a colonial policeman — a job he’d end up loathing, but one that kept him in Burma for five long years and helped set off his political and literary awakening. Following his Burma sojourn, Blair returned to England and adopted the pen name George Orwell.

Theroux, 83, is presently at work on a new travel book. In this exclusive for Further, he recounts half a century of adventures in what remains, to this day, one of the world’s most confounding and beguiling places. — Peter Jon Lindberg

One of the pleasures of traveling in Southeast Asia 50 years ago was that many of the countries I knew were as old-fashioned — I mean visually unchanged — as they had been as colonies. I lived in Singapore then, working as a teacher at the national university. Though it was a republic, the island had yet to be transformed into the emerald city-state it is today. Bumboats and barges were moored along the Singapore River, unloading goods for the shophouses on the banks — dragon motifs, shuttered verandas, spooky go-downs, buildings that were more than a century old. It was still the low-rise, tiled-roofed city described by Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham, which was a distinct thrill for me, because I taught my students the works of those writers, and they recognized their city in their pages: the cricket pavilion, the Maidan, the polo club, the click of mah-jongg tiles from the verandas above back alleys, the noodle stalls and bicycle rickshaws.

Malaysia, meanwhile, had not lost the atmosphere or the kampongs of its past, the setting of Anthony Burgess’s Time for a Tiger. The klongs of Bangkok were thick with sampans bearing flowers and fruit and fish. (This was long before most of the canals were paved over.) Vietnam was at war, but Saigon was unaltered architecturally from an earlier era, still looking like a French possession, still the setting of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.

In the fall of 1970, I was reading George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days (1934), and on one of my vacations from teaching, eager to see the landscapes described therein, I flew to what was then still called Rangoon. 

Orwell had lived in Burma for five years, from 1922 to 1927, when he was a young man just out of Eton College. Instead of going to Oxford or Cambridge like his friends, he applied to join the Imperial Police Force, and served in six different stations around Burma, including Rangoon and Mandalay. His name then was Eric Blair — he adopted the name Orwell with his first book.

Though I wouldn’t reach the settings of Burmese Days, which takes place up-country in a small riverside town, I wondered if I might find traces of Eric Blair’s Burma, the elegant old-fangled Burma of the British Raj. 

I was not disappointed. Like Singapore and Bangkok and Saigon, Rangoon had not been modernized, except for the street names: Dalhousie Road was now Maha Bandoola Road, and Montgomery Road was now Bogyoke Aung San Road, named for the leader of Burma’s independence movement (and father of activist and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi). Yet little else had changed on these main roads, still lined with mansions and shophouses. The Strand Hotel, opened in 1901, was seedy but still in business, a relic of its former heyday.

I knew that Blair had been posted to Syriam, just across the Pegu River from the capital, where he guarded the Burmah Oil refinery, built in 1897. There is nothing compelling about an oil refinery, even an old one, and like Blair I soon took the return ferry to the city to walk the streets and marvel at the majestic Shwe Dagon Pagoda, a stupa like an enormous gold bell at rest.

Blair had also been posted to the forbidden Insein Prison, some 20 miles north of Rangoon. I took the train to Insein, as Blair had done 45 years earlier, and though I wasn’t allowed to enter the precincts, I could see beyond the locked gates the entrance, a monumental Victorian archway, and the circular shape of the prison walls. Insein was a marvel of engineering: a so-called panopticon, an all-seeing structure, based on an idea of the 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham. From above, the prison resembled a cartwheel or a pizza: spokes of walkways radiating from a central watchtower, which had an unobstructed view of the cells around the rim. Erected in 1887, Insein was still housing convicts at that time; indeed, 137 years later, it continues to do so today.

The unreality of arriving in a distant modernized city cannot compare with the unreality of seeing one that has hardly changed at all

A wealthy city tends to replace its outmoded buildings with skyscrapers, while in a country with a poor economy and little investment the past is not erased, and old buildings remain, often — as was the case in Rangoon in 1970 — in a state of significant decrepitude. The old Central Railway Station was infested with rats that nibbled at the sacks of rice piled on the platform, and it was a clanking steam train that I boarded for my twelve-hour journey from Rangoon to Mandalay. I was an improvisational traveler then, with no onward arrangements, so when I arrived that evening I climbed onto a rickshaw and asked the driver to take me to the cheaper of Mandalay’s two hotels.

I spent several sweltering days in Mandalay, which, once again, had changed little in the forty-odd years since Blair had been there. He studied police work inside the palace precincts that the British had renamed Fort Dufferin. By 1970 it had become a Burmese military garrison, still enclosed by enormous walls with gates and watchtowers, and a moat full of lotus blossoms. I lost myself in the twelve acres of hawkers’ stalls at the Zegyo Bazaar, as Blair had done, and among the monasteries and pagodas atop iconic Mandalay Hill.

From Mandalay I traveled downriver to the fabled city of Pagan, with its thousands of red sandstone temples, great and small. I walked the sandy paths from temple to temple, in the company of Burmese pilgrims and families but only a tiny number of tourists. Despite or because of the scarcity of foreign visitors, I was struck by the unfailing hospitality of the Burmese, who made me feel welcome everywhere I went.

Had that been my only visit to Burma I might have concluded that the country was antiquated, ramshackle, and above all exceedingly hot. But a few years later, I went back during the trip I recorded in The Great Railway Bazaar, on a months-long train journey across Asia. This time I traveled north of Mandalay to the cooler climes of Maymyo, a hill station where Eric Blair had been posted 50 years earlier. A chance encounter with another passenger on the train was very lucky: I met the Indian-born Christian Madrassi, Mr. Bernard, the manager of Candacraig, the only place to stay in Maymyo.

Candacraig was a gabled weatherbeaten mansion festooned with turrets and porches. It was once a rest house known in British times as a “chummery,” where servants of the Raj — mostly bachelors — took their holidays. Mr. Bernard welcomed me with enthusiasm; I was his only guest. I remember in particular one cold wet night, when he kindled a fire in the dining room and served me a delicious meal of chicken curry, with a mango from his own garden, while rain lashed the shutters. It was bliss — and elaborating on Mr. Bernard’s war stories and the pleasures of Candacraig became features in my account of this Burma journey in The Great Railway Bazaar. Later I learned that in his first year in Burma, Eric Blair and his fellow policemen had stayed at Candacraig.

There wasn’t much to see in tumbledown Maymyo then, but Mr. Bernard urged me to take the train north, a half day’s run, to see the Goteik Viaduct, an engineering marvel upraised across a great gorge. Opened in 1900, the viaduct was American-made with Pennsylvania steel: “a monster of silver geometry in all the ragged rock and jungle,” I wrote in my notebook at the time.

It was October: mild in Rangoon and Mandalay, chilly in Maymyo. The cooler weather made travel more pleasant, and I saw Burma through a different lens. Pagan now had many more tourists. Rangoon’s hotels were improved; there were fewer pony carts and more taxis. But politically Burma was in transition. Being confronted by soldiers and policemen I had the sense of a bullying bureaucracy and intrusive officialdom. This was strange in a country where courtesy and humor were so highly valued. Because I was traveling in search of material for a book, I made a point of questioning Burmese people about their lives, their prospects, their views of the government. A referendum was about to be voted on regarding changes to the constitution. The Burmese I spoke to were hopeful for better days, and confident that democratic elections would be held.

This was in autumn of 1973. A constitutional referendum did take place that December, but the results simply enshrined Burma’s single-party system, assuring total power for General Ne Win and his Burma Socialist Program Party. For the next two decades, Burma’s political situation would grow increasingly dark.

Thirty-four years passed. In 2007 I decided to take a sentimental journey, retracing my steps on that 1973 adventure, again mostly by train. I left London as I had at the beginning of The Great Railway Bazaar, passing through Europe and Turkey, bypassing Iran and Afghanistan this time (I traveled via Turkmenistan instead), then onward to India and Burma.

Burma had a new name: Myanmar. Rangoon was now Yangon. The country was a military dictatorship; Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest.

I wrote in my notes: The unreality of arriving in a distant modernized city cannot compare with the unreality of seeing one that has hardly changed at all. If a place, after decades, is the same or worse than before it is almost shaming to behold — it seems to exist as a mirror image of yourself the traveler, who has to admit: I’m the same too, but aged — wearier, frailer, fractured…

Yangon was a sad and skeletal city. And the stories I heard from Burmese concerned the abuses of soldiers and police. The panopticon of Insein Prison was full of men and women accused of political crimes, meaning their protests against the dictatorship.

In spite of its seediness Yangon was now filled with good hotels. The Strand was restored as a luxury hotel and, for me, unaffordable. Although Myanmar’s government was a villainous dictatorship, the city was thronged with tourists. Mandalay was much the same but also lugubrious. And so I took the train back to Maymyo, the old hill station, renamed Pyin-Oo-Lwin. What had been a backwater in 1973 was now a tourist destination, with an enlarged and prettified botanical garden, called Kandawgyi Gardens, along with many new hotels, a restored railway station, and (said the brochure) “colorful wooden horse-drawn wagons” for visitors’ photographs and joyrides. The creaky transport of yesteryear was now advertised as uniquely charming.

“You are Mr. Paul Theroux,” said the desk clerk. “I’m so glad to see you. We talk about you all the time!”

My beloved old chummery, Candacraig, was repainted and shining, looking baronial. When I checked in the young desk clerk said, “You are Mr. Paul Theroux — I’m Peter Bernard.” It was Mr. Bernard’s son. “I’m manager now. I’m so glad to see you. We talk about you all the time!”

Peter said that as a small boy, 34 years before, he had seen me, smoking a pipe in room #11. “You were writing at this table here.”

After my book appeared in 1975, praising the comforts of Candacraig, foreign travelers began to arrive, Peter said, “holding your book, wanting to meet my father.” And so the elder Mr. Bernard had spent his last years as a minor celebrity in town. He died in 1981.

Now, Peter Bernard was beaming as he showed me around Candacraig, the town, and his house, where we had tea. He repeated that he was glad to see me, and at one point cried out “Welcome home!” It was a reminder that true travel is less about buildings and museums than it is about what I’ve come to think of as “human architecture”: people and their stories.

Paul Theroux has published 57 books. His 58th, a short story collection called The Vanishing Point, will be out in January 2025. He lives in Hawai’i and Cape Cod.