BURMA’S CONCRETE JUNGLE
SD TUCKER steers well clear of the Burmese junta’s new purpose-built, occult architecture capital of Naypyidaw, largely because he doesn’t want to get shot dead in the street like George Orwell’s elephant.
Surely Burma’s greatest linguistic gift to the world is the term “white elephant”, meaning something that is of little use to man nor beast, yet still ruinously difficult and costly to maintain, a bit like Meghan Markle. In legend, Buddha’s mother dreamed of just such an elephant entering her womb immediately prior to the baby godlet’s conception, making the possession of similar rare albinos prized by Southeast Asian monarchs as signs of their divine Buddha-sanctioned right to rule. Thus, if a rival courtier or troublesome courtesan were ever to be gifted a pale pachyderm by the King, it could not be declined, being an ostensible sign of royal favour… whereas in truth the King aimed only to eat up his potential usurper’s gold through looking after the useless creature, which could never be given away or used as a work-animal, being no beast of burden, just a burdensome beast. So revered were they that some were escorted everywhere by Buddhist priests, lulled to sleep by choirs singing hymns, and even suckled as calves by human women – you can see how they could easily bankrupt an owner. The term was popularised abroad by American carnival-barker PT Barnum, who acquired one at great expense, planning to bill it as “The Sacred White Elephant of Burma”. When he actually got it, Barnum found it was really just dirty grey with roseate spots or “diseased blotches”. Sadly, white elephants aren’t truly white, but mottled pink, a genuine misnomer.
Naturally, today’s Burmese absolute rulers in the astrology and magic-obsessed military junta (or Tatmadaw) which has governed the Buddhist nation for most of the 70-plus years since it gained its independence from the British Empire in 1948 possess several white elephants of their own, which are endlessly paraded on TV being showered with scented holy-water and chanted prayers to make the Generals’ own reign seem whiter than white rather than blood-red. New elephants have a remarkable record of popping up just before elections, as in 2010 and 2015, suggesting the military keep a few hidden in reserve for as and when they are needed, with the animals hailed as living guarantees of peaceful “democratic transition” between one set of Tatmadaw puppet-politicians and another. In recent decades, Burma has accumulated a record number of albinos, which at first seems like a heavenly gift bestowed by Buddha – until you consider that rampant deforestation has simply flushed them out into the open, facilitating easy capture by government snatch-squads. Like Russian dolls, these white elephants now live safe and secure, guarded by policemen wielding assault-rifles, within another, even larger, white elephant of the concrete kind – Uppatasanti Pagoda, a golden temple-cum-zoo within the grounds of the junta’s mega-costly purpose-built new capital of Naypyidaw. It’s a wholly artificial city-state carved from the jungle interior and serves equally as fortress, royal city, three-dimensional propaganda symbol and extended exercise in occult architecture so mammoth in scale it would make even Nicholas Hawksmoor tremble. With the Tatmadaw seizing open power once again in the deadly coup of 1 February 2021, their impregnable elephant-sanctuary may yet prove its worth after all.
1
BARNUM FOUND IT WAS DIRTY GREY WITH ROSEATE SPLOTCHES
Most Westerners think Rangoon is still Burma’s capital, so when we see protestors being shot there, we may think they are close to storming their sovereigns’ palaces, but it is not so. Naypyidaw means “Abode of the King”, a name revealed to the public on Armed Forces Day, 27 March 2006 (2+7=9 – as we saw last month, the auspicious numbers 9 and 11 are the Generals’ lucky ones), construction only having begun in 2002 at a cost of around $4 billion; slave-labour works fast, but perhaps not quite so cheaply as might be expected. Than Shwe, Burma’s numerology-fixated dictator from 1992 to 2011, got the place off to a propitious start, evicting inconvenient villagers from their farms and ‘offering’ them new construction jobs. At 11am on 11 November 2005, 11,000 military trucks carrying 11 army battalions rumbled into Nyapyidaw from Rangoon, fresh from kidnapping civil servants from 11 different departments for forcible resettlement with no prior warning; their task was to ready things for the junta to move in later. Six times bigger than New
2
York, everything there is so jumbo-sized it really does seem designed for elephants, notably the 20-lane motorways, which, except when the Generals parade their tanks and motorcades down them, are virtually empty.
Allegedly, they are truly meant to serve as military airstrips for getaway planes (the Tatmadaw’s main ones being called White Elephant 1 & 2) in case of civil emergency. Supposedly, a million people live there, the majority being forcibly resettled admin staff, but the place is such a ghost-town that when Top Gear visited in 2014, they could safely play a game of football on the main road. As there seems nobody outside but street-cleaners, the showpiece capital is easy to maintain, with roundabouts in the shape of Buddhist lotus-flowers, welltended roadside lawns and pastel-coloured dormitories all looking spotless but eerily empty. Constructed in separate regimented rectangular grids like an early Sim City,
it has six basic zones with colour-coded roofs on the buildings to let (levitating?) citizens know which one they are in. These are separated by wide expanses of fields, artificial lakes, eco-parks and golf-courses, all linked by those Ballardian highways. If you were indeed playing Sim City Burma,
you might notice something odd about the floor plans of government buildings viewed, god-like, from above; many are identical. Broadly cruciform, they have square brackets extending at right-angles from the crosses’ arms, in a way that resembles the claws of a pixellated 8-bit scorpion. Burmese villages often erect large model scorpions to ward off evil spirits. But which malign ghosts would the junta fear?
HEX AND THE CITY
A city with no history can have no ghosts, but a storied place like Rangoon is different. In 1996, the Generals authorised the digging up of Kyandaw Cemetery there, apparently to sell the land to a favoured drug lord; the families of the dead had to pay the excavation costs. Two years later, on the 10th anniversary of a 1988 rebellion, at a spot where 80 or so student protestors had been slain by security forces, poltergeists appeared in buildings next to the cemetery in Myinegone Junction. What began with a local resident being hounded out of his haunted apartment by floating cups and dishes soon ballooned into a full-blown urban panic, with tales of writing and images appearing on the walls of a nearby tearoom, and reported sounds of marching, screams, voices and moans coming from thin air drawing curious crowds whose wild gossip began to present a potential security risk. In the Golden Land electronics store, polts started throwing stones and levitating TVs, one of which began broadcasting an unscheduled image of the innocent blood
Monks visit the Uppatasanti pagoda.
spilled back in 1988. Regime media quietly ignored the event, but thousands turned up anyway, saying the Generals had angered the dead by denying the murdered students and exhumed corpses a proper burial – opinions for which some loose-tongued onlookers were arrested. A junta officer goose-stepped to the scene to read out an official dismissal notice, relieving the spooks “from their duties on Earth” in a clipped military exorcism. Rangoon means “the end of strife”, but at Myinegone Junction, such emotions now appear perpetually embedded within an asphalt Stone Tape.
Burmese polts are somewhat coterminous with ‘Nats’, native pre-Buddhist deities who died a ‘green’ or untimely death – a bit like the youthful ‘green’ students who perished at the hands of the junta. Nats are worshipped nationally in the lunar month of Natdaw (November-December), so to have them turn against you is a real PR disaster. When early Buddhist kings failed to stamp out Nat worship, they co-opted them instead, instituting an official pantheon of 37 main Nats and relabelling each as a deceased member of the royal line, spiritual guarantors of dynastic stability. One such Royal Nat, King Thihathu of Ava, gained a new post-mortem Nat name meaning ‘Lord of the White Elephant’, and is depicted as riding one in Burmese religious iconography. Yet the precise identities of these Nats could change to reflect new regnal needs; if a young prince claims one of the 37 Nats was really his own direct grandfather, setting up his golden statue in the Hall of the Ancestors to push out one of the old 37 spirits, he sets himself up as a future Royal Nat too. Anyone wishing him to suffer a ‘green death’ might thus be put off by the prospect of his ghostly revenge, once dead and deified: angry Nats
could curse an entire country or city, as at Myinegone Junction. In Naypyidaw, giant statues of the three greatest ancient Burmese kings line the main military parade ground, one of them being King Anawrahta, who created the whole fake propaganda pantheon of the 37 Royal Nats in the first place. In Burma, today’s kings are tomorrow’s gods; and today’s kings are the junta’s Generals, so don’t cross the Tatmadaw unless you want to face a green death yourself.
3
BULLETPROOF MONKS
Naypyidaw is not only a royal city, but a Buddhist one too. Traditionally, Burmese kings consecrated their capitals by building both a palace and a pagoda, signifying mastery over Earth and Heaven alike. The Generals’ own palace is the Hluttaw, or Union Parliament, which combines Albert Speer-style monumental proportions and classical religious architecture. The complex has 31 buildings, equating to Buddhism’s 31 planes of existence, its main entrance faces East towards the rising Sun, and it has tiered roof tiles, or pyatthat, customarily indicating the presence of either royalty or idols of the Buddha. The accompanying pagoda is Uppatasanti, home of the white elephants, opened by Than Shwe as a copy of Rangoon’s Shwedagon Pagoda, previously the holiest national site. Oddly, it is 30cm (12in) smaller than its rival – but only so it can be precisely 99m tall (9x11=99). Within is enshrined a holy relic, purportedly the tooth of Buddha himself, bought by Than Shwe from a Chinese monastery, possession of which is also supposed to indicate a king’s divine fitness to rule. King Anawrahta had repeatedly tried and failed to obtain this relic, but now, 1,000 years later, his rightful successor General Shwe had succeeded where Anawrahta had not. Moreover, the
4
State Seal of Burma under Tatmadaw rule from 1989-2011 was a map of the nation guarded by two Chinthes, mythical variants of the lion which stand to real ones as dragons stand to lizards. Similar leonine statues also perch as spiritual sentinels outside many of Burma’s other Buddhist pagodas, making the Generals those same fierce Chinthes in human form.
Such symbolism is essential, as politicallyminded Buddhist monks, or pongyis, are Burma’s main plausible alternative powerbase. The leading rebels against British rule were orange-robed militant monks, notably during the ‘Shoe Question’ episode of 1901-19, when Europeans caused outrage by refusing to remove their footwear when entering temples, and the Saya San rebellion of 1930-32, when the rebel ex-monk and selfstyled “prophet-king” San turned tattooist, inking his own personal monk-army with magical images intended to attract aid from flying tigers and winged spears and to repel British bullets, with predictable results. Post-war Burmese rulers tried to claim Karl Marx was a secret Buddhist, then turned away from dialectical materialism and argued Buddhism was Burma’s only antimaterialist defence against it, but Burma’s priests still proved troublesome. There may be 400,000 monks in Burma today, who act as an alternative welfare state in the absence of any decent government one; in the aftermath of 2008’s Cyclone Nargis, which killed 140,000 people, it was only monastic charity that prevented an even greater death-toll. Critical pongyis can be libelled as Drunken Masters, cannibal-killers or sexfiends, but when in 2007 footage emerged of police beating monks, an attempted ‘Saffron Revolution’ led by 80,000 orange clerics took place. The Generals now saw the need to coopt as many monks as possible, bribing some with cash, cars and TVs, or building special monk-only hospitals; even better was to allow them free reign to persecute the nation’s minority Rohingya Muslim population, whom some accuse of plotting a demographic out-breeding programme of ‘love-jihad’. From 2016, ultra-nationalist monk-led bodies and their military funders colluded in genocide, gang-raping, murdering and burning alive thousands of Rohingya, ethnically cleansing the nation of over a million refugees. In return, the extremist abbots order all good Buddhists to vote for Tatmadaw puppets, and condemn the opposition as tools of Islam. When in 1997 a Buddha statue had a ‘magic gem’ stolen from its belly by corrupt soldiers in Mandalay, anger was handily deflected by a Buddhist woman making false rape claims against local Muslims; this led to deadly anti-Islamic riots, rather than anti-military ones. During the 1988 student rebellions, Protocols of the Elders of Mecca- style pamphlets also mysteriously began appearing, accusing Muslims of planning to steal all the Buddhists’ land, property and women.
Yet many alleged “bogus monks” resist and threaten junta members with excommunication, turning their alms bowls upside-down to signify refusal of Tatmadaw bribes. The most incorruptible abbot of all was Thamanya Sayadaw, a saintly figure who ran a renowned mountain commune, doling out aid and protecting displaced persons, of whom Burma now has many. He was too widely revered to jail, so the junta tried to co-opt him; but he reputedly used his psychic powers to make visiting Generals’ cars fail and bravely supported the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi instead, visiting her under house arrest using his astral body. After death, his more tangible body was stolen by armed men in a truck, before being burnt to ashes in a ritual of yadayachae, or Burmese black magic. The bodysnatch occurred prior to a constitutional referendum, surprisingly set for 10 May 2008, or 5/10/2008. 16 is an unlucky digit in Burma – 5+1+0+2+0+0+8=16 – meaning the military had to perform yadaya sacrilege to win the vote. Expecting to lose, their supposed gambit was to choose a dark date which guaranteed this, then to flip their fortune back around by incinerating the abbot.
5
BIG BUDDHA IS WATCHING YOU
Naypyidaw could aptly be described as ‘Orwellian’, which is fitting as George Orwell himself served as a colonial era policeman in Moulmein, Lower Burma, in the 1920s, where he learned both to hate the Empire and to put a bullet through a troublesome elephant’s brain, as detailed in his celebrated 1936 essay Shooting an Elephant. By the time he left his Burmese Days behind in 1927, Orwell had acquired native tattoos on his knuckles, “blue spots the size of small grapefruits”, akin to those magical ones later used in the Saya San rebellion, an apparent mini-rebellion of his own against British rule. Orwell shot the elephant after it fled its
mahout and went on the rampage, trampling a local to death. It had calmed down by the time he found it, but the trailing Burmese throng still expected him to pull the trigger, so he did, causing a sudden revelation: “Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece. But in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalised figure of a sahib.” Today’s
6 anti-junta protestors must hope the bulletspraying hollow men among the regime’s snipers eventually experience some similar collective epiphany for themselves.
One analysis deems Orwellian Naypyidaw “both a bunker and a billboard”. Undoubtedly a symbolic city, beneath its spiritual layout hides a competing military one. US diplomats thought its construction a sign of “dementia” on General Shwe’s part, yet by choosing a site to redevelop in the centre of the nation he avoided the prospect of invasion from the sea, either by amphibious troops or future cyclones. The official reason for moving from Rangoon was that it was too overcrowded, but the real motivation was memories of previous uprisings there, when the city’s urban geography had been used against the junta. Narrow British-era roads were easily blockaded by protestors, as can be seen in footage of new protests in 2021. But in Naypyidaw, there are only wide-open spaces with nowhere for rebels to hide; a single soldier with a machine-gun could mow down dozens before the huge motorways could even be half blocked. The Hluttaw parliament complex even has a dry moat running around it, which may not be wholly decorative. That it is the only place in Burma with genuinely reliable electricity and wi-fi gives the soldiers another advantage. The Semi-Forbidden City is also difficult to reach, being placed in the middle of the jungle. The only access-route is the so-called ‘Death Highway’, a 300km (186m) accident blackspot leading north from Rangoon, which could easily by shut off by tanks or helicopters if need be – the opposite of Kipling’s more hospitable Road to Mandalay, the old, pre-colonial royal capital. Burmese kings once made a habit of establishing their citadels from near-scratch, appending the term ‘Naypyidaw’ at the end as a regal seal of approval, like our Bognor Regis. By letting the suffix stand alone this time, the Generals indicate this latest Royal City is meant to be the ultimate one, built to last forever – or, at least, until all those albino elephants expire.
If the Generals know their history, letting their pale, ghostly elephantoms pack their trunks is as unwise as allowing the Tower of London’s ravens to fly away. When, in 1883, PT Barnum agreed to pay the modern equivalent of $1 million to a Siamese nobleman for a white elephant, it was poisoned prior to export abroad by Buddhist priests appalled at its capture by heathens. King Thibaw Min of Burma now opportunistically, if impiously, sold Barnum another pinkish one, named Toung-Taloung, for twice the price. It arrived in 1884, accompanied by a full native orchestra and retinue of priests, but proved a flop with the public, who could see pink elephants any day they liked simply by drinking more gin. The unprofitable Toung-Taloung died in a fire in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1887, although
7
the cynical Barnum said “I can’t say I grieved much over his loss.” King Min did, though. In 1885, two years after he had sold his sacred beast, Britain won the Third Anglo-Burmese War, Mandalay fell, and Burma was fully subsumed intoVictoria’s Empire, with Min becoming the nation’s final ruling monarch. And when, two years later, Toung-Taloung burned to death, it looked uncannily like suicide; although more than once rescued from the flames, he kept rushing back into them in an apparent attempt at interspecies
suttee, to join his true owner in the afterlife.
8
If Burma’s rebels really want to depose the
Tatmadaw, they could do worse than imitate Orwell and gun down their prized pets, making General Shwe’s Naypyidaw crumble like King Min’s Mandalay once did. $4 billion would be an awful lot to have paid for an elephants’ graveyard.