Seventh Heaven-ish

Truth to tell, it was something of a relief to land back in Singapore. Burma was full-on sensation, and after 16 days it was good to be back in a place that was reliably different and within an hour of landing could supply us with a pizza and salad (for which the desire felt slightly shameful).

Singapore works (as in functions really well); though it is peculiar to be in a place that puts an imitation ship on top of skyscraper hotels; has taxis that meter rides so precisely that all fares have to be rounded up or down because there is no coinage to pay the fractions of a dollar they register; and represents Christmas with Hansel and Gretel houses made of ginger bread, pretzels and icing sugar (remember that Christmas story of kidnapped children, seduced into their plight by sweet stuff, who nearly get eaten but in the nick of time trap their tormentor witch into an oven and burn her to death?).

Pretzels, ginger bread, icing and sponge in a Christmas confection with soft toys – greeting us in the reception area of our hotel. cf the ‘traditional’ Christmas story of Hansel and Gretel.

In Singapore, they have ways of making you interested!

Perhaps the smack of firm retribution in the Hansel and Gretel story resonates subliminally in Singapore. A taxi driver told us with relish about the riot in Little India shortly before we arrived (after an Indian immigrant had been crushed by a carelessly driven bus). He said the arrested rioters could be gaoled for up to seven years, and then caned before they were released. We were, he went on to assure us, very safe on the streets of Singapore, for all wannabe muggers knew clearly the pain they would suffer if caught. From another taxi we learned that for carrying a knife the sentence was 7 years, and for carrying a gun, life – with no chance of parole in either case. We weren’t asking about their penal system, the info was just a way to help us feel secure. I have no idea quite what was true, but we realised that the story of Singapore’s draconian laws banning entry to tourists carrying chewing gum was just a rose-tinted glimpse of how stern they really are.

Standing outside the changing rooms in Mustaffas, Little India, in Singapore, these ‘armless guards (modelled on Posh Beckham?) offer a stern rebuke to any wannabe shop lifter.

The people of Singapore manifest a collective aura of deep conformity and obedience, which felt just a little bit like they were all robots. I found myself thinking that this might be one of the places that had inspired the idea behind The Matrix. The place is a well-oiled machine; a simulacrum of civil society under capitalism; an unreality because all the nasty, colourful, and smelly bits are left out, or at any rate superbly well hidden.

Marina Bay Sands Hotel – Restaurant sign. There is no indication of any sense of irony about the name in such a rigidly managed dynastically-run country

There was absolutely nothing radical, or dangerous or challenging or meaningful in most of what we saw in Singapore – though a lot of it was impressively OK. The nearest thing to satire was in the ship on the top of the sky scrapers where there was a bar was called Ku Dè Ta – geddit?

We were there just before Christmas, but there was no sense at all that this festival was a celebration of the birth of Christ and offered a redemptive message of love and peace and goodwill and the equality of all in the sight of God. You don’t have to be a believer to clock the message, you only have to know what Christmas is about, but in Singapore it was as if nobody knew the story at all (only the bit about presents and consumer spend).

Every river needs a Santa boatman – including Singapore

A whimsical Christmas indeed at Vivo City Mall in Singapore

This year Christmas has been sponsored by …. (and it officially lasts from 8 November to 19 December – the 51 days of Christmas.

Sponge Bob offers Xmas Redemption to anyone spending $100 at Changi Airport

We get cynical about the commercialisation of Christmas in the UK, and it can seem that the Advent Calendar actually counts the number of shopping days to go before it is too late; reminding you with each day’s sweetmeat of the duty to spend. In Singapore it is all much more straightforward. Christmas lasts for 51 days from 8^th November to 29^th December – and the three wise men have been replaced by Sponge Bob (God knows who he is); and all decorations must carry the names of their sponsors; and the reindeers are legion; and everyone must buy to receive, for to receive is to give.

I make it sound rather horrid, though actually it isn’t. Singapore has wonderful places to visit – gardens, museums, galleries, malls, architecture and stuff. The people are delightful and incredibly obliging and helpful. But …well there just is something profoundly soulless about it all.

Nonetheless, for us The Botanical Gardens, and the huge biomes of Gardens By The Bay were an obvious draw, and they were fab. The biomes make The Eden Project in Cornwall look a bit like a first draft. Pix are the only way really to say more on this.

These are the biomes of Singapore’s Gardens By The Bay. To the left is the Flower Dome, where it is perpetual temperate spring, and to the right is the Cloud Forest, a cool and misty mountainous place. In front are the cooling towers and solar panels.

The Singapore Biomes are just amazing pieces of architecture

Above and below are the walkways round the ‘mountain’ of the Cloud Forest. Misty, moisty weather pours out of hidden pipework and supports a vast array of plants.The Singapore Biomes are just amazing pieces of architecture

Sal in the mist of the Cloud Forest biome in Singapore’s Gardens by the bay.

Marina Bay Sands Hotel from inside the Flower Biome in Gardens by the Bay, Singapore

Solar Towers Singapore – lit up at night.

Cactii – Flower Dome, Singapore.

A leaf from Singapore’s Botanic Gardens.

Orchids from Singapore’s Botanic Gardens.

A glorious flower from Singapore’s Botanic Gardens.

The Asian Civilisations museum was wonderful, and curated with a precision that must have the most sophisticated database behind it. It is impossible to understand how the peoples of the colonising nations of the West could ever have imagined the dominated peoples of the East were culturally primitive and backward. It is no surprise that so many Europeans went ‘native’ when they encountered the societies they had been sent to rule. In a contemporary tone, their question would have become, “What’s not to like?” Apart from the humidity: precious little.

Camouflage material worked into a traditional Asian sculptural form at the Asia Civilisations Museum

The museum that cracked Singapore for me (and I think for Sal too) was at the Chinatown Heritage Centre. It told the story of Singapore from its beginning as a small village port conveniently situated on the Strait of Malacca, and its growth as a major trading port using large numbers of mainly Chinese immigrants for labour. The conditions were dire, and it cuts a long story short to say that when they were growing up in the 1950s, Singaporeans of my age (62) might have expected to live as coolies (exploited labourers), domestic servants, hookers, hand-to-mouth traders, petty criminals and opium addicts – and then to die young.

In the Heritage Centre is a re-creation of a shop-house, a warren of small box rooms (above a workshop), each barely big enough for a single bed in a UK house, where whole families of Singaporeans lived (6,7, sometimes 8 people) . They needed a Dickens to tell of their plight, but they got Lee Kwan Yew. It is probably enough to say that in a little over 50 years, LKY (as he is commonly known) led Singapore so far from poverty and squalor that its population now has the third highest per capita income on the planet.

A cool apartment block in Chinatown, Singapore – more air conditioning than you can shake a twizzle stick at. An unimaginable place to live 50 years ago.

The Heritage Centre showed how, in these appalling conditions, people organised themselves in mutually supportive communities and societies (tongs) – and that’s where the penny dropped. In Singapore you see a society where the body social, the community, the group, is valued far more highly than the particularities, characteristics and needs of individuals. In this context the worst crimes are crimes against the harmony and wellbeing of the social group as a whole; and it gives rise to the uncompromising and draconian consequences that our taxi drivers spoke of with such relish and pride. It also gives rise to a form of social discipline that sustains the kind of economic development we saw.

Anyway, this isn’t supposed to be Dave’s essay on Singapore! It just seemed to me that my sense of a kind of soullessness in the place was actually a reflection of the fact that I come from a culture that places a hugely greater emphasis on individual rights and comforts than is the case in Singapore, and I guess in many more of the countries in the region, including China. Whatever else may be true if the offer to the Singaporeans was to exchange the lives they had until the 1950s for the lives they have now, it is difficult to imagine anyone not leaping for the deal, and being harsh about any individual who compromised the outcome.

Clarke Quay Singapore – at night from our window at the Park Hotel.

If you want to get a bit of sense of how the urban future may look, Singapore is a good place to start. In a decade or so I should like to go again, and see how it all turns out; but I got to the point where I was longing for the off …

A Christmas display fully detached from the festival’s cultural origins! The legend reads:
LADY SANTA – MAKING THIS CHRISTMAS TOTALLY BAROCK (sic)

Number 6 – Burma, Myanmar, somewhere very else

Burma is … well … Burma is not what I am used to. This is clear from the outset. The fact is not a surprise, but the experience of course is.

I’ve decided to call it Burma because we have learnt that mostly the Burmese call it that too, not because Myanmar is an alien or unusual word to them, but because Myanmar is a word that has been hijacked by the military poobahs who run the place. So it’s Burma.

Burma is beautiful and brutal; gorgeous and ghastly; stunning and savage; but above all, and way beyond alliteration, it is both tragic and deeply shocking. This is a country which is not so much undeveloped as un-developed (though I have since learned that to those who know about these things the term to use is de-developed).

In Ghana (where we were two years ago) a sign of poverty is that most of the roads are un-metalled (neither concrete nor tar) including some of the trunk roads; it’s an infrastructure project waiting to happen. The Ghanaian vector is up and out of poverty. In Burma the roads show the vector is down and into poverty. In Burma metalled roads are the norm, but a very decayed norm. The edges of the roads are crushed out into dust, with few kerbs and little drainage, and there are potholes everywhere. Roads are a dull thing to look at in such lovely country, but they expose the fact that once upon a time the country had its act together an awful lot better than the Generals have it together now.

Of course the Burmese do try to maintain their highways. We passed a roadside quarry creating road repair materials. Gangs of men were working with jack hammers on the big rocks, before passing the now smaller rocks on to men with sledge hammers, who passed their output into some kind of grading process which at the level of gravel had people using bamboo sieves. On the roads themselves, there were difficult-to-catch photo opps of coolie gangs (often women) scattering the aforesaid broken rocks and gravel where needed, followed by ‘steam-rollers’ (that would have old-engineering geeks creaming themselves in pleasure) to crush them into place.

Highway maintenance in Burma is a handmade business, mostly done by women.

An engineer’s delight, still in use in Burma

Fixing the road in Kalaw in Burma

Above road level, most everything in the country’s infrastructure tells the same story in all its prosaic detail. There are endless fine old buildings (and many newer ones) that are simply and obviously mouldy and rotting. An unexpected part of the street furniture are large voltage regulators and emergency power generators outside the bigger buildings – many of them with uniformed guards. This is afterthought technology put in to try to deal with a decay in the quality and reliability of the electricity supply that has come about since the buildings were erected.

But I fear that by this point anyone doing me the favour of reading this blog will be giving up on this gloomy post. So let me be clear that this place is also just stunningly beautiful and full of the most lovely and hospitable people.The Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, for example, is gorgeous and utterly alive.

This is the central stupa of the Shwedagon Pagoda, covered in gold leaf. It has a reliquary containing four hairs from Gautama Buddha’s head.

It is hard to take a tourist photo that approaches those in the brochures – but this isn’t a bad attempt at snapping some of the smaller stupas at the Shwedagon.

At the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon. There is the opposite picture of us somewhere. They seemed to think we were interesting too. In fact they started the digital exchange.

The quiet decay in this house in Yangon is obvious. This image reminds me of some that I have seen from Cuba.

The thing which got me about Burma is that its un-development and poverty are so wholly unnecessary. Asking why the country has decayed in 50 years from being a thriving South East Asian state into being one of the poorest 10 countries on the planet is a question which I can’t really pretend to answer with any real depth of historical understanding (the books by Thant Myint-U, grandson of UN Secretary General U Thant gave us a handle on the history – see a reading list elsewhere), but here is a bit of punt.

Burma sits at the interface between India and China, and one way or another invaders and colonial forces of many kinds have flowed hither and thither over the country since forever, powerfully interacting with the endless internal struggles between ‘Burmese’ kings and their wannabe replacements. Judging by the architecture alone, there can be little doubt that in the churning of power a great deal of ‘surplus value’ has always been extracted from the Burmese population. In this respect though, Burma is similar to many other countries, like France for example, where the chateaus give such powerful mute testament to the way the peasantry where exploited by the aristos. One of the odd experiences for me, in both Yangon and Mandalay, was a sense that had I been knocking around in 18th century France we would have had a remarkably similar experience of the same huge disparity between the ruthlessly impoverished majority and their violently defended, brioche eating, utterly detached, regal masters living in ‘The Abode of Kings.’

This phrase, ‘The Abode of Kings‘ is not my attempt to encapsulate the arrogance of Burma’s rulers. At a cost of billions of dollars (always dollars) a brand new capital city has been built for the governors and the government, called Naypyidaw which, in vernacular translation, means ‘The Abode of Kings‘ (literally, royal city of the sun). The city is a restricted area, and certainly not accessible to tourists. The place is said to reflect extreme control-freakery, for example accommodation is allocated strictly according to rank and role, with colour coded roofing to show where the residents work (blue roofs for health workers, green for agricultural workers and, and …). Fifty mansions have been built for the most senior government officials. There is a pagoda with a central golden stupa just 30 cm (12 inches) shorter than the one which does service as Burma’s icon at Shewdagon in Yangon, and it is said that nearby the generals keep a couple of lucky white elephants (albinos). We were told that the city has been laid out with enormous space between buildings in order to minimise collateral damage should it ever be subject to air raids, however this might be a misreading of the huge amount of ‘public‘ space devoted to recreation – lakes, a zoo, gardens, beaches (the city is inland) etcetera. Every night there is a musical light show at the city’s water fountain complex; this in a country where only 30% of the population have electricity, and safe, reliable, piped-water supplies barely exist. Of course this could all be propaganda.

Whatever the details may be, the historical fact is that since 1962 Burma has been dominated and controlled by a powerful military elite, and by any criteria it can only be said that they have screwed up gloriously and showed themselves to be astonishingly selfish, useless and remarkably unpleasant. Whether their behaviour and non-achievements reflect greed, ignorance, hubris, or just plain stupidity and incompetence, is difficult to know – but some of all of the above is is probably true.

There are some glimmers of hope that Burma has bottomed out and is beginning to move upward again. The internationally known Burmese leader, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, appears to be making some headway, though it is difficult to believe that this reflects any real change of heart on the part of the military. From my naive economic perspective, it looks to me as if the military are faced with an impasse; a reality that there is nothing more they can extract from their hugely impoverished population, and a truth which betokens the kind of political instability that is inimical to the commercial interests international investors. It is difficult to imagine that any incoming revolutionary government in Burma would feel the slightest obligation to repay the debts incurred by their military oppressors.

Anyway, I’ve certainly said enough about all this. Our direct experience of Burma was of a magically beautiful country, populated by the most delightful, gentle and welcoming people, and suffused by a Buddhist glow that was every bit as peaceful and contemplative as one could hope it would be (notwithstanding stories of monk-led anti-Muslim riots elsewhere). I think that Burma will always look good in photos, but its present kind of poverty makes it especially photogenic. I’m going to finish this post with some pictures which give a flavour of where we found ourselves and what we did. We had a wonderful time (and a brilliant guide) and we certainly weren’t under the cosh of western-wealthy-guilt, or post-colonial-apologism – but it was always important to retain a perspective which noted the oppression and exploitation to which our hosts had been subjected, and the mostly human reasons for their poverty.

So, some pictures (this is a really hard choice to make). I’ll put a full size album on Flickr eventually with lots more photos.

First up a message from the Generals.

The Myanmar armed forces : TATMADAW by name, CRUSHING their game. This sign is on the wall of Mandalay’s 1 mile square royal palace, now a military base.

The photogenic ‘quaintness’ of poverty doesn’t hide the reality; though it is a reality which isn’t always miserable or dysfunctional.

Pony carts are for real

Bringing home the steel.

You can’t do Burma without doing Buddha.

Buddha is big in Burma and he comes in many different sizes and poses. This was the biggest we saw.

It’s not uncommon to see Buddha twins – but I don’t know why they come in pairs since there was only one of him.

Gold Buddha – Shwedagon

Black Buddha – Shwedagon

‘Christmas’ lights are extensively used, wherever there is electric power, to illuminate the buddhas.

All around the Pagodas is additional statuary, although I know nothing of the stories and meanings it conveys.

Caves are filled with thousands of shrines to Buddha, in a huge range of sizes and designs (most of them carved in and around Mandalay).This is a small one tucked away behind the base of a huge one.

At the wooden temple in Mandalay the carving is exquisite. This guy’s head is about the size of a peach. Mostly the colour has gone, but I found this in a shadowy part.

An unfinished Buddha in the Mandalay area where they make them.

Bagan is an extraordinary place with 2,437 stupas, big and small. Once a thriving wooden city, everything in Bagan has decayed apart from the stupas leaving this surreal landscape. Until two or three years ago many people lived in villages around the stupas, so they were still part everyday life. The authorities have now removed the villages. I have no idea whether this is better or worse from a conservation or any other point of view, but I don’t suppose the villagers liked it.

Arriving at the next pagoda, one that we will climb.

Climbing a pagoda in Bagan

In Bagan, the stupas and pagodas are spread across the landscape as far as the eye can see.

These stupas in Bagan record the earthquakes that shake things up every so offen.

People go to school, do stuff and get old like they do most everywhere – but it’s not at all like here.

At school the children are taught by rote and copying. In the back of this classroom are several sacks of caustic lime, some of them split, which were being stored there for building works.

Snopy

This man is leading a procession taking young boys to their noviciate in the local monastery, where they will typically spend up to a month learning about Buddhism.

These young monks are collecting Dana, the gifts from the population on which the monks survive. Almost all Burmese boys will ordain for 2-4 weeks and be initiated into their Buddhist culture.

These girls are engaged in a Buddhist initiation ceremony, which the majority of Burmese children still go through.

This woman sells offerings to be given at the local temple, just across the road from her stall.

This woman from the Shan Palaung people makes fabrics using a hand loom – and gave us tea when we arrived in her workshop.

There is social care for old people who find themselves with no family. Behind this woman is a re-cycled fertiliser bag with an unfortunate label.

We really have been to these places.

Sal in Yangon at the Pagoda I need to look up the name of!

On Lake Inle they are bringing home the water by boat.

Washing clothes on the banks of the Irawaddy.

Irawaddy ship

This woman offers captive birds for release at a pagoda. The release gives merit to the liberator. I don’t know how the other side of the equation works for the captor and retailer.

The remains of colonial era house in Yangon. The Surrey influence is is clear!

In Yangon Cathedral there are memorials to the regiments who fought in Burma. They have been restored, and some counties have become renamed in the process.

Bus stop, Yangon. Man U sells noodles.

I just liked this.

A building in Yangon. A right mix of mould, wiring, satellite dishes and drops of colour

That’s enough pictures – though Flickr will have more.

I’ll finish with an image containing the words that the TATMADAW would do better to pay attention to (wouldn’t we all!)

The eightfold path to enlightenment involves ethical conduct, concentration, and wisdom (Sila, Samadi and Panna)