Photograph © Ralf-André Lettau
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News
1981-08-09: Burmese Leader to Quit After 19 Years in Power
Gen. Ne Win, who has led this Southeast Asian nation for 19 years, announced today that he would resign from the presidency in November.
1987-06-26: 45 Are Found Dead in Burma In an Airliner That Vanished
All 45 people aboard a Burma Airways plane missing since Sunday died when the aircraft crashed into an 8,200-foot mountain in eastern Burma, the Government reported Wednesday.
1988-08-12: Burma on the Brink
The defiant protests exploding across Burma testify to more than a quarter century of repression and misrule. Despite an overwhelming advantage in firepower, the military Government is on the ropes.
Martial law no longer intimidates people. Unarmed protesters march fearlessly against soldiers and police. Following a pattern seen decades ago in South Vietnam and more recently in Tibet, Buddhist monks are turning from spiritual contemplation to more active defiance.
1988-08-16: Rangoon Is Reported Quiet As Burmese Look for Victims
Rangoon was quiet today as Burmese crowded in front of a hospital to search for names of friends and relatives on a list of the casualties in last week’s anti-Government protests, a Western tourist reported.
1988-08-21: The Students Behind Burma’s Revolt
“We have no leader, we have no arms,” said a Burmese student, lifting the bandanna that masked his face as he marched through Rangoon on a recent day of anti-Government protests. “But one day we will remove this Government,” he went on. “They are shooting at us and we will die. But we will not die in vain.”
1988-09-11: New Era in Burma
“There is wall-to-wall support for the establishment of genuine multiparty democracy in Burma. The Government there has completely unraveled. We are at the dawn of a new era, and it is very much in the interest of the United States to make it as clear as possible, as quickly as possible, that we are strongly on the side of democracy rather than dictatorship in Burma.” – Representative Stephen J. Solarz, Democrat of Brooklyn, after a visit to Burma last weekend.
1989-01-03: 100,000 Burmese at Funeral of an Independence Figure
More than 100,000 Burmese poured into the streets of Rangoon today to join a funeral procession for the widow of Aung San, who led the country to independence from Britain.
1989-06-20: Burma Takes Another Name: Now, the Union of Myanmar
Burma changed its name in English today to the Union of Myanmar, and it renamed the capital Yangon, the Working People’s Daily said. The nationality was also changed to Myanmar.
1989-06-22: Troops Kill a Protester In a Rally in Rangoon
Troops fired on a demonstration by about 500 people in the Burmese capital today, killing one protester, the Rangoon radio said.
It was the first reported fatal shooting by security forces in Rangoon since the army took power in a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations last September, when diplomats said at least 1,000 were killed.
1991-01-20: Travel Advisory: Alert Cites Burmese Unrest
Americans considering visiting Myanmar (formerly Burma) are advised by the United States Department of State to exercise caution because of political unrest and are warned about air and train travel dangers there. A travel advisory from the department says while security conditions have improved slightly since last summer, political dissatisfaction continues and armed security forces are often on the streets of all major cities.
Travel
1983-09-11: In Burma, Ordinary Is Brilliant
Maung Kown beckons a pair of visitors back into his simple pony cab at the end of a hot Burmese day of touring. Sunset nears, signaling the start of a daily pilgrimage. Settling into the bouncy rhythm and clatter of the pony’s unhurried gait, the foreigners are conveyed along Pagan’s dusty plain to a tall pagoda. The driver collects all footwear and sends his passengers up its warm stone steps. Once they are at the top, the light waning, the scorched brown earth begins to grow coppery. Whitewashed columns and walls take on burning hues and even plain brick is fired brilliant oranges and reds. After the sun disappears, fluorescent bars blink on at the pagoda’s stupas, or towers, and the sky glows 30 minutes more in a charged but serene display. Suddenly, the seemingly tired, ancient landscape is suffused with a sense of renewed inner life.
1983-09-11: Perfection Endures Amid Decay
Crowded ferries on the Rangoon River practically vanish behind squalls of rain. The palms go wild. Umbrellas come out – black brollies for the laity and paper- and-bamboo hti for monks. Everybody runs for cover. It’s time for tea or sleep, and after a while the sun appears, turning the pavements into mirrors for swirls of pigeons. This is Rangoon in the wet season, from May to October. Veterans call midwinter better – it is dry then and almost brisk at night. But the Burmese capital has its charms in the rain, which lets up often enough. They say the pagodas of Pagan in Upper Burma are even more unearthly than Rangoon’s 368-foot-high Shwe Dagon. But you have to travel to Rangoon to get up north, and Rangoon isn’t quite like going to Chicago. It’s a crumbling city – nothing physical has changed much since the 1930’s – and it brings out the mock-romantic in some visitors. One day in the barrel-vaulted dining room of the old Strand Hotel, a group of youngish Western tourists gathered around a spotted tablecloth to plot their next move. Tibet? The Amazon? Two men wore Panama hats. You got the feeling that they had just seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
1986-06-08: Burma’s Splendid Isolation
Burma has long subscribed to the dictum that good fences make good neighbors. By limiting contact with the outside world since 1962, Burma’s xenophobic socialist-military government has largely insulated the country from its neighbors in Southeast Asia, and from the last half of the 20th century. Things eccentric and magnificent are captured in this isolation.
1986-06-08: Burma’s Splendid Isolation: In Summer, Its Own Pace
“You could come back in November,” Sheila M. K. Thwin said philosophically as we waited in a small pagoda in Pegu to escape a summer cloudburst.
If you go to Burma in June, July or August, it will probably rain, and the Burmese will certainly tell you again and again how much better the weather is in other seasons.
1986-06-08: Spritual Land of Prayers And Pagodas
As we now believe pop stars and sports heroes are superhuman, the Burmese believe in nats. Their 37 nats are half human, half spirit, angels and demons asking offerings not to make our lives difficult. In ancient Burma before Buddhism came, every village had its special nat in each tree and field. There were wind and water nats, rice and wild game nats. Then a reforming king, who founded the first Burmese Empire, decided that too many nats spoiled the brotherhood and decreed that there would be only 36, commanded by a king nat. Rather like the saints of the Roman Catholic Church, each nat had his or her duty of intercession between God and mankind. Most of them had been human beings who had died famously or tragically like the beatified Christian martyrs; stories about their lives and deaths are a bardic history of Burma. They have marvelous titles such as Lady Golden Sides, The Brown Lord of Due South, The Lord With the White Umbrella, The Younger Inferior Gold, and Lady Bandy Legs.
1994-04-24: On the Road to Myanmar
For travelers, much has changed in Myanmar, the long-isolated nation still better known to the outside world as Burma: Tourist visas, once good only for a week, are now good for up to a month; foreign visitors are no longer being coerced into changing money at a ludicrous, larcenous official exchange rate that at one time had made Mandalay as expensive as Manhattan; there are several international-standard hotels and many more on the way; with a new international airline, Myanmar Airways International, flying to Myanmar need no longer be a death-defying act.
1995-11-12: Yangon, A City Of Light And Shadow
For a time earlier this year, the best show in Yangon began shortly after 3 in the afternoon, when the rapturous crowds along a leafy stretch of University Avenue broke into cheers at the first sight of their heroine, her hair usually tied up in a bun that had been laced with fragrant blooms from her overgrown garden.
1998-12-13: Mirages
Like Ms. Lear in Venice, I could not believe I was seeing this “for real,” that this was not a photo, but actually thousands of temple ruins, lost and lonely, as though waiting for their builders to return and claim them once more.
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