Lu Maw is a stand-up comic and the most prominent member of the Moustache Brothers, Myanmar's famous burlesque troupe. A jumpy, thin-faced fifty-seven-year-old who performs in a white undershirt and blue plaid sarong, he is a onetime whiskey bootlegger who serves as front man and translator for the two real stars of the act, his mustached brother, Par Par Lay, and their rubber-faced cousin, Lu Zaw. At the family compound in Mandalay, between the jade market and a strip of glitzy shopping malls, I joined ten tourists watching the three men perform an hour-long show consisting of a Jay Leno–style monologue, traditional dance numbers, and skits about Chinese traders, "white powder" sniffers, and corrupt traffic cops.
Before my two-week trip last spring, all I knew of Mandalay was Rudyard Kipling's ode to the colonial ideal of gentle Asian exoticism. In the 1990s—after the military government did an abrupt about-face, abandoning closed-door socialism—the city became a trade hub for goods arriving overland from neighboring China and for Burmese teak, gems, and drugs flowing in the opposite direction. Its development lags far behind other Asian capitalist converts such as Hanoi, however, and much of Mandalay still looks as it has for the last century—a grid of wooden houses and Buddhist monasteries sprawled along the banks of the Irrawaddy River. Breezes carry the scent of bodhi tree flowers, and the wide, dusty streets are filled with creaky trishaws and beautiful girls whose shiny black tresses fall past their knees.
The military regime, which changed Burma's name to Myanmar, wants visitors to take the rosy view. For a reality check, I went to see the Moustache Brothers early on in my trip because they bravely straddle the line between tourist Burma, full of golden pagodas, guesthouses, and luxury hotels, and military-ruled Myanmar, in which economic hardship and political repression are the norm and watching what you say is part of each citizen's daily struggle for self-preservation.
"Par Par Lay was in the slammer, in the klink, up the river," Lu Maw said during his warm-up, winningly using rapid-fire English idioms gleaned from dictionaries, conversations with foreigners, and, these days, Chinese pirated DVDs of American films (he particularly admires the work of J.Lo and Angelina Jolie). "My brother burned his bridges and crossed the Rubicon," he continued. "The military gave him seven years hard labor for telling one joke." Their cousin, Lu Zaw, received the same sentence.
Power was out in the neighborhood, a deliberate shortage, Lu Maw said, to keep citizens home at night. He switched on a television hooked up to a car battery to play a videocassette of the offending gag. Asked by Lu Zaw if he knows the difference between Myanmar's ethnic dance styles, Par Par Lay imitates the hand movements of a Chin dancer and a Shan dancer, and then demonstrates the technique of a "Ruling Party dancer," switching to frantic behind-the-back gesturing, a gibe at government officials' penchant for demanding bribes. The offense lay not just in the content but in the venue: a 1996 Independence Day party organized by Myanmar's democratic opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi at her house in Yangon.
Part history lesson, part political commentary, part slapstick, the act belongs to a centuries-old school of traveling vaudeville called a-nyeint. In the nineteenth century, a-nyeint jokes targeted personalities in the Burmese royal court, including the king and his astrologer. Nobles could be cruel and capricious. In 1858, for example, after King Mindon ordered the court to relocate from Amarapura to Mandalay, a few miles upriver, fifty-two people, including a pregnant woman, were buried alive under the foundations of the new palace because astrologers deemed mass sacrifice propitious. The charm failed to take: The British overthrew the last royal dynasty in 1885 and made Myanmar an outpost of the Raj. Japanese soldiers occupied Mandalay during World War II, and the palace burned to the ground during battles with British troops. In the 1990s, the military built a crimson-and-gold palace replica, where foreigners must now pay a five-dollar admission fee. In its own version of human sacrifice, the regime ordered every family in the city to contribute one person to work on the project without pay for three months.
After releasing Par Par Lay and Lu Zaw from prison in 2001, the government refused to grant any Burmese citizen a permit to hire them. In Myanmar, I learned, you need a permit to hold something as innocuous as a birthday party, and you can get tossed into jail for a week for failing to provide the authorities with an advance list of any overnight guests or entertainers. The Moustache Brothers, which once used stagehands and backup musicians, is now reduced to the three men, two wives, and a sister, all of whom earn a living by holding nightly performances for tourists. The government tolerates these sessions; the strategy undermines the comedians' relevance by cutting them off from their public and makes them the object of one of the regime's favorite dictates, printed on giant red-and-white billboards around the country: "Oppose those relying on external elements, acting as stooges, holding negative views." The Orwellian language may sound ridiculous, but Mandalay guides take it so seriously that they refuse to drop clients off at the show for fear of losing their government license.
"You're sitting in the auspicious chair," Lu Maw said, turning to me and winking. It transpired that Aung San Suu Kyi had paid a visit to the home in 2002, during her last, brief release from house arrest. I said that I gathered, since his family depended on tourism, that he didn't agree with Suu Kyi's long-standing call for visitors to stay away from the country. "The Burmese need tourists to witness what is going on in this country—that we have no light, no flour, no fuel," he said passionately. Then he grinned and asked whether I'd buy Moustache Brothers T-shirts and souvenir DVDs. "I like taking tourists to the cleaners!"
It's been more than a decade since the xenophobic and cash-strapped regime declared 1996 "Visit Myanmar Year," encouraging foreigners to come see what had been one of the world's most hermetically sealed nations. Its legitimacy already marred by the massacre of thousands of student protesters in 1988 and the negation of the 1990 democratic elections won by Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party, the military further sabotaged its PR by using forced labor to build airport hotels and other tourism infrastructure. This is one of the main reasons Myanmar remains singled out today, among repressive but scenic nations, for a tourism boycott, called for by several activist groups and endorsed by the British government.
Thanks to the boycott and the lack of basic infrastructure, just 227,300 foreigners arrived at Yangon's International Airport last year, a fraction of neighboring Thailand's 14 million annual visitors. But that is precisely Myanmar's increasing appeal to backpackers and affluent voyagers alike, for whom the country is an as yet unglobalized refuge and the uncrowded third leg of a tour of Southeast Asia encompassing Thai beaches, Cambodia's Angkor Wat, and Bagan—a Manhattan-sized plain in central Myanmar containing three thousand Buddhist monuments. A slew of recent films, memoirs, and novels, moreover, have renewed buzz among travelers about the pariah state. Next year is bound to bring even more attention to the country, with the release of the fourth installment of Rambo. Filmed earlier this year near the Thai-Myanmar border, the movie has the now-sixty-year-old action star Sylvester Stallone staging a rescue attempt of Christian aid workers kidnapped by Burmese soldiers.
In scattered interviews conducted in the mid-1990s, Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent eleven of the past seventeen years under house arrest, reiterated her wish that tourists stay away from Myanmar, and in her last public comment on the issue, in 2002, she said, "The situation has not changed." Tourism, however, has wound up being a far less important path to international reintegration and foreign currency earnings for the military regime than either the junta or the boycott campaign anticipated. In this context, some pro-democracy organizations, such as the U.S.-based Free Burma Coalition and even members of Suu Kyi's party, have begun asking whether tourism, now largely privatized, can be a tool not for isolating the regime but for benefiting more of Myanmar's 54 million citizens.
I had worked as a journalist in South Africa and had witnessed how Western sanctions helped pressure the white minority into dismantling apartheid. But in Myanmar's case, economic sanctions have pushed the regime to trade with Asian partners far less concerned with ending human rights abuses, building democracy, or improving the lot of ordinary citizens. Both sides of the tourism boycott agree that Myanmar's military has more than doubled in size since 1996, to 430,000 soldiers, becoming one of the world's largest armed forces. This increase is not due to tourism receipts, which amounted to $164 million last year, but to the billions earned annually from the extraction and sale of resources—teak, precious stones, and especially natural gas—to Myanmar's energy-hungry neighbors China and India.
Boycott supporters remain adamant that even the most responsible tourism, which avoids government hotels and patronizes small local businesses, helps finance ongoing human rights abuses, including forced labor brigades and the brutal ethnic cleansing of the Karen minority. "Tourism may supply only a bit of the money that goes into buying guns and burning villages, but it's where travelers can play a role and make a statement," says Tricia Barnett, director of the London-based organization Tourism Concern, which, along with the Burma Campaign UK, is a leader in the boycott movement. "You can say that tourism can keep individual families from going hungry, and it's true. But eighty percent of Myanmar's citizens never see a tourist."
Others contend that the increased presence of tourists—particularly visitors from democratic countries—can loosen the government's psychological grip on the population. "Tourists are not essential to the government's survival and won't be even if the numbers grow to a few million per year," says Thant Myint-U, a Burmese historian and the grandson of former UN secretary general U Thant. "But tourism is the one Burmese industry in which the private sector has free reign. A leap to a few million tourists per year could make a huge difference in ending poverty, not just of individuals but of ideas, imagination, and civilian institutions."
I had planned my trip as a greatest-hits tour covering Mandalay, Lake Inle, Bagan, and Yangon, with a stint of hill trekking in the Eastern Shan State. Along with my suitcase, I packed trepidation, but not about my personal security (efficient police states being remarkably free of street crime). Would my presence do more harm than good? Despite the talk of boycotts, I had plenty of company. Throughout my trip, I heard American and British voices in hotels and airplanes (though I heard many more French and German accents). In some respects, the country, which blocks international cell phones and censors incoming and outgoing e-mail, felt less cut off than I had expected. In Yangon, I attended a hip-hop dance class led by the Burmese rapper Lil' Kaung Myat, whose ambition is to get a shopping mall gig in Singapore, followed by an appearance on Asian MTV. And at Lake Inle, I met a boatbuilder's wife who rhapsodized about her favorite television show, Medicinal Master, a soap opera about a traditional village healer who married the daughter of a rich city businessman. "Every week there is a medical mystery, and they suffer because of their love story," she told me.
Like all Burmese kings of the past, today's generals are fervent believers in Theravada Buddhism, and they have been spending millions of dollars on a massive pagoda-building and -restoration campaign. Part of the motivation is to instill a Buddhist, Burmese-speaking national identity in a country composed of 135 different ethnic groups that have mounted various insurgencies since independence from Britain in 1948. Conspicuous donations to temples and monasteries also serve as karma insurance, a way to make up for bad deeds that jeopardize future reincarnations. The country now has so many gold-covered pagodas that when approaching Mandalay by air, I had seen the earth literally glitter beneath me.
My hotel was a short trishaw ride from Mandalay Palace, enough time for the driver to whisper an urgent question: Was it true that in a democratic country such as the United States, a poor person could hire a lawyer and seek compensation from a rich person in a hit-and-run car accident? He seemed wistful when I answered yes until I added that a rich person might be able to hire many lawyers and even pay off witnesses. The palace grounds were largely empty of visitors, and the driver told me that in his experience, many travelers exercise their own personal boycott of the site after learning that it was rebuilt using forced labor.
I followed their example and headed instead to the holiest temple in Mandalay, Mahamuni, which contains a golden statue of the Buddha allegedly sculpted from life during his travels in Arakan in 553 b.c. At the donation counter, next to a photograph of Senior General Than Shwe, Myanmar's top official, I witnessed a man registering an offering consisting of a pair of his aging mother's sixty-thousand-dollar diamond earrings—an astonishing gift, considering that the average citizen earns less than two dollars per day. Amid the hum of prayer chants, men of lesser means clambered onto the golden figure to place individual squares of gold leaf, each as thin and fragile as a butterfly wing, on the statue's knees, elbows, and torso. The thirteen-foot-tall Buddha was disappearing under the weight of all these donations, with only the head showing above encrustations that looked like a gold coral reef. Women sat in their separate prayer niche fingering prayer beads, forbidden from touching the sacred statue.
Mandalay remained the capital for Buddhist study after the British moved their administrative center to Rangoon, and today sixty percent of the country's 400,000 monks and nuns live in Mandalay and its vicinity. Monasteries and nunneries shelter a social force nearly as large as the military and function as a welfare net, absorbing orphans, the unemployed, and the outcast into their orders; some also run meditation retreats for foreigners. When I asked my guide if I might visit a spiritual center off the tourist trail, I was taken to a nunnery near the old airport, where the government had seized and cleared farmers' rice paddies and built mansions on the land. We arrived to find a family celebrating the initiation of an eighteen-month-old girl, a novice for a day. They prostrated themselves and paid respect to the abbess, who invited me to share a feast of curries and jaggery cake. The four-story nunnery resembled a modern apartment block and was unfinished, with exposed concrete floors and pillars. Inside, the nuns had created an idealized forest of plastic palm trees and bright-colored Jakata paintings of Buddha's life story.
"I decided to become a nun when I was thirteen," said one pink-robed, shaven-headed sister, the sixth of her eight siblings to take her vows. The Buddha himself considered women inferior creatures, capable of observing just 10 of a monk's 227 precepts—an attitude that persists today. "People refuse to give us alms, and give instead to monks because they believe their blessings are greater," the nun told me. She said it smiling, with model Buddhist equanimity, but pointed out that monks and nuns all take the same exams of Buddhist knowledge in Myanmar, and that she had scored the highest in her section.
I signed up to experience the country's version of hill tribe trekking, a form of anthropological tourism pioneered in Thailand. The expedition base, Keng Tong, was once notorious as the capital of the Golden Triangle—opium country between Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos that got its name from the Thai and Laotian practice of paying for Burmese raw opium with solid-gold ingots. The old funnel for mule caravans running goods between China and Thailand, Keng Tong has lately been supplanted by Mong La, on the Chinese border, where autonomous Wa tribesmen, former Communists and headhunters, run a Las Vegas–style frontier town with entertainments banned in Myanmar proper, including casinos and transvestite cabarets. Keng Tong, on the other hand, with its mossy dark-timbered houses surrounding a mountain-flanked lake, retains the atmosphere of old Asia.
My trekking guide (who, like most of the Burmese I met, asked that his name be withheld because of the prohibition against speaking to foreign reporters) picked me up at the airport wearing baggy jeans, a red baseball cap, and, around his wrist, nine pieces of colored string. "I collected each one from a widow," he said. "They will protect me from the ogress.
"The King of All Celestial Beings is riding an ogress on his way to marry the frog princess the day after tomorrow," he continued matter-of-factly. "I had dyed my hair orange to be noticed and get good fortune from the king, but after the astrologer warned us about the ogress, my wife made me dye my hair black."
We headed to Keng Tong's morning market to buy picnic provisions. Money changers sat cross-legged on platforms, counting stacks of Chinese yuan notes, Thai baht, and old Indian silver rupees. Vendors sold foods I had never encountered, including dried frogs, scaly dragon fruit, and "ice potatoes," a black tuber that tasted cool and nutty when I bit into one. We bought parcels of sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves, steamed pork balls, and gingered quail eggs, then drove out of town in an aging Toyota Corolla along the old fourteenth-century pony track, now a tarmac road so rutted that bullock carts and bicyclists actually passed us. A sandy turnoff led past rubber plantations, fields of castor nuts for an as-yet-unrealized government bio-diesel program, and finally to the terraced rice fields of an Eng tribal village. Eng women wore black jackets and skirts, had black-stained teeth (a mark of beauty), and raised black pigs to sell on the black market.
Across a rushing stream sat a monastery, and it soon became clear that my guide had a private agenda—to ask for a piece of protective string from the monastery leader, a holy novice who had declined to take any of the exams that would advance him on the career path from monk to abbot. The novice was a trim man in his early thirties, with a shaved head, burgundy robes, and tattooed arms. We found him on a dais inside the red-and-gold prayer hall, eating a lunch of herbs and noodles. We peeled three tangerines we had bought in the market and placed them in a silver bowl as an offering. My guide grabbed mine back to neaten it when he saw that I'd missed a few strands of white pith.
"It's impossible to live by two hundred and twenty-seven rules, but I can try my best to live by ten rules and have compassion," the novice said when I asked why he didn't want to rise through the monastic ranks. He had arrived in the village at the age of seventeen, after first seeing it in a dream, and he had converted the residents from animism by an impressive feat: a week of motionless fasting and meditation atop a huge boulder. He had taken in some forty orphans—many of whom were now pre-teen boys, and were just coming back with picks and hoes over their shoulders after a morning of road clearing. Two of the boys prepared lengths of white silk cord for blessing. After saying a prayer and pressing copper squares around the string to make necklaces, the novice acknowledged another reason for keeping his spiritual head down: "The military like to pay respect to abbots. They never come here."
Wearing our necklaces, we hiked up bamboo-covered slopes to the coriander-scented gardens and rectangular stilt houses of an Akha settlement. Older women wore peaked hats heavy with silver coins, boys played with slingshots, and a girl used a bamboo pole tipped with sticky resin to pluck cicadas off tree branches; she bit off their wings with her teeth and put her snacks, legs kicking, into an embroidered cloth pouch. The guide handed out candy to the children and shampoo packets to the women. I had been enjoying the people and the landscape but suddenly felt awkward and mentioned that some Western travel consultants believe tourists shouldn't give gifts to local people and corrupt their culture. The guide looked at me as though I were the dreaded ogress. "It is a form of sharing," he said. "My policy is not to give the villagers money, because then they will stop working."
That night, back in Keng Tong, a power outage plunged the streets into darkness. Teens on motorbikes cruised the road around the lake, joined by shiny SUVs bearing license plates of the United Wa State Army, a former insurgent group that has made a lucrative peace with the Myanmar army and is reportedly now Southeast Asia's biggest heroin and methamphetamine producer. Keng Tong attracts an interesting assortment of business travelers, judging from a brochure in my hotel room. "Explosives, radio activity materials, firearms and ammunitions, birds and beasts are prohibited from carrying into room," it read. "No narcotics in room, please."
Lake Inle, my next stop, is the site of an innovative hotel, the Inle Princess Resort, which belongs to the daughter of a Shan businessman elected to parliament on the National League for Democracy ticket in the 1990 election, the results of which the junta nullified. Managed by two veterans of the Amanresorts chain, it features spa pavilions, a meditation chamber, and forty-six luxury stilt chalets overlooking the lake. The resort donates a portion of its profits to a local orphanage and provides staff with a retirement plan, paid vacations, and merit promotions. I was intrigued to learn that in 2002, Aung San Suu Kyi had visited the Inle Princess and had commended staff for running "a good model for Burma."
Eleven miles long and nearly three thousand feet above sea level, Lake Inle is ringed with mountains. In the midday haze, water, sky, and mountains melted together, the horizon seemed to disappear, and dagger-shaped teak fishing boats appeared to levitate above the water's pearlescent surface. I hired a longboat and crew from my hotel, and we motored past cheroot factories, floating tomato gardens, and waterfowl. The boatman pointed out a duck flock with one male and many females. "I want to come back as a duck," he quipped.
On the western side of the lake, in the village of Indein, I walked into a forest of five hundred small pagodas, crumbling and adorned with broken fragments of dog-sized plaster elephants, phoenixes, and jolly dancers with round, smiling faces. The pinnacles of these monuments were topped with stone rings like those on a toddler's play set; trees grew out of the cracks in the monuments, and some had ancient, rusting chimes that jangled in the breeze. The site, a remnant of the twelfth-century court of King Alaungsithu, was lovely in its ruined splendor, but up near the main temple and place of worship stood a row of crude cement reproductions. Each was set with a marble plaque thanking tourists—from Singapore, China, Denmark, and Austria—for their donations. Repairing old monuments, which suffer the annual wear and tear of monsoons, is a way for contemporary worshippers to pay spiritual dues. The profusion of donation plaques—plus the perception that supporting monks is an anti-government gesture—often inspires tourists, not realizing that some of the biggest donors are in fact Burmese military officers, to follow suit.
Bagan, the most visited site in Myanmar, is a holy landscape of more than three thousand stupas on the east bank of the Irrawaddy River, a nine-hour ferry ride north of Mandalay. The eleventh-century capital of King Anawrahta, credited with bringing Theravada Buddhism to Myanmar, Bagan had its heyday from the ninth century until the Mongols invaded around a.d. 1280. The vast complex, covering sixteen square miles, includes structures with stepped terraces reminiscent of Mayan pyramids and cruciform buildings with internal flying buttresses predating Gothic cathedrals.
The word stupa, meaning "place for relics," derives from the Sanskrit term for hillock; according to art historians, Bagan's elaborate stupas evolved from prehistoric grave mounds. And indeed, in the early-morning mist or the crepuscular light after sunset, the place looks haunted, like a cemetery for giants—a notion reinforced by the sight of massive Buddhas squeezed inside some of the larger temples.
People lived and farmed among these ruins until the 1990s, when thousands of them were forcibly relocated, ostensibly to make way for archaeological excavation. Instead, the site has been the subject of an extensive and controversial restoration campaign, one in which contractor profits and the desire to accumulate Buddhist brownie points often take precedence over authenticity.
Modern additions are another of Bagan's threats. At the eastern end of the site, the government commissioned Burmese entrepreneur Tay Za to erect a viewing tower. The result is architecturally out of place not just because of its smooth, cylindrical form but because of its Iraqi ziggurat-style external staircase. Tay Za, the chairman of Air Bagan, is reputedly close to Senior General Than Shwe—so close, in fact, that, according to the BBC, he's licensed to trade arms with Russia (though the tycoon denies it). After Tay Za completed the tower, he was granted adjacent land, on which he built Bagan's most luxurious hotel, the Aureum Palace, which stands to benefit from the start-up, this year, of Air Bagan flights between Bagan and Siem Reap, the gateway to Angkor Wat.
"They live like Saddam," a resident groused to me of the military caste and its cronies, as we ate stewed river prawns in a garden scented with frangipani and burning mosquito coils. "Their life is about staying in power, and they care only about their own families." This man had traveled abroad and was a fan of CNN. "I want Larry King to come to Myanmar," he suddenly burst out. "The problem with Myanmar is that we have no one to speak for us. I want Larry King to speak for us, and I will even pay for his hotel and plane ticket."
Called Rangoon by the British and rechristened Yangon in 1989, the former capital of Myanmar sits on a main tributary of the Irrawaddy, just at the point where the river widens before flowing into the Andaman Sea. It is the main transportation link for interior towns and regions and was among Asia's busiest ports until 1962, when General Ne Win launched his disastrous Burmese Road to Socialism policy and closed the door on the outside world. Today, although the current regime has opened the economy, Yangon receives just one or two container ships per month, if that. The lack of sea trade is a result of Western sanctions and reflects Myanmar's continued isolation from international markets.
In 2005, reportedly at a precise time deemed auspicious by astrologers, Senior General Than Shwe relocated Myanmar's capital to Naypyidaw, a purpose-built city two hundred miles to the north. The move made the military secure against naval invasion (U.S. aggression in Iraq reportedly worries Myanmar's leaders) and put it closer to remaining ethnic insurgencies in the Shan, Kayeh, and Karen states. Yangon's moldering Victorian buildings, a vestige of British colonial rule, have been emptied of government ministries. (A rumor circulating at the time of my visit posited that the regime had vacated Yangon in order to lease prime riverfront real estate to Chinese entrepreneurs seeking to develop a new port to serve China's landlocked Yunnan Province.)
I was told that Senior General Than Shwe had also wanted to relocate Yangon's Shwedagon Pagoda, the holiest place in the country, but had changed his mind at the last minute. On a hill overlooking the city, Shwedagon contains a shrine housing four of the Buddha's hairs and draws as many as forty thousand worshippers daily to meditate and circumambulate the three-hundred-foot-tall central stupa, which is coated with tons of gold and topped by a seventy-six-carat diamond.
The guide I hired in Yangon warned me to stay on guard here: Government spies, he said, sometimes dress as monks and engage foreigners in conversation and eavesdrop on Burmese. Others had told me that it was the guides themselves who were instructed to sow disinformation. The net of suspicion and paranoia—into which both Burmese and visitors are drawn—rendered the sight of men and women meditating before Buddha statues all the more poignant, as if the smiling stone figures are the only trustworthy confidants. Still, the day I visited was an occasion for celebration. Three boy novices had come here, with their families, dressed in the costume of Buddha before his enlightenment: pink silk sarongs, gold-sequined crowns, garlands of jasmine and imitation rubies; their cheeks were dotted with thanaka wood paste, their lips touched with pink lipstick. I stayed past sunset, watching the sky turn from turquoise to a black pierced by stars and the spotlighted stupa's golden glow.
When I finally came down from the sacred hill at around nine o'clock, Yangon's streets were eerily quiet. Many were darkened because of power cuts, and police had closed University Road, where Aung San Suu Kyi's house is, with their nightly roadblock. To take people's minds off politics, the generals have allowed the spread of Western-style entertainment, including malls, music clubs, and golf tournaments. But amid domestic fuel shortages and soaring inflation (in August, the regime doubled diesel prices), few Burmese can benefit from the new amenities. Deteriorating living conditions have sparked a series of demonstrations this past year, including one of the largest in recent history, in August, when several hundred protesters, mostly women, marched through the streets of Yangon before being dispersed by pro-government goon squads.
The day I left Myanmar, I stopped on the way to the airport in Yangon at a compound where three white elephants, captured in the Rakhine State, were being kept as symbols of auspiciousness. They had been left behind when the capital moved north, and were chained so tightly to their wooden scratching posts that they could move just half a step in any direction. The elephants had been taken from the forest on the orders of former prime minister and intelligence chief Khin Nyunt, a protégé of General Ne Win's who was relieved of his duties by Senior General Than Shwe in an internal coup in 2004. Their keepers were waiting to see if they would have to move the elephants to Naypyidaw. Foreign diplomats were also waiting to see if they would be summoned to live in the new capital. All of Myanmar, in fact, was waiting—to see whether Aung San Suu Kyi would be released from house arrest when her term was up in May (she was not), and to hear updates on the health of the two most powerful generals, both in their seventies and reportedly suffering from serious maladies.
"Things will change, we just don't know how or when," Lu Maw had told me hopefully back in Mandalay, reflecting a combination of courage, perseverance, and, amazingly, good humor that to me, more than rubies, teak, or gas, seem Myanmar's key assets. "We must be patient. Just look at what happened in the Soviet Union."