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‘It is as though a committee of Scaligers and Bentleys had assembled to edit the tales of the nursery. Perrault’s chronicle of Red Riding Hood is collated with Grimm’s and … the credibility of the two several versions discussed. And when that little matter had been satisfactorily dealt with, there follows a long and incredibly learned discussion of the obscure, the complex and difficult problems raised in Puss in Boots …’
Leaving aside flying dragons and divine intervention – for now at least – there is still much of the history of Myanmar and its neighbours that we can be sure of.
Here we try to condense millennia of history around the Bay of Bengal in Myanmar, India and Bangladesh into just over 5,000 words. There is always more to say! Follow the links for more information. And there is no better way to dive into the history than by visiting this region yourself. Our guests will be led by expert guides and receive specific reading lists in advance. This way we aim to help you look closer, while travelling further …
Burmese school children are taught that their country’s history begins in the town of Tagaung in the north of Myanmar on the banks of the Ayeyarwady. It was here, the royal chronicles purport, that the first ever Kingdom of Myanmar was founded by the Sakya prince Abhiraja, who arrived from India in the 9th century BC.
Colonial scholars and their successors take a sceptical stance on the story of Abhiraja, arguing that his prominence in the country’s official histories is an awkward attempt to route Myanmar within a firmly Buddhist origin story. Gautama Buddha lived 300 years after Abhiraja, but both came from the Sakya clan of northeast India.
In the 3rd century BC, when Rome, Persia, the Mauryans in India and the Han Empire in China reigned from the north of England to the Sea of Japan, the valleys around the Ayeyarwady Delta were one of the rare patches left in peace. Bronze was being smelted in the Shan Hills to the east, the people of the Ayeyarwady Delta were some of the first in the world to domesticate the chicken, and small city states were emerging.
One of the largest of these states was the Pyu city of Hanlin, the oldest known place of civilisation in Myanmar. The people of Hanlin later migrated south towards Sri Ksetra where much of the ancient city and stupas can be seen. The people of Sri Ksetra appeared to have existed largely untroubled until the 8th century AD when hordes of the war-loving Nanzhao from the limestone hills around Lake Dali in western China raged through the land.
With the city states of Myanmar in disarray, others from the north came where the Nanzhao had led. Amongst these were the ‘Strong Horseman’, or in their own language, the ‘Myanma’. The Burmese Chronicles claim that one of these Myanma, Pyusawthi, founded the city of Bagan.
Anawrahta (1014-1077), a descendant of Pyusawthi’s and Myanmar’s first ‘Great King’, seized the throne of Bagan when still a teenager after killing his cousin in single combat, “his mother’s milk still wet upon his lips.” The city of Bagan became the heart of a small empire, a centre of commerce, learning and spiritualism.
In 1273 King Narathihapate of Bagan made the crucial error of executing the envoys of Kublai Khan. The Mongols eventually saw to the fall of the great Bagan Empire in 1287. Narathihapate fled south to Pyay where he committed suicide.
During the 10th century AD, at the height of Bagan’s pomp, nomadic Muslim clans from Central Asia, using swift-horse cavalry, repeatedly overran South Asia’s north-western plains, leading eventually to the establishment of the Islamic Delhi Sultanate in 1206.
The Bengal Sultanate emerged as an independent Islamic state after breaking away from the Delhi Sultanate in 1352. Known for its prosperity and maritime trade, Bengal became a cultural and economic hub. The Bengal Sultanate had a circle of vassal states in the Indian subcontinent, including parts of Odisha in the southwest, and Tripura in the east and the Arakan in the southeast. The Kingdom of Arakan had in fits and starts, expressed its independence from the Bengal Sultanate, while attempting to keep links with the Bagan Empire to the east.
With the fall of the Bagan Empire, Arakan became a kingdom under siege, both from the reinvigorated Mon people of Lower Burma who conquered the south of the Arakan. Bamar (Myanma) forces conquered the north, leading to the King of Arakan, Min Saw Mun, fleeing to Bengal in 1406. Min Saw Mun returned to Arakan in 1428, regained the throne and shifted the capital to Mrauk-U.
Although often Buddhist, the kings of the Arakan received Islamic titles and fashioned themselves after Mughal rulers. They replicated the Sultan’s governing techniques, including adopting the title of Shah. A close cultural and commercial relationship developed across the Bay of Bengal. A hybrid Buddhist-Islamic court ruled over an eclectic population made up of Arakanese, Bengalis, Burmese, Afghans, Dutch, Portuguese and Japanese Christians from Nagasaki.
In the early 1500s, northern India fell to a new generation of Central Asian warriors. The resulting Mughal Empire did not stamp out the local societies it came to rule. Instead, it balanced and pacified them through new administrative practices and inclusive ruling elites. The relative peace maintained by the empire during much of the 1600s was a factor in India’s economic expansion, resulting in greater patronage of painting, literary forms, textiles and architecture.
Meanwhile, while the Mughals were taking hold of India, in Myanmar the country was united once more under the Toungoo Dynasty. This dynasty was dominated by King Bayinnaung, the second Great King of Myanmar who brought fire and sword to every renegade city, town and village, wielding the country together and reaching deep into Laos and the Kingdom of Siam. He created the largest empire in Southeast Asia of the time. One historian described Bayinnaung’s life as ‘the greatest explosion of human energy ever seen in Burma.’
Two centuries later, Bayinnaung’s dynasty fell and in its place rose a Bamar man called Aung Zeyya from modern day Shwebo. Attempting to vanquish the Mon people one and for all, in May 1755 Aung Zeyya took the fishing village of Dagon and renamed it ‘Rangoon’, meaning ‘end of strife.’ He is the founder of the last ever Burmese Kingdom, the Konbaung Dynasty, and the third Great King of Myanmar.
The Konboung Dynasty set its eyes on expansion. In 1784 they invaded and sacked the Kingdom of Mrauk U. Between 1817 and 1825 they made repeated incursions into the Kingdom of Manipur and the Ahom Kingdom of modern-day Assam. This, unexpectedly, brought them up against a new, little-known power. White foreigners, with modern weaponry. This was the British, in the guise of the East India Company.
“In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swathe of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semi-feudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.”
So writes Alex von Tunzelmann, in her book Indian Summer. In the 1600s, Bengal was the richest province under Mughal India. From 1704, Murshidabad was the capital of Bengal, ruled by the Mughal-appointed Nawabs. Here silk and muslin was spun and it became a prosperous trading hub. The French and Danish, with the permission of the Nawabs, set up trading outposts on the western bank of the Hooghly River. Later, fatefully, arrived the British, in the form of the East India Company (EIC).
In March 1690, the Company received permission from the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in Delhi to establish a factory in Bengal, and on 24 August 1690, the EIC officer Job Charnock set up headquarters in a village he named Calcutta.
The construction of a Fort William in Calcutta, was seen as unnecessarily provocative military act. In June 1757, the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah, attacked the fort and defeated the British. Survivors were thrown into the “Black Hole of Calcutta”. The EIC responded with force. “Clive of India” defeated Siraj-ud-Daulah at the Battle of Plassey in 1757.
Over the course of the next century, the East India Company took over much of India, gradually but definitively emasculating the Mughal Emperors in Delhi, who remained in place until 1858.
Bahadur Shah Zafar II was the last Mughal Emperor. He did not have in him the warrior blood of his ancestors. A keen calligrapher and lover of poetry, while the British progressively took more of his power, his court busied itself attempting to form the perfect Urdu couplet.
By the mid-1800s, the early British in India – known as the “White Mughals” for their enthusiastic adoption of local customs – had been replaced by a more brutish and puritanical contingent who believed there was nothing to be learnt from the backward Orientals.
The growing rift between British and Indians culminated in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Led by Hindu soldiers employed by the EIC, the mutineers flocked to Delhi on the morning of 11 May 1857, joined hand with the resident Muslims, and raised the reluctant Mughal Zafar as the leader of the rebellion.
By lunchtime, virtually all of the British inhabitants of Delhi, including women and children, had been massacred. The British response was brutal. While the blood of almost all the men and boys of Delhi still soaked the streets, Shah Zafar was charged with attempting to instigate a Muslim jihad; a misleading narrative which nonetheless appealed to the jingoistic. Historian William Dalrymple describes Shah Zafar as:
“… an attractive symbol of Islamic civilisation at its most tolerant and pluralistic … a striking liberal and likeable figure when compared to the Victorian Evangelicals whose insensitivity, arrogance and blindness did much to bring about the Mutiny [and] the engulfing all of northern India in a religious war of terrible violence.”
Shah Zafar was exiled to Rangoon in a bullock cart.
Thirty years later, in a striking piece of historical symmetry, the last king of Burma would be taken from Mandalay Palace, also in a bullock cart, and exiled to India.
The EIC had for a long time not taken interest in Burma. However Burmese incursions into the territories bordering EIC territory, such as the Ahom Kingdom and the Kingdom of Manipur, came to be the catalyst of war.
In January 1824, the British governor-general told the EIC Board of Directors that war was inevitable so ‘to humble the overweening pride and arrogance of the Burmese monarch.’ The First Anglo-Burmese War took place from 1824-26. Despite the tenacity of the Burmese soldiers, they were utterly outclassed by British weaponry. At the Treaty of Yandabo, Burma ceded the Arakan coastal strip from Chittagong to Cape Negrais. The Second Anglo-Burmese War in 1852 resulted in the British taking Rangoon and the port towns in the south of the country.
Kingdom Min ruled Upper Burma from Mandalay. When he died suddenly in 1878, quick manoeuvring by one of his wives led to the young and nondescript Prince Thibaw taking the throne.
The subsequent massacre of 79 of Thibaw’s kinsmen seen to be potential rivals, including women and children, was reported in aghast editorials of European newspapers. Both Thibaw’s mother-in-law and wife were strong-minded, ambitious and paranoid, and between them drove the young king into an emasculated, gin-soaked state of depression – or at least, so it was reported in London editorials.
Tensions began to rise between the British and the Burmese, as the former harboured suspicions that King Thibaw was cosying up to the French. This, coupled with rash diplomacy on the part of the young Burmese king, incited the Third Anglo-Burmese War in 1885. The war lasted just two weeks; the elephants of Mandalay were no match for the world’s first ever machine guns.
The last king of Burma and his court were swiftly exiled to India. Following the fall of Mandalay the British annexed the entirety of the country. Thibaw died at age 57 on 15 December 1916 and was buried in a small walled plot adjacent to a Christian cemetery.
Shah Zafar had died on 7 November 1862. The well-oiled machinery of the British Empire quickly swung into action to ensure that the passing of the Last Mughal was as uneventful as possible. As the British Commissioner in Burma wrote to London at the time:
“A bamboo fence surrounds the grave for some considerable distance, and by the time the fence is worn out, the grass will again have properly covered the spot, and no vestige will remain to distinguish where the last of the Great Moghuls rests.”
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 led to the Government of India Act which saw the transfer of governance of India from the East India Company to the British Crown, marking the start of the British Raj. In place of the Company Governor, there was now to be a Viceroy, appointed by London, ruling India from the capital Calcutta.
Under the British Raj, Bengal sustained itself as the political and cultural heart of India, and through this emerged the Bengal Renaissance. The Bengal Renaissance, was a social and artistic movement that took place in Bengal from the late 1700s to the early 1900s. The movement questioned the existing customs and rituals in Indian society such as the caste system, and the practice of sati. In turn, the Bengal Renaissance advocated for societal reform – the kind that adhered to secularist, humanist and modernist ideals. The leaders of the Bengali Renaissance were often also the leaders of the Indian independence movement.
The Indian independence movement emerged in the late 1800s, rooted in the Indian National Congress political party. Key figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru championed nonviolent resistance, while leaders like Subhas Chandra Bose advocated militant methods. All the independence leaders spent sporadic times in jail. Due to multiple stints in Mandalay Prison for many Indian politicians, Gandhi once joked, “The road to freedom passes through Mandalay”.
In spite of the seriousness of the independence cause and the punitive measures of the British, there was an odd congeniality between these independence leaders and the British. In his detective novel Smoke & Ashes, Abir Mukherjee’s protagonist colonial officer Sam Wyndham muses:
“I always found it difficult to know how to deal with these Gandhi-inspired independence wallahs. They’d stand onstage and claim the British were little better than vampires, sucking the life blood of India, and we would respond with mass incarcerations and the cracking of a skull now and then. But away from the glare of the world, they were often the most pleasant of chaps, inviting you in for tea before you arrested them …”
The situation in Burma was messier, and more bloody. Under colonial rule British Burma saw a huge amount of immigration, principally from Bengal. Indians were given jobs in the civil service; and ethnic groups such as the Karen and Kachin were regarded as more “martial” and recruited into the armed forces. Meanwhile Chettiar moneylenders from South India sucked dry Burmese farmers.
The first major uprising in Burma was in the 1930s, led by a farmer called Saya San. It received widespread support but ultimately was brutally suppressed. Saya San and over a hundred others were hanged.
Following Saya San, most organised dissent was instigated by students, often taken their lead from the independence movement in India. These students referred to each other as thakin – a term for ‘master’ usually reserved for the British. One of the most prominent of these student leaders was Aung San. At 26 years old he left with 29 others to Japan, there to seek support for the struggle against colonial rule and to receive military training.
The outbreak of WWII in 1939, and the subsequent entry of Japan in 1941, was a watershed moment in the independence movements of both India and Burma. Both Gandhi and Nehru opposed the entry of British India into the war without consultation with the country’s Indian lawmakers. Others, such as Subhas Chandra Bose, like Aung San of Burma, directly joined forces with the Japanese. Bose founded the Indian National Army (INA) to fight alongside the Japanese and kick the British out of Asia.
At the end of 1941, the “Thirty Comrades” of Aung San returned to Burma with the Japanese. These 30 were now the first troops of the Burmese Independence Army (BIA). The INA was to arrive in Rangoon shortly afterwards.
By May 1942 the Japanese had taken control of Burma. Rather than handing over governance of the country directly to the Burmese, Aung San was told that a period of Japanese rule was necessary. It soon became clear to Aung San that the new occupying force was no better than the British. In fact, he later said that though under the British the Burmese had been handled like oxen, under the Japanese they were treated as dogs. He quietly made plans to turn on the Japanese.
Over the border in India, General Slim of the British India Army reformed and galvanised the Allied Forces. Bose had encouraged the Japanese to attack the British in India, promising them a warm welcome from anti-British Bengalis when they arrived in Calcutta. However, the tide of war changed at the battles of Imphal and Kohima in 1944, when the attempted Japanese invasion of India was repelled. In 1945, with the assistance of Aung San’s BIA, the Allies pushed the Japanese back and retook Rangoon.
With the close of WWII and the change of government in London, Britain’s exit from both India and Burma was inevitable and when it came, came very fast. Lord Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy, was placed in charge of getting the British out of India as quick as possible. Nehru emphasized secularism and national unity, while Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, advocated for the creation of a new country, Pakistan, leading to the simultaneous independence and partition of British India on 15 August 1947.
While this was going on, wearing a coat leant to him by Nehru so to keep warm in the London frost, in January 1947, Aung San visited British PM Clement Atlee in London and negotiated terms for Burma to gain independence within the year.
On the 19th of July 1947, an armed group of paramilitaries of Aung San’s political rival U Saw broke into a meeting at the Rangoon Secretariat and assassinated Aung San and six of his cabinet ministers. Aung San died at the age of 32, just a few months before the Union Jack was lowered for the last time in Burma, and the country achieved independence on 4 January 1948.
In 1962, the commander of the Burmese Army, General Ne Win, one of Aung San’s Thirty Comrades, seized control of the country from Prime Minister U Nu. Ne Win inaugurated ‘the Burmese Way to Socialism’ by nationalizing the economy, banning independent newspapers and all other political parties save for the Socialist Programme Party. Around 15,000 private companies were nationalized and foreign agencies including the World Bank were expelled. By 1967, Myanmar, a country that had been the largest exporter of rice in the world leading up to the Second World War, was unable to feed itself.
Meanwhile trouble was brewing over the border in East Pakistan. Partition had slashed in two, along religious lines, both the Punjab and Bengal, two of the largest provinces of undivided India. Pakistan therefore comprised two geographically and culturally distinct regions: West Pakistan and East Pakistan (East Bengal).
Over the years, the Bengali population of East Pakistan felt increasingly that they were economically exploited by West Pakistan. The final straw was when Sheikh Mujib of the East Pakistani Awami League political party, was denied the chance to form a government despite decisively winning the election of 1970
On 7 March 1971, in front of a sea of people at the racecourse in Dhaka, Sheikh Mujib declared in a blazing voice: “The struggle this time is the struggle for our emancipation; the struggle this time is the struggle for independence”
On the night of 25 March, the West Pakistani military launched Operation Searchlight: a brutal crackdown incorporating widespread atrocities that targeted civilians, including the slaughter of students and razing of Hindu sections of Old Dhaka. Sheikh Mujib and other senior members of the Awami League were arrested and taken to West Pakistan.
This was the beginning of the Bangladesh Liberation War, a widespread and ugly conflict that led to a humanitarian crisis with millions of refugees fleeing to India. PM of India, Indira Gandhi (daughter of Nehru), unsuccessfully attempted to drum-up international support for Bangladesh and opposition to Pakistan. The war escalated in December when Pakistan launched pre-emptive air strikes on Indian airbases, leading to full-scale war between India and Pakistan. The Indian military swiftly advanced into East Pakistan. Within a few weeks, Pakistani forces were overwhelmed, and on 16 December 1971, Pakistan signed the Instrument of Surrender.
It was a resounding success for Mrs Gandhi in India. To an eruption of cheers, she announced the victory in Parliament, with the ringing words: “Dacca is now the free capital of a free country.”
In the aftermath, Mrs Gandhi’s personal popularity across India reached cult levels. In parliament she was praised as a new Durga, the Hindu warrior goddess, and likened to Shakti, the manifestation of female energy and power.
In her own country, emboldened by her popularity (one political commentator had described her as the only man in her cabinet), Mrs Gandhi moved with ruthlessness in annexing the Buddhist Kingdom of Sikkim in 1974. In the 60s, Mrs Gandhi had already bombed the Mizoram insurgency into submission and under her supervision, the Indian Army had acted with brutal impunity in battling the independence movements of Nagaland and Manipur.
Years later, in 1982 a large number of Sikhs fortified the Golden Temple complex at Amritsar as part of the Sikh separatist movement. In June 1984 Mrs Gandhi ordered Operation Blue Star in which the Indian army ousted the separatists from the complex. Sikhs estimated that thousands were killed. Five months later Gandhi was assassinated in her garden in New Delhi by two of her own Sikh bodyguards.
Across the border in stagnated Burma, Ne Win was still in in power. In 1987 the UN downgraded Burma to “Least Developed Country” status provoking violent rural protests. In March 1988, students gathered to demonstrate and the authorities responded by beating over 100 of them to death. Eyewitnesses claim that female students were taken away and gang raped.
On the auspicious date of 8th of August 1988, at 8 minutes past 8 in the morning, dockworkers along the Rangoon River went on strike. Soon thousands of people were making their way to Mahabandoola Park in the town centre. At nightfall, army vans pulled up and opened fire on the crowd. Over 3,000 protestors were killed. Instead of quelling the revolt, the military’s use of violence inflamed the situation.
Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of General Aung San, was in Burma at the time, having married and had two sons with British academic Michael Aris. In 1988 she was back in her homeland to tend to her ailing mother. However, as she saw bloodied protesters admitted into the hospital where her mother was being treated, she rapidly became embroiled with the pro-democracy movement.
Her re-introduction to the people of Burma took the form of a speech in front of a crowd of thousands outside Shwedagon Pagoda, proclaiming the current protests as “a second struggle for national independence.” This was essentially a declaration of war against the junta.
On the 18 September the army responded. Over two days of bloody suppression the revolutionary atmosphere was seemingly put to rest. The State Law and Order Restoration Council (Slorc) was formed, declaring martial law and arresting advocates of democracy and human rights.
In 1989 Slorc re-christened the country ‘Myanmar’. Aung San Suu Kyi, who had been named leader of the newly-formed National League for Democracy, was swiftly put under house arrest while many of her colleagues were incarcerated.
In the 1990s, Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest but barred from leaving Yangon. When her husband was diagnosed with cancer in 1999 she was told she was free to leave the country but Aris himself was denied a visa to come to Myanmar. Fearful of never being able to return to her country if she left, Aung San Suu Kyi stayed put. Despite pleas for mercy from the international community, Slorc held firm. Aris died later that year and at the turn of the millennium Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest again.
After Bangladesh won its liberation from Pakistan in 1971, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman became Prime Minister. A secular, multiparty parliamentary democracy was established. In January 1975, Mujib introduced one-party socialist rule. He banned all private newspapers and amended the constitution to increase his power. He was assassinated in 1975, along with most of his family, including his 10-year-old son, Sheikh Russel.
In 1991 Begum Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh National Party became the country’s first female PM and parliamentary republic was restored. The Awami League returned to power in June 1996, under the helm of Sheikh Hasina, eldest daughter of Sheikh Mujib, one-time ally and now arched rival of Begum Khaleda Zia.
When Sheikh Hasina came to power, she cast Khaleda Zia and the BNP as religious fundamentalists, in-bed with Pakistan and enemies of Bangladesh. After the horror of the Islamic terror attacks in Dhaka in 2016, she was credited with stamping out the threat of Islamic terror.
Dubbed “Asia’s Iron Lady”, Sheikh Hasina fostered a strong relationship with India. The economy boomed. Labelled by Kissinger at its birth as a “bottomless basket” seeking international aid, in 2021 Bangladesh surpassed both India and Pakistan in per capita income.
However, Sheikh Hasina became increasingly authoritarian. Under her premiership, Khaleda Zia was under house arrest, her party’s activists hounded, the media cowed, and the courts suborned. Student protests against Hasina in August 2024 forced her to flee Dhaka by helicopter to Delhi.
Meanwhile in Myanmar, at the turn of the millennium, General Than Shwe was ruling the country. Aung San Suu Kyi was in and out of house arrest, and discontent brewed under the surface. In 2007, a rise in fuel prices sparked public unrest. Buddhist monks held a series of anti-government protests which came to be known around the world as the ‘Saffron Revolution.’ There were reports that soldiers had beaten one monk to death. In response, the All Burma Monks Alliance (ABMA) was founded, denouncing the government as ‘an evil military dictatorship’, and refusing to accept alms from military officials. On 24th September, somewhere around 100,000 protesters marched through the streets of Yangon.
In 2008, against all expectations, the military government proposed new legislation to open up parliament to other political parties, while reserving 25 per cent of the seats to military appointees. In 2010 Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest. A sham election saw victory for the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). In March the following year, U Thein Sein was sworn in as president of a new, nominally civilian government.
At at the end of 2011 Aung San Suu Kyi announced that she and other NLD candidates would stand for election to parliament. That same year the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Myanmar and held talks with both Aung San Suu Kyi and President Thein Sein. Clinton said that Suu Kyi will no longer merely personify the Burmese people’s dreams of peace, happiness and prosperity but will begin to be responsible for making them come true. “I know that route”, Clinton said, adding that she also knew “how hard it is to balance one’s ideals and aspirations” with the demands of practical politics.
In April the following year the NLD candidates swept the board in parliamentary by-elections and Aung San Suu Kyi was elected as a member of the national parliament and the de facto leader of the opposition.
In June 2015 the Myanmar parliament voted to keep the army’s veto over constitutional change, suffering a blow to those who hoped for a speedy transition to democracy. However, the general election in November that year was held smoothly and regarded as free and fair by international monitors. The NLD won a landslide victory and took their seats in the much-transformed parliament in February 2016.
Tensions between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State erupted in 2017. In August that year, attacks coordinated by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army on police outposts and an army camp, incited a fierce retaliation by the Burmese military. This clearance operation led almost 700,000 Muslims to flee across the Bangladesh border to an area south of Cox’s Bazar, and provoked Ms Yanghee Lee, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, to report that it had “the hallmarks of genocide”.
Under Suu Kyi’s administration, a large amount of political prisoners remained incarcerated and the NLD government came under widespread international condemnation for the degeneration of press freedom.
Despite all of this, Aung San Suu Kyi remained wildly popular and in 2020 secured a consecutive landslide victory. This election was accepted as free and fair by international electoral monitors. However, the result was not accepted by the Myanmar military. On 1 February 2021, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing announced a State of Emergency, arresting the top hierarchy of the NLD and assuming control of the country.
The recent histories of this region echo and refract from country to country. Nehru, Aung San and Sheikh Mujib all led their countries to independence from Britain. Two of them were assassinated by political rivals. All three had strong and capable daughters who took over the reins of power. Commencing with commendably ideals and impressive determination, both Mrs Gandhi and Sheikh Hasina became more authoritarian the longer they remained in power. One was gunned down, the other hounded from the country by a baying mob.
One may recall the words Aung San Suu Kyi wrote in Letters from Burma:
“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”
As for herself, a sympathetic observer would argue that Aung San Suu Kyi was not in power long enough to show in what direction she could take her country. As for now, she remains under arrest, once again.
Sampan remained in Myanmar throughout the political turbulence since 2021. Here is one of our letters from Yangon as demonstrators took to the streets and the police responded in force. For updates on what is happening in Myanmar, we recommend Frontier.
We love and are fascinated by this part of the world. We find it beautiful and captivating, in spite of all its troubles and complexities. By travelling in this region – by diving into the history and listening to people’s stories – we hope to help our guests, if not find answers, at least be able to ask more informed questions.
There are likely to be further twists and turns. Whatever the next chapter brings, Sampan will be here to witness it.
An icon for non-violent resistance, from arrest to parliament to arrest once more.
Once ruled by a hybrid Buddhist-Islamic court, now both history and territory is disputed.
The Cold War, a fight for freedom and the birth of Bangladesh.
Five Britons who lived in Burma, with stories more interesting than that of Rudyard Kipling.
Rob Lyman explores the events and ramifications of WW2 in Kolkata, Kohima and the Naga Hills.
Alex Bescoby speaks to us about exploring the forgotten history of Myanmar.
