Customer Reviews

The Trouser People: A Story of Burma in the Shadow of the Empire

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THE TROUSER PEOPLE by Andrew Marshall is simply riveting! Wittily written and packed with historical facts, Marshall retraces the experiences and observations of Sir James George Scott ("Shway Yoe"), that irrepressibly insightful Briton who served his "Great Queen" (Victoria) in Burma in the 19th century, having first gone there as a school teacher and journalist. Posing as a tourist, Marshall, a journalist, made several forays into forbidden Burma to gather material for this tale. Ever under the scrutiny, and never escaping the suspicion of the military junta for being anything but a tourist, he fooled them all. The result is this tragic commentary of Burma which has been under the military boot since 1962.

Marshall's trek from China's Yunnan province to find the legendary Nawng Hkeo lake in the War hills was indeed a hair-raising experience. The Wa tribe, whose domain straddle the Burma-China border, were, until 1970s, ferocious head hunters. Legend has it that they descended from a tadpole who resided in Lake Nawng Hkeo, which stands hidden in the mist on a ridge 7,300 feet high. The Wa have now substituted head hunting with growing opium and manufacturing methamphetamines.

The traditionally longyi (sarong)-wearing Burmese derisively called their colonial oppressors "the trouser people." It seems that nothing has changed in the hundred years since the Brits first set foot on Burmese soil over a century ago. They are now oppressed by rulers of their own kind, the generals, who also wear trousers, but who are also beneficiaries of epithets far more colorful.

Marshall perceptively concludes that the British raj and the present day Burmese generals both share the conviction that they alone know what is best for the country.

U Kyaw Win
Boulder, Colorado

This is not an even-handed scholarly study of Burma -- thank goodness. It moves along just like a journey, in fits and starts, pausing here, rushing there.

Focusing on Sir George Scott, British Empire-builder of a hundred years ago, Marshall paints a vivid picture of Burma today. His writing is extraordinarily full of life, leading the reader from sympathy to outrage, from suspense to laughter. This is not a book you want to give to someone recuperating from surgery: Marshall is one of the funniest writers I have ever read, and would play havoc on surgical stitches.

One point I would like to debate: his discussion of the Kayan/Padaung families working for the Hupin Hotel in Yawnghwe/Nyaungshwe. I know the family that runs the Hupin personally -- several branches of the clan, actually, and count several of the staff among my friends. Yes, they are not running the hotel for their health, and yes, they are making a profit, but in all sincerity, I do not think their dealings with the Kayan are as heartless as Marshall depicts.

There are two families of Kayan by Inle Lake. Marshall met the ones hired by the Hupin, not those moved in by the government. The Hupin went into the mountains and made a deal with the family: they would build a house for them, give the men jobs in factories around Yawnghwe, the women would work for the hotel, and the kids would go to school at Hupin's expense. They are paid monthly salaries and medical expenses, and any weddings and what-not are paid for by the Hupin. Some of the children have reached high school, and are still going strong. Few children in the countryside get so much schooling. One little girl envied all the attention her big sister got from tourists because of the rings on her neck. The little girl raised such a fuss that her parents agreed to let her have rings on her neck, even though she had not reached the traditional age for that. BTW: she refuses to go to school.

The price for a photo with the Padaung is US$3: this is split 3 ways, between the guide, the hotel, and the Padaung (US$1 is a good day's wage for someone working in Yangon, a week's salary for the countryside.) The Padaung are free to go back to Kayah state. When they go, they bring handicrafts back to the hotel, which they sell to tourists; this money goes into their own pockets. My friends from the Hupin asked the Kayan to lower the price of the bracelets I was buying, and let me tell you, it was a struggle! These are not listless zombies meekly obeying a master's wishes.

Marshall describes a concrete compound. I am not sure what he is talking about, unless it is the area outside their compound, beyond the bamboo bridge. Their wooden house was built Kayan style, in accordance with their specific wishes. They are an extremely conservative tribe. Marshall makes much of the women not leaving their compound. The Padaung are shy people, and the women do not speak Burmese, so they are not willing to range far. Also, I have heard from separate, unrelated sources that there is a danger for Padaung women to roam, because there have been cases of their being -- not exactly kidnapped, but taken off for show in Europe.

Marshall says "the hotel staff member broke into a practiced spiel." We may not be talking about the same man, I did not speak English with the Padaung man I went with, but I suspect the "practiced spiel" may be memorized word for word by someone who speaks minimal English, and may not have confidence in leaving the beaten path.

I deeply feel that the Hupin is more than fair in its dealings with its staff, whether they be Burman, Shan, Chinese, Kayan, or others. When I told the Hupin family what Marshall had written about them, they were quite hurt. Frankly, they are making enough money from tourists, they do not feel the need to exploit the workers. Marshall went to Burma expecting to see the disadvantaged being exploited, so when he saw the disadvantaged, he assumed they must be getting exploited. In the case of the Hupin, I can vouch that he was wrong.

All in all, though, this is an excellent picture of Burma, including parts most of us will never see. I hope Marshall is hard at work on his next book. This is an author to keep an eye on.

Let's get one thing clear from the begining, if you're looking for a comprehensive history of Burma/Myanmar with analysis on how it has become one of the most repressive nations in the world, this is not your book. Rather, Marshall's book is a sometimes witty, sometimes heartbreaking "in the footsteps of" style travelogue, in which he manages to travel around modern Burma/Myanmar, following the path of an obscure Victorian adventurer/explorer (and fellow Scotsman) who laid the groundwork for British colonial rule. The core theme is that in Scott's day, Burma was a little known area unpenetrated by the West and populated by a diverse assortment of tribes with varrying degrees of hostility-and some 125 years later Burma/Myanmar remains that way in many ways.

Marshall scoured Scott's unpublished diaries and other sources (all thankfully listed in a comprehensive bibliography) before embarking on four sparate trips. The most straightforward of these was a journey from Rangoon upriver to the old imperial capital of Mandalay and then into the some of the hinterlands. Another trip involved travlling through northern Thailand to the border, where ethnic Shan rebels are attempting to resist Burmese army genocide. A third trip took him from northern Thailand across the border and into the hills near the Laotian and Chinese border. And the most harrowing trip involved slipping across the Chinese border and into ethnic Wa territory where he searches for a legendary lake from which the Wa say they evolved from tadpoles. These trips are crisply related, intertwined with accounts of Scott's travels and life, and background history.

While Marshall certainly doesn't defend British colonialism, he does credit it for introducing modernity to the region and for creating a nation-allbeit juryrigged -from disparate tribes. Marshall lays Burma/Myanmar's current status as human rights disaster area and its herion-exporting based economy firmly at the feet of a military junta that seized power in 1962 and has held an iron grip on the country ever since. An iron grip that is assisted by ethnic Wa drug lords, whose operations rival that of their more famous Colombian counterparts. Burma/Myanmar's economy is wholy dependent on the exporting of illegal drugs by Wa drug lords in collusion with the military. Historically this has been heroin, but in recent years, mehtamphedamine and ecstacy production is said to rival the most sophisticated European operations, and the drug lords have branched out into music and software piracy. With the country's money and guns all linked together in such tidy self-perpetuating interests, it's difficult to see how the stanglehold will ever be broken short of outside intervention.

A great book about tragic events in a beautiful country. The author shadows the travels and travails of Victorian adventurer/administrator, George Scott. The result is a narrative that is readable and engrossing. Marshall presents a wealth of historical material in a relatively short volume (quite unlike the typical contemporary non-fiction book). He is at his weakest when he romanticizes Scott's relationship with the locals in Burma and skirts the excesses of colonial rule. He also neglects Scott's more patronizing and condescending writings about the people of Burma. On the other hand, Marshall presents a very readable account of comtemporary history in the country and a credible portarait of the current regime.

I have visited Burma in the past few years and Marshall's descriptions of people and places were quite evocative of what I saw. Hopefully, the same will be true for other readers, regardless of whether they have traveled there or not.

This is really very good indeed. I read a lot of travelogue-meets-history and generally come away pretty dissatisfied. It's not easy for a journalistic writer to merge an account of personal adventuring with controversial historical analysis and not end up annoying the reader. But there's never any doubt that Marshall succeeds - the intrepid stuff is as lightly done as the scholarship and he - as any expedition leader must - wins the reader's trust at the first hazard (in this case the smuggling of himself over the Thai border to a rebel camp in the damp and dangerous Karen highlands).

It's quite a feat. The difficulties of the territory are not just geographic; Marshall takes on the evils of modern Burma under the Generals and the peculiar pleasures of British late-period colonialism and dares to draw the links - hardly uncontentious. But he convinces, and provides a lot of entertainment, too.

He has some great characters. George Scott, the Victorian conqueror of Upper Burma (sometimes by football), is a treasure of eccentric fun from an age that usually churned out bullies and bores to run the British colonies. The modern Burmese Marshall meets and travels with are vivid people whose endless sad story is at the centre of the book - when so often the Natives in this sort of writing end up being merely the author's supporting cast. And Marshall, as character in his own book, wandering with cheeky inquisitiveness through the Burmese generals' land of horrors, is witty, self-deprecating and never boasts about being brave at all.

Best of its kind since Redmond O'Hanlon.

This book is a travelogue of journeys the author took into Burma to retrace George Scott's adventures of the 1880s. The author, Andrew Marshall, seems to be a journalist based in Thailand, from where he has been able to travel to Burma relatively easily. While in Burma, he tries hard to make contact with tribal people, especially the Shans, who Scott spent so much time with 100 years before. The narrative is split between Scott's travels in the nineteenth century, and Marshall's present day experiences.

Occasionally, Marshall's informal style of writing, with his use of British slang, gets a bit thick for me. Nevertheless, the case that he makes against the Burmese military is quite compelling. I've heard friends and acquaintances argue on both sides of the question of whether traveling to or working in modern day Burma provides support for the brutal government there. After reading this book, however, I don't see myself going anywhere near the country until there is a regime change.

The short of my opinion on this book is that if you are curious about Burma,(or think you could be curious) then buy this book. The writing is superb, the author has an exceptional capacity for observation and an endearing personality, the book is very dense(yet fun) on the score of interesting facts, and the basic conception is very imaginative. I admit that I've not read any other books on Burma, and only a few other travelogues, but regardless, - and I mean this in the most objective sense possible - this book is d*mnd good!

Some of this has undoubtedly been included in other reviews, but... The whole structure of the book is woven around the travels through Burma of two people, the author and a 19-th century Victorian goomba, George Scott. Having two parallel story threads roughly a century apart, I felt, did a lot to put things in persective, and at times really set my imagination on fire. Reading one page, I'm(armchair-wise) traveling with the author to a distant, intriguing village high up in some beautifully forested and rice-terraced hills; on another page I get to read about some Shan chief who, killed by the British, was boiled into some kind of goo by Shan rivals and decanted into vials which were sold as potions for bravery; on another I'm wondering if the author is going to be beaten by soldiers and dumped in the fog-ensnared mud while undertaking some foolhardy quest in a northern Wa drug state, trying to find a mythical lake; and on another I get to witness George Scott defuse the mistrust of a xenophobic Wa village, armed with nothing but a sense of humor that apparently transcended culture.

And interwoven with all these wonderful, exotic stories, are many facts, historical and contemporary, on various customs, superstitions, political circumstances, human rights violations, and on every other matter of conceivable relevance. Such as the efflorescence of soccer in Burma in the 19-th century, for example.

In summation, the author has a sharp eye for detail, the ability to make very intelligent writing, a sense of adventure and an abundance of curiosity, and the wit and passion to put it all together into a very satisfying read, and this he has done.

This book held my attention all the way through.Historical facts were mixed with exciting adventures and humour. The sheer bravery of the author was, at times, totally amazing.As this is also an expose of Burma's modern tragedy,just writing this story was a brave thing to do.He has an extraordinary ability to take the reader with him as he goes through various trials and tribulations and to make history come alive again. An excellent book from this Scottish writer.

Not too much adjusting required but the author should have toned down the purple prose a bit and he could have been a little more organized with his story. Andrew Marshall is an intrepid journalist and he gives us views of a Burma that not many westerners have had access to since a repressive military regime took over in 1962 and renamed the country Myanmar. Marshall juxtaposes his present day adventures against the story of George Scott a Scotsman and "a natural imperialist who was instrumental in imposing British colonial rule in Upper Burma." Scott was a tiny man with a large waxed mustache who had a fondness for oversized pith helmets. He came to Burma in 1875 and worked first as a teacher in Rangoon and eventually became a skilled photographer and keen observer of local cultures and customs. He wrote a well respected anthropological book about the hill tribes of upper Burma - the Shan, Kayan and the Padaung and their "giraffe" women with necks elongated by the wearing of multiple copper necklaces. Scott was also responsible for introducing soccer to the Burmese and in contrast to the locals who hitched their sarongs up around their thighs "like a large decorative nappy" the British played as they came and remained THE TROUSER PEOPLE.

It's odd that it's in discussing soccer that we get the notion of how the British became the trouser people because soccer is only lightly touched upon in this book. Marshall attends soccer matches and uses it to illustrate some points about Burmese culture and says that part of their love for the game is because it "is so much like fighting." But other than the connection with Scott soccer just doesn't fit in and is one of the reasons why the story sometimes feels disjointed.

When the book is good and where Marshall shines is when he discusses the modern day trouser people - the ruling army junta - and present-day Burma. He says the commanding General is "Burma's Poo Bah, big Brother and (it was rumoured) most prominent closet homosexual." Conditions in Burma today are grim. Long gone is the imperial glory that was Mandalay. Instead upper Burma is home to the formerly head-hunting but now mostly heroin-dealing Wa tribe. Marshall's close call with the UWSA (United Wa State Army) is reminiscent of his hero's encounter with the Wa 100 years previously when Scott got a group of headhunters to laugh so long that they forgot what they had come for.

Marshall had a lot of material to work with here: fascinating tribal cultures; a cruel Burmese government that oppresses ethnic minorities and democratic opponents such as Aung San Suu Kyi; Scott and his history and legacy; and the modern day drug lords and their mini-kingdom of Mongla. Marshall's device of using his and Scott's travels to explore Burma and its culture works up to a point. As a travelogue the book is fine but there are too few real insights or explanations and Marshall can't seem to bring it all together. Adventures, close-calls, and stories about soccer and trouser people are fun but we are left wondering about larger issues such as: How did Burma get to this point of being a failed state? To the extent that Marshall's sampling of history and jumbled story doesn't answer the question you may come away a little bit dissatisfied.

This is really very good indeed. I read a lot of travelogue-meets-history and generally come away pretty dissatisfied. It's not easy for a journalistic writer to merge an account of personal adventuring with controversial historical analysis and not end up annoying the reader. But there's never any doubt that Marshall succeeds - the intrepid stuff is as lightly done as the scholarship and he - as any expedition leader must - wins the reader's trust at the first hazard (in this case the smuggling of himself over the Thai border to a rebel camp in the damp and dangerous Karen highlands).

It's quite a feat. The difficulties of the territory are not just geographic; Marshall takes on the evils of modern Burma under the Generals and the peculiar pleasures of British late-period colonialism and dares to draw the links - hardly uncontentious. But he convinces, and provides a lot of entertainment, too.

He has some great characters. George Scott, the Victorian conqueror of Upper Burma (sometimes by football), is a treasure of eccentric fun from an age that usually churned out bullies and bores to run the British colonies. The modern Burmese Marshall meets and travels with are vivid people whose endless sad story is at the centre of the book - when so often the Natives in this sort of writing end up being merely the author's supporting cast. And Marshall, as character in his own book, wandering with cheeky inquisitiveness through the Burmese generals' land of horrors, is witty, self-deprecating and never boasts about being brave at all.

Best of its kind since Redmond O'Hanlon.