From the Land of Green Ghosts [antikvár]

Foreworc by John Casey Early in 1988 I was on my way to Japan to spend six months teaching at a university in Kyoto. I decided to visit Burma en route. It was a place I had long wanted to see, my interest being compounded out of the Kipling associations attaching to the name 'Mandalay' and from Burma's having been closed to the outside world since General Ne Win seized power in 1962. It was only very recently that restrictions on tourists had been a little eased. A friend of mine at Caius College, Cambridge, had taught a Burmese student. This man was now a minister in the Ne Win government, and my friend sent him a telegram to introduce me. The result was that an astonishing tour, in which I was escorted by up to a dozen officials, was arranged for me in Upper Burma, concentrating on the historic sites around Mandalay. Finally, on a Sunday morning, I was taken to Maymyo, accompanied by a convoy of Land Rovers and (as I realised later) several agents of the military intelligence. There I found, to my intense embarrassment, that the entire staff of the Maymyo bank (which was, of course, closed) had been assembled in their best shirts and longyis to entertain me to lunch and escort me around the town. The wishes of the masters in Rangoon had to be obeyed. The bank employees obviously had not the faintest idea why this inconvenience was being forced upon them, but they treated their unknown guest with exquisite courtesy, and even with humour. Still, I felt as though I was taking part in a Marx Brothers hoax. At the end of the day in Maymyo my hosts urged that I have dinner with them. Luckily I had the sense to realise that it was time they got back to their families. Besides, there was something I recollected. The xiii