Golden Earth (25 page)

As things were, Chinese economy remained unshaken. Some sort of a jade-rush took place. Laden caravans set out for China, and were regularly ambushed and looted by jade-thirsty freebooters, although the majority got through safely, to swell what was believed to be the wealth of the nation. Remembering that in their war with Burma, the Chinese forces made a beeline for Mogaung, which they occupied, it may be surmised that the ends in view by those who provoked the conflict were less pure than those of justice.

Prices were kept inflated and production restricted by the fact that all the jade mines were located in the Kachin tribal area. The Kachins insisted on working the mines in their own way, steadfastly declining all offers involving leases or contracts. In their search for the stone, the Kachins relied upon divination. Quarries were opened with elaborate sacrifices and feasting, and then only after the omens had been consulted to decide whether or not the stone was to be allowed to ‘mature’, it being a Kachin opinion that the colour improved with keeping. Even so the workings might be held up over some dispute about the sharing of the proceeds, a punctilious matter in which every member of the clan, whether present or absent, was taken into consideration. Work was carried on only in March and April. After that the mines became flooded by the rains, and took the rest of the year to dry out. Meanwhile the Chinese buyers sat by, twiddling their thumbs in impotent exasperation, unconscious of the fact that by great good fortune the incompetence of the Kachins worked in their favour and cancelled out the disadvantage that Burma was nearer the cities of China than were the mines of
South-East
Turkestan. In the last century prices were much enhanced when King Mindon, an enthusiastic monopolist, tried to set himself up as middleman of the industry, and the Kachins retorted by discovering only inferior jade.

The Chinese have never been able to consider jade as mere ‘dead’ substance; they have always had a rather modern view of the nature of
matter. From the earliest times, it was associated with the five cardinal virtues: charity, modesty, courage, justice and wisdom (one notes in passing the omission from this category of the peculiarly Christian faith and hope). It was also quite inevitable that it should be believed that jade could be taken internally with beneficial results. Once a year, therefore, the Emperor fasted ceremonially, consuming nothing but powdered jade of the most exquisite colour. This was for the good of the Empire; but, in the individual, the liver as well as all the organs in mystical association with it, according to the Chinese medical philosophy, were benefited by homoeopathic doses. The Chinese in their refined, almost tortured aestheticism, recognise one hundred and twenty-six colours of jade, some of them baffling to Western amateurs, who find difficulty in differentiating between such shades as sky-blue and the blue of the sky ‘after it has been washed by a shower.’ Nor can many Western experts claim, as do the Chinese, to distinguish one variety of jade from another by the touch.

At the present time it seems likely that the jade mania may have come to an abrupt end. Production at Mogaung was entirely for the Chinese market, the stone being otherwise valueless. It is difficult to imagine that China’s present rulers would sanction this type of import, or that they would approve of so many Chinese man-hours being employed on the production of trinkets, whatever their artistic merit – unless for export. Perhaps, as the driver said so confidently, the opencast miners in this valley had indeed gone to chapel; or perhaps they had given up waiting for the Chinese merchants to come to the auctions, and had gone back to cultivate their opium, the market for which – if less spectacular – has always been dependable.

L
AVING LEARNED
that in the dry season only rare military boats went down the river from Myitkyina to Bhamó, I decided to return to Bhamó by road and to take a river steamer thence to Mandalay. This stretch of the river was covered by a twice-weekly boat service, and the trip took three days. When I had made some preliminary enquiries about this part of the journey, at the offices of the Irrawaddy Water Transport Board in Rangoon, the information to be had was surprisingly vague. It was known that the boats passed through areas held by both types of Communists, as well as PVOs, and that although they were usually attacked, an escort of soldiers was carried and no boat had so far been lost. What they were not sure about was the nature of the accommodation. The executive I saw thought I would have to sleep on deck and take my own food with me.

At the company’s Bhamó office the picture painted was a brighter one, to the extent at least that there was a regular food supply. A butler attended to the needs of first-class passengers, and there was even a choice of Burmese or Chinese food.

At seven in the morning I walked a plank over the shining Irrawaddy mud separating the solid bank from a shallow-draught lighter, one of a number which were hastening with passengers and goods to the steamer anchored in midstream. Like most river-steamers it had a romantic and anachronistic air; a flat-bottomed and skeletal construction of
open-sided
decks, terribly vulnerable, it seemed in its flimsiness, to assault of any kind. The
Pauktan
, of one hundred and six tons displacement and licensed to carry 228 deck-passengers on 2053 square feet of deck-space (when not
occupied by cattle, cargo or other encumbrances) proved, to my surprise, not to be a survival of the last century, but a postwar production.

The show-boat illusion was dissipated as soon as I put my foot on the iron deck, after boarding the ship close by a central redoubt covered by steel plating, from behind which came a cushioned thumping of
powerful
engines. On one side of this was the deck-passengers’ kitchen in which, as I passed, a cook was hacking through a piece of dried fish held on a block. It took two blows of his heavy dah to cut off each segment. Early arrivals had already staked out their claims to deck space. As soon as they arrived they spread out mats or carpets, made tea and prepared bowls of rice and fish which they ate with ready holiday appetite. Before and after doing so they made a constant procession up to a row of sinister iron prison-cells mounted in the stern, labelled in English, Women and Men Wash Place.

After half an hour, an army launch came alongside with an escort of fifty soldiers, each man carrying, besides his rifle and normal kit, an embroidered pillow. A few minutes later there was a second influx of the military, twenty soldiers who were escorting forty-seven Chinese
Nationalist
internees and five dacoits. The escort party had started out with fifty Chinese, but three had already escaped. They were being taken to an internment camp at Meiktila. The dacoits were going to a prison two days’ journey away. Two of them – one a Chinese soldier – had committed murders, and all five, although, as was to be expected, they looked
exceedingly
depressed, seemed from their appearance incapable of desperate deeds. The Chinese murderer in particular had a gentle and sensitive face.

The military took over the whole of the upper deck, laying out their kit, army-fashion, in neat rows, the embroidered pillows – some with lace fringes – perched squarely on haversacks. Sentries were posted at the tops of the companionways. The dacoits, now chained hand and foot, were seated in a melancholy row. To reduce the chafing of their gyves, they had been allowed to wrap rags round the metal. The Chinese formed squatting circles and began to play a game with engraved ivory counters, while their guards looked on with keen interest. A group of pongyis had formed round one of their number who had produced a
snapshot album. To my surprise, most of the pictures were of girls, including one combing her hair in front of a mirror. On the deck below barge-load after barge-load of passengers continued to come aboard, alternating with hundreds of bales of dried fish, the odour of which slowly filled every corner of the ship. Most of the passengers, too, had brought with them tough, grey, salt-powdered hunks of fish, and, nervous at first of the promiscuous contacts of voyages, carried them everywhere they went, so that for some hours the decks and approaches of the
Pauktan
were heavy with the intertwining of ammoniacal stenches.

Much to my surprise, in view of the ship’s semi-transparent
silhouette
, there were cabins on the
Pauktan
, containing besides the bed, an electric fan, a washbasin which emptied out into a bowl placed below, and a placard recommending the Asia Chop-Chop Shop at Katha. A minute triangular saloon was fitted into the bows, where you could sit with an excellent view of the river; and first-class passengers, Burmese and Chinese, who had retired here kicked off their sandals and looked up beamingly at the approach of footsteps, ready to ask politely, ‘May I know your destination, sir?’ In this room meals were served, presided over by the butler, the Burmese counterpart in dignity and conservatism of attire of the impressive domestic who in England survives chiefly in advertisement descriptions of gracious living.

A good hour after the advertised sailing-time passengers were still arriving. Even when the last of the lighters had cast off, small boats came racing up, with much excited hailing and waving, disgorging fares who for the most part appeared to have come along on the spur of the moment, as they were without luggage. This, in fact, was the case. On making enquiries I learned that these latecomers were members of parties who had been seeing friends off, and then had suddenly felt an urge to join them. On the boat there were many happy and unforeseen reunions. In the end, the captain got tired of this kind of thing; a bell rang and up came the anchor. Leaving in the lurch a couple of boatloads of impulsive Burmans, we began to slide down the river, accompanied by a dipping, slowly-flapping escort of Indian river terns.

All the world’s great waterways are scenically uninteresting except in places where the river narrows in its passage through mountains or a gorge. Otherwise, the expanse of water is too great, the banks too far away. Here the Irrawaddy was half a mile to a mile wide, and the monotony of clouded water and the close vegetation of the distant shores was broken only when the pilot, steering a course that wound in great sweeping curves through an unseen channel of deep water, sometimes came close to the banks. The water opened in folds at the bows, carrying a broken, dusty sparkle, and although the sun was high the water had a cold, breath-catching smell of stagnant pools. The banks had been undermined, laying bare the roots of trees in a pale tracery, like some coral growth exposed by the recession of the sea. We soon passed one of the hundreds of ships that had been sunk or scuttled during the war. It had become an extension of the jungle, a boat-shaped peninsula, from which, surprisingly, a smokestack and one paddle protruded. The
deck-rail
embraced a variety of luxuriant grasses, bushes and one small tree – a vantage point selected by a bittern to survey the waters.

Within a few hours we entered the second or middle defile, where the river, narrowing perhaps to a hundred and fifty yards, was shut in by hills covered by the most luxuriant forest, a multiple volcanic eruption of foliage, beneath which a wall of green lava toppled over upon a foreshore of glistening mud. As we nosed forward, silently cleaving the surface of clouded jade, the channel ahead closed in as if we had reached the end of a dark lake, barred by a cliff rising a sheer eight hundred feet out of the water. Then, as we turned a tree-crowded headland, the water could be seen, going on in glossy patches beyond the black boulders. Most
travellers
have recorded that they saw elephants here, but there were no elephants when the
Pauktan
passed through, although at a blast on the ship’s siren a flight of parakeets broke from the treetops and came low overhead, a brief green glitter in the blue.

The defiles of the Irrawaddy are said to be of extreme depth, and I have read that a steamer which dropped anchor here failed to reach bottom when six hundred and thirty feet of chain had run out, and, getting out of control, was lost. The butler told me that Burmese Loch
Ness monsters are seen with fair regularity, undulant creatures with the inoffensive heads of asses or sheep, which show themselves at times of national crisis, or when comets are seen. Their appearance has no more than a monitory significance, and without harming passing boatmen, they are content to belch a little smoke before disappearing below the surface. It is an accepted fact that river-sharks haunt some of the bays.

We stopped at the village of Shwegu, where most of the population seemed to have gathered on the sloping bank to sell crude earthenware pots, vilely decorated by the moulded addition of glossy, ceramic
peacocks
. The art of Shwegu in particular and Burma in general is a disaster, ranking in the scale of debasement, with the honourable exception of its lacquer-ware, as about level with that of modern Egypt. But the little saleswomen, most of them in sparrow’s-egg blue longyis and big Shan hats, were charming, and their pots – however deplorable separately – were arranged in the most effective mass compositions. The passengers were delighted with them, and scrambled ashore as soon as the
gangplank
was let down, to buy great quantities of these depressing souvenirs.

Beyond Shwegu a few barren islands appeared, fringed with sand-spits bearing ranks of motionless cormorants, some sunning themselves with wings heraldically opened. Once we saw an eagle wading majestically in the shadows, thus revealing itself as a surprisingly long-limbed bird. Pied kingfishers hung motionless in the air, their long beaks hanging down like hornets’ stings, and sometimes dropped, as if an unseen thread had snapped, upon their insect quarry. In its fishing this bird employed a different technique, involving an extraordinary aerobatic feat – a trick which I had never seen practised before. While travelling at full speed, at perhaps seventy miles an hour, parallel to, and just above the water’s surface, it would suddenly – at least, so it appeared to me – spot a fish, and then, unable to turn quickly, would at once lose speed and reverse its direction by purposely striking the water. It did so with wings partially opened, in such a way that the impact actually caused it to bounce back, at the same time allowing it to change direction and then go into a shallow
dive after its prey. The whole operation, which I was never tired of watching, took about a second, and I wondered when and how the first kingfisher had discovered the possibilities of this manoeuvre, and whether it was generally practised throughout the pied-kingfisher clan, or only by the Burmese birds.

Towards the evening, while the sun was still fairly high in the sky, the landscape suddenly lost its colours. The creamy-yellows of the water, the gilding of the sand-spits, the infinitely varied greens of the jungle trees, the banks, which were sometimes the bluish-white of water seeping through chalk, sometimes brick red, all relapsed into a leaden uniformity, a flat, photographic monochrome; it was more like a brightly moonlit scene than one viewed by the light of day. As the line of the distant mountains was erased from the sky and a tide of mist began to rise up the jungle
tree-trunks
, the ship was turned into the shore to join a dark cluster of junks.

This was Katha, where we were to stay the night, but although the
town was said to be in Government hands, the Chop-Chop Shop, alas, was out of bounds, and a trip ashore was not thought desirable. Bren guns had been set up on both decks, and on the bridge – which was also armoured – and their muzzles thrust shorewards in the gathering gloom, which was suddenly violated by the brusque glare of the ship’s
searchlight
. Extra guards had been posted over the prisoners who, with the failing light, had stopped gambling for matchsticks and were singing those rather tuneless European-type marching songs which are believed in the Far East to instil martial virtue. The opium-smokers among the Chinese had been humanely issued with an opium-ration, and had been sent away into a corner to smoke it. The officer who pointed this out was very proud of the fact that there was no opium-smoking in the Burmese army. Even the dacoits – two of whom it was whispered would be executed next day – had not been forgotten. Earlier in the day, after some self-examination as to the propriety of the action, and with the officer’s permission, I had given them cheroots. Now there was an official issue.