Golden Earth (24 page)

Myitkyina was the starting-point for the great and tragic trek of the refugees who fled from Burma through the Hukawng Valley, before the Japanese advance, in the summer of 1942. Why should this mass flight have turned into a disaster, in which it is estimated that twenty-thousand persons lost their lives? On the map the distance from Myitkyina to Margherita, the first town over the Indian border, does not look great. It cannot be over three hundred miles, and the first hundred of them – to Sumprabum – were covered in many cases in motor vehicles. No hostility was shown to the refugees by the tribesmen inhabiting the thinly
populated
hills through which they passed. How was it, then, that so few
escaped? A few extracts from the diary of my friend Lee, who was caught up in this exodus, may help to explain.

His original party of eight – which was later swollen to twenty – consisted of his wife, Ma Pyo, a Burmese girl, their eighteen-months-old son, their servants, a junior officer, and his batman. They arrived at Myitkyina on May 4th, ‘organised’ and hid vehicles on the west bank of the river and spent the next three days ferrying civilians and a few wounded soldiers across, using the ferryboat which had been deserted by its regular crew. On May 7th the Burmese steersman ran off, Japanese fighters strafed the last of the transport planes on the Myitkyina airfield, and the Japanese ground troops were reported very near the town, coming up the Bhamó road. The last party of refugees was therefore ferried across, and Lee and his people set off in their three cars and reached Sumprabum – where the motor road comes to an end – next day. A great multitude of bewildered refugees were encamped here, trying to find coolies before setting out on foot. No one had any idea of what lay ahead, and a usual estimate of the distance to be covered was ninety miles. Lee notes that thirty-eight schoolgirls from the Baptist school in Moulmein had got thus far. A few months later, in hospital in India, he met one of the two survivors.

At this moment, things did not look too bad – at least, to an old mining prospector. Lee knew that they had a long walk in front of them, but he had no doubt that by keeping good discipline, and by covering reasonable daily stages, they would get to India in two weeks at the most. The chief drawback was Ma Pyo’s condition. She was six months
pregnant
, and Lee was furious when she turned down the offer of a female missionary to take her and their baby son, and to keep them safe with her in the Kachin hills, where the missionary had great influence, and proposed to hide out. With an outburst of wrath which establishes the Old Testament mood of their expedition, he assured her that she would be shot if she held the party up by going sick. ‘But,’ he says, ‘I should have known better than to doubt the stamina of a Burmese girl. They are small and dainty, but mighty tough. At one time or another every man in my party lost heart and gave trouble, so that I had to drive them like animals;
but Pyo calmly carried on. She did more than her share.’ There are further references in the diary to the superior resistance of the
womenfolk
. ‘We met a huge Sikh woman with her six children, the eldest about ten years and the youngest a few weeks old. She had no one else with her, no food, spare clothing or bedding. She was worried about her milk lasting out for the baby, but was otherwise cheerful, and too proud to ask for assistance. We did what we could, and left her plugging steadily along, carrying two kids, with the other four helping each other.’

So they had started out confidently enough, with Lee, the professional backwoodsman, at their head. But that night the Wet Monsoon broke, and without their knowing it, twenty thousand had been condemned to death. With the first showers, the mosquitoes came out, and it rained without stopping for ten days. Ten days happens to be the incubation period of malaria, and by the end of that time most of the refugees had it. A few who were taken with cerebral accesses died within a few hours. Others lay down in the wet jungle, and shivered and starved. A few, like Lee and his party, kept staggering on through the rain, fever or no fever. Lee, who had it worse than the others, became half-blind. When his head cleared a little he remarked that they were passing the first of the dead bodies, and learned, to his surprise, from the others, that they had passed many dead during the previous two days. It was particularly bad in the outskirts of the villages, where the semi-domesticated pigs hung about to feed on the dead – and on the dying. After that Lee gave up trying to shoot pigs for food, finding that his people would no longer touch their meat.

From this time until they crossed the frontier of India, a month later, they were never out of the sight and smell of death; and at this point the refugees dropped, as if with loathing, their civilised poses and pretences. Civilisation provides a whalebone corseting, and when this is unfastened, the individual either turns to jelly or begins to flex unsuspected muscles. From now on Lee found something exaggerated in people’s conduct, including his own. They had turned into ham actors in an old-fashioned movie, either heroes or villains. It was a study in black and white, with no halftones.

The gregarious instinct survived these apocalyptic conditions. ‘The
go-downs were crammed full of refugees; with smallpox, cholera,
dysentery
and malaria rampant,’ but decency was the first casualty, ‘… they would not even leave the camp and go into the jungle to answer the call of nature.’ And colour prejudice persisted to the bitter end. ‘We found an Anglo-Burmese boy of about thirteen years, calling “Aunty, Aunty”. When we asked him what he was doing there all alone, he replied, “My legs will not work, so my Daddy and Mummy have gone on with my sister, who is very white and not dark like me.”’

They kept on coming upon camps which the Tea Planters’
Association
had been operating, but which had been abandoned, and were like waterlogged graveyards, with unburied corpses everywhere. Lee, as something of a connoisseur of death on battlefields, was offended by the incorrectness of these civilian postures. They were all undignified. People had died while defecating, or drinking, and had polluted the water supply with the corruption of their bodies. ‘The only person I saw who died in a dignified manner was an elderly Mohammedan gentleman. He was a wealthy man, as he had a number of servants with him. When he could travel no further and knew his end was near, he had his servants spread rugs of good quality under a shelter, and then had them stretch him out on them. He crossed his arms and told his people to spread the last rug over him. They did so.’

As for himself, Lee noticed the rapid growth of a protective shell of callousness. To illustrate this, he mentions that on May 24th – the second day of his recovery from malaria – they found a Chinese, unable to walk, but sitting with a happy grin on a pile of rice he had found in a shed. A mile further on they came upon another, lying face downwards, in the last stages of hunger and exhaustion. Lee rolled him over, and sacrificed a little of his precious store of brandy to bring him round. After a while they got him on his feet, cut two walking sticks for him to pull himself along with, and told him how to join his countryman on the rice heap. ‘At that time I felt sentimental,’ Lee says. ‘Had this incident happened three weeks later, I would have passed the man, and left him to die without a second thought.’

On June 8th, after floundering for a fortnight along tracks that were
knee-deep in mud in places, they reached the Nam Yung river. It had been converted by the rains into a roaring torrent. Within an hour and a half of their arrival, they saw nine men in succession who tried to cross it torn from the guide rope and drowned. One Gurkha woman, on seeing her husband carried away, gave birth to a premature child. It was born dead, and thrown into the river. That night the guide rope gave way and they were stranded. There were four hundred and fifty demoralised refugees at the crossing and several thousand on the way. Lee found a place upstream where the river split into two arms, the nearest of which was only sixty feet wide. All they had to do was to drop one of the large trees growing on the bank across it, use it as a bridge, and repeat the manoeuvre on the further bank. But of the four hundred and fifty waiting to cross only twenty-two would volunteer to help cut down the tree. They were all so weak that they could only peck at it with their dahs for a few minutes at a time. ‘We nibbled at that tree like so many woodpeckers.’ In the end it fell in the wrong direction, lengthways along the stream. Then when another day had been spent in felling a second tree, which had dropped into the correct position, it was suddenly noticed that the water was falling, for it had stopped raining in the upper reaches of the river. At this moment a party of Oorias turned up, ex-fishermen from the Puri coast of India. They were all expert swimmers. It was then decided to repair the guide rope, which the Oorias agreed to swim across with, and to re-attempt a crossing of the main stream. Six or seven orderly batches, five at a time, made the crossing, with Lee covering the rope with his pistol from the northern shore. Then the crowd panicked. About thirty at once rushed the rope. It broke under the strain, and they were all swept away. Lee and his party went on without looking back.

Immediately after this came what were for Lee the two worst moments of the whole journey. His old Chinese servant was in a very bad state. He could not keep down any food, and had lost the use of his legs. They were obliged to leave him to die, an action for which he assures me he has never been able to forgive himself. About this time it seemed clear that his baby son also would not survive. He had carried the child on his back for the whole journey, and now it seemed to be in the last stages of dysentery; it
was in a state of coma, and constantly oozing blood and pus. As there appeared to be no hope, Lee decided to put him out of his suffering and administered a lethal dose of morphia tablets, ‘enough,’ he says, ‘to kill ten men. To our astonishment he immediately recovered; and later on, when he had dysentery again, I repeated the morphia treatment on a minor scale, again with success.’

And so, at the end of June, they came finally into India. Most of the males in the party collapsed utterly as soon as they reached safety, and several nearly died. Lee’s normal weight of one hundred and fifty-five pounds had been reduced to ninety pounds. Ma Pyo was the only one who had not lost weight; but she was covered with sores. About eighteen thousand refugees coming this way had got through before them, but most of these, by starting earlier, had avoided the worst rains. There were very few to follow.

The centre of the Burmese jade industry was at Mogaung, near Myitkyina, and next morning I asked the driver to take me there. But it soon appeared that the direct road marked on my map no longer existed, and as Mogaung could only be reached by an enormous detour, the driver said that he would take me to a small jade mine which was more easily reached. We drove perhaps ten miles out of Myitkyina, walked for half an hour up a valley, and there was the mine, a series of small caverns in the hillside, only one of which looked as if it might have been excavated in recent times. The driver assured me that these, as well as some pits to be seen in the half-dry bed of the river, were being worked. To a question as to the miners’ whereabouts, I received the astonishing reply that they had gone to chapel. Judging perhaps from the tone of my voice that an affirmative answer was expected, he also assured me in answer to a further question that the traditional method of ‘fishing’ for jade by paddling barefooted in the stream was still followed here. It is one of the many picturesque fallacies with which the jade industry is beset, that the best pieces are always found, by touch, in this way. Outside the caverns, a few dirty pieces of rock were strewn about. These, the driver said, were
jade of inferior quality, and having observed that precious stones are usually without attraction in their unprepared state, I was prepared to believe that this was so.

The history of jade provides an interesting illustration of the creation by a refined and luxurious society of its symbol of wealth. The white nephrite chosen possessed all the qualifications required. It was beautiful and rare; it could be obtained only with immense trouble – the original Jade Mountain was at K’un Lun in South-East Turkestan – and its fashioning into jewellery, owing to its extreme hardness, called for the expenditure of infinite labour and much technical skill. In the original quarries in Turkestan a certain small amount of green jadeite was also found. By virtue of its rarity this green stone became practically priceless. With a kind of dim recognition of the influence of metallic oxides in establishing the jade’s colour, many attempts were made to fake this valuable green by such ingenious methods as burying copper in contact with blocks of white nephrite. With the adoption of jade symbols for the State worship of the Heaven, Earth and the ‘Four Quarters’, jade assumed for the Chinese the prestige associated with gold in the West; and it is safe to say that had one of the Biblical Three Wise Men of the East come from China, jade would have been his gift.

The discovery by a thirteenth-century Chinese prospector, at a moment when the K’un Lun mines had reached exhaustion, of great quantities of jadeite in the Kachin States of Burma, caused a sensation in the Celestial Empire, and Mogaung became the El Dorado of many Chinese expeditions, the members of which mostly perished, after horrible privations of the type suffered by their Spanish counterparts in their search for gold. Finally the trade was established, and it was found that, most happily, although jadeite of pure translucent green existed, it was rare, compared to the colours produced by the action of metallic oxides, other than copper, upon the silicate. There was plenty of green jadeite at Mogaung, but most of it was the wrong green, or it was too opaque, or was variable in colour, and thus succeeded in one way or another in defeating the demands of finicky connoisseurship. The undermining of Chinese values was averted. Otherwise, one suspects, it
would have been necessary to combat the threatened devaluation in some way, perhaps by the disappearance, for reasons of State, of all those concerned in the mine’s discovery.