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Updated: June 20, 2025
The Morton Lane School at Maulmain, the Eurasian School at the same place, the Kemendine School in Rangoon, the Girls' School at Mandalay, have each of them about three hundred scholars, and they are sending out influences which will in a few years revolutionize the civilization and the religion of Burma. Other schools of not so high a grade are doing equally faithful work.
Around these homes birds and animals and naked children are everywhere to be seen. Among the incidents of our stay at Mandalay I remember a native dance, called "Pwe," given one evening in front of the hotel. This was a little on the order of a vaudeville, consisting of a mixture of talk, song, and dance. The performers were arranged on a high platform.
It did not of course satisfy the Extremists, but their influence had suffered a great set-back from the wrecking of the Surat Congress, their great Deccanee leader was working out a long term of imprisonment at Mandalay, and with the tide of anarchism still spreading and visibly demoralising the student class all over India, even to the undermining of parental authority, the first feeling of suppressed and largely inarticulate alarm and resentment developed into a definite reaction in favour of government as by law established.
I mentioned this offer at the Bhamo Club, when a civilian present at once offered me 50 rupees for the pony; he did not know the pony, he explained, but he knew Roberts. In a steamer of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company I came down the river from Bhamo to Mandalay.
Diplomacy has not yet said the last word on this matter, and the exact frontier between Burmah and China has still to be delimited, but the fixing of a definite date for the dispatch of the first mission from Mandalay to Pekin, which is timed to set out in January, 1894, is in itself of hopeful augury for the settlement of all difficulties.
Mandalay is at the upper end of this lake-like part of the Irrawaddy; it lies back and behind the river bank or bunda, so it is not visible from the river. Our steamer pulls up against a flat that lies against the sandy shore, exposed, at this time of year, by the lowness of the river. There are no wharfs as I had expected, only two or three floating sheds, and two or three steamers like our own.
What variety of colour there is and movement; the lights of the shops flood the lower part of the street and buildings with a warm orange, there are emerald, ruby, and yellow lights in the apothecary's windows, primary colours and complementary, direct and reflected from the wet pavements; the clothes of passing people run from blue-black to brown and dull red against the glow, and there's a girl's scarlet hat and an emerald green signboard choice of tints and no mistake we will take the lot for a first illustration, and in London perhaps, we will get another street scene or two, and so on; as we go south and east we will pick up pictures along the road from Edinburgh to Mandalay with coloured pictures all the way, notes of the outside of things only, no inner meanings guaranteed the reflections on the shop windows as it were anyone can see the things inside.
I haven't seen a white elephant yet, but in the Shwe Dagon Temple I found a lively eight-months-old youngster, an orphan from Mandalay, that could eat bananas twice as fast as my Burmese boy-guide and I could peel them, and the boy-guide in question assured me that he will turn white by the time he is two or three years old. Which would be very interesting if true, but I fear it isn't.
All these buildings are of timber, only the finest teak being used, and the many columns which support the roofs of the halls of audience consist of single tree-trunks of unusual size and great value. The moat serves to supply Mandalay with its drinking-water, and is fed by a conduit from the hills.
Population in 1900, only 467. In 1920 over 35,000. Slogan, Watch Us Grow. Seventeen hundred oil and gas wells. Fields of corn and cotton. Skyscrapers. The Watonga Building, twelve stories. Haynes Block, fourteen stories. Come West, young man! Ugh! Sometimes she made little rhymes in her mind. There's Singapore and Zanzibar, And Cairo and Calais. There's Samarkand and Alcazar, Rangoon and Mandalay.
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