The Trouser People
burma in the shadows of empire
BY PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING JOURNALIST ANDREW MARSHALL
"The stuff of ripping yarns" - Sunday Times
"STEPPED ON SOMETHING SOFT AND WOBBLY.
STRUCK A MATCH, FOUND IT WAS A DEAD CHINAMAN."
THE TROUSER PEOPLE is an offbeat tribute to a little-known land of startling human diversity.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andrew Marshall was inspired by diaries he found in London's British Library. They belonged to Sir George Scott, a forgotten Victorian adventurer who hacked, bullied and charmed his way through Burma's uncharted jungles to establish British colonial rule.
Born in Scotland in 1851, Scott was a die-hard imperialist with a fondness for supersized pith helmets and a bluffness of expression that bordered on the Pythonesque. "Stepped on something soft and wobbly," he records in his diary one dark night. "Struck a match, found it was a dead Chinaman."
But as Marshall discovers by retracing the explorer's footsteps, Scott was also a writer and photographer of rare sensibility. He spent a lifetime documenting the colourful ethnic peoples who still live in Burma's rugged hinterlands, then widened the imperial goalposts in another way. He introduced football to Burma, where today it is a national obsession.
Part travelogue, part reportage, Marshall travels from the decaying splendor of Rangoon to the royal capital of Mandalay, then up into the tribal highlands to meet the bewitching "giraffe women" and the former headhunters of the Wild Wa - today, Asia's biggest drug-traffickers. He discovers a nation whose soldiers, like the British colonialists before them, were nicknamed "the trouser people" by sarong-wearing civilians.
THE TROUSER PEOPLE is an intrepid and often hilarious journey through Britain's lost heritage - and a powerful exposé of Burma's modern tragedy. This fully revised edition includes a gripping eyewitness account of the Saffron Revolution, the 2007 democratic uprising led by Buddhist monks.
"MARSHALL IS A GIFTED WRITER" - NEW YORK TIMES
ANDREW MARSHALL is a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning British journalist and author.
Marshall spent two decades exploring Asia's remotest places for TIME and other big publications, including National Geographic, Esquire, GQ and The Sunday Times Magazine. In 2012 he joined Reuters news agency where, as a globe-trotting Special Correspondent, he writes investigative stories about crime, conflict and human rights.
In 2014, he and Reuters colleague Jason Szep won the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for what the Pulitzer judges called "their courageous reports on the violent persecution of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Myanmar that . . . often falls victim to predatory human-trafficking networks."
He also won a Pulitzer in 2018, with colleagues Clare Baldwin and Manuel Mogato, for "relentless reporting that exposed the brutal killing campaign behind Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs"; and in 2019, with Wa Lone, Kyaw Soe Oo and other Reuters colleagues, for a series on the violent expulsion of the Rohingya from Myanmar.
He is the author of two non-fiction books which have been translated into 10 languages. THE TROUSER PEOPLE was a New York Times Notable Book. He is also co-author of "The Cult at the End of the World," a prescient account of Japan’s homicidal Aum cult and the rise of high-tech terrorism. A feature-length documentary based on the book will be released in 2023.
He has co-produced three documentaries for Al Jazeera - on cholera epidemics in Bangladesh, military torture in Thailand and drug users in Malaysia and Indonesia - and acted as a consultant on a fourth for Channel 4, about apocalypse culture in Israel, Japan and the U.S.
He lives in London.
"I NO LONGER CONFUSE THE YINDU PEOPLE WITH THE YAW,
THE YAO OR THE YO."
An excerpt from the book
In 1891 George Scott began work on his great five-volume Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States. Brick thick and turgid with detail, gazetteers were the blunt instruments of colonial administration. Today they squat, massive and many-volumed, on forgotten shelves in library basements, dusty reminders that the Empire was won not just by force of arms, but also by sheer tonnage of paperwork.
They are psychotically fastidious. Scott’s Gazetteer records every man, woman, child, bullock, buffalo, cow, pig and pony in the Shan states, along with the geography, ethnicity and chief produce of even the smallest village. Nothing escapes its omniscient sweep. It knows, for example, that the saopha’s revenue from opium and liquor in Hsipaw State in 1897-8 was 18,132 rupees. It knows that in Kengteng five annas will buy you four duck eggs and still leave change for a custard apple.
But Scott’s Gazetteer was much more than a dry imperial stocktaking. It was a fathomless resource on the origins, customs and languages of Burma’s ethnic peoples, written not in the stilted prose of a bureaucrat, but with the flair and passion of an experienced journalist. Even a century after its publication, the Gazetteer had an almost biblical authority. In Burma I met an American gem-dealer and a Canadian Red Cross worker who both swore by Scott’s magnum opus. I bought my treasured copy at a Rangoon bookshop. It wasn’t great bedtime reading; that would be like propping the Ten Commandments on your chest. But with a firm table, and some quality time, the Gazetteer was endlessly absorbing.
I now knew that Kachin warriors usually make war just before the moon rises, and make love in purpose-built ‘bachelors’ huts’ – the love hotels of the jungle. I had learned the crucial difference between the Banyôk people (who worship their dogs in an annual ceremony) and the En (who eat them). I had followed Scott’s brief exegesis on the Karen’s use of chicken bones to divine the future. I knew that the Kachin believe that the movement of giant subterranean crocodiles causes earthquakes, while the Eastern Tai are convinced that eclipses are the work of a moon- swallowing frog who must be frightened off by gong-beating and gunfire. I no longer confuse the Yindu people with the Yaw, the Yao or the Yo.
Even the index was a rewarding read. Looking up one eye- catching entry – ‘Headhunting, rules for its conduct’ – I read that, among the Wa, ‘to behead a man from a community even on the same range of hills is looked upon as unneighbourly and slothful’. The Gazetteer also scotched the myths of earlier observers, disagreeing, for example, with Lieutenant Master’s flamboyant contention that the Ling tribe solves the problem of coping with elderly relations by eating them. ●
And finally . . . Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry discuss The Trouser People on "Q.I."
