Four years in Upper Burma

by W. R. Winston

Experimental farming is, in Upper Burma, a new undertaking which necessarily falls to the lot of Government, in the absence of the requisite knowledge and enterprise on the part of the people. With a view to increasing the products of the country, and bettering the position of the people, an experimental farm has been established in the Shan States. Various products, new to Burma, are receiving a trial; for instance, English fruit trees on some of the hill stations, and at various other places potatoes, American maize, wheat, barley, and English garden vegetables. The successful introduction of some of these new products may mean a great deal for the prosperity of the country. Attention has also been paid to the rearing of cattle, sheep and horses, and veterinary assistants are employed, at the expense of Government, in combating cattle disease, and their work has given satisfaction to the people.

There is no branch of the public service for which there is more need in a new country than that of the Department of Public Works. A country recently come under British rule presents a wide field for the talents and energies of the civil engineer. The principal public works of the Burmans consisted of the construction of reservoirs for that great necessity of life, water, both for drinking purposes and for irrigation, and the formation of channels for conducting the water to the fields. These works were found only in a few favoured places, and though not finished in first-rate engineering style, exhibited no small amount of ingenuity and skill. Beyond this their engineering manifested itself rather in religious edifices than in works of general public utility.

There was therefore great need to supplement what the Burmans had left lacking. The country was without a single good road. Even in Mandalay itself there was not a road worthy of the name. Now some hundreds of miles of good road have been constructed, the streams bridged, and communications opened up on the principal lines of travel. An extensive system of new irrigation works is under construction or in contemplation. In every principal station barracks for the soldiers and the police, and jails have been built, and in every town, market houses, court houses, public offices and hospitals provided; so that already there is not a town of any considerable size which does not show abundant outward signs of the change which has come over the country.

Railways were of course unknown in Upper Burma before the advent of British rule; and they are likely to prove a powerful stimulus to the development of the country. There was a line of railway already finished in Lower Burma from Rangoon to Toungoo, 166 miles, and the extension of this line to Mandalay, 220 miles farther, was one of the first great public works projected. It was sanctioned in November 1886; the survey was pushed on and completed by the summer of 1887; the work was begun on each section as soon as the estimates were sanctioned; and so rapidly was the work carried on that an engine ran through from Toungoo to Mandalay by May 1st, 1888. The line was finally completed and opened for traffic in March 1889. The cost was a little over twenty millions of rupees.

At the beginning the work practically lay through an enemy’s country, but survey parties and working parties were carefully guarded, and no successful attacks were made upon the many thousands of labourers on the work. The construction gave employment and wages to a large number of Burmans, at a time when the labouring classes would have been otherwise in great straits. The finding of honest remunerative work for so many people was, in itself, a great check on dacoity. Since the railway was opened the districts through which it runs have been the quietest in Upper Burma, although previously so greatly disturbed.

From every point of view this first introduction of railways into Upper Burma must be pronounced a great success. From the very first this line paid its working expenses, and in conjunction with the rest of the state railways in Burma, 4 per cent. on the capital invested. If it could do that at the outset it will do much more when other railway extensions are carried out, and roads are made as feeders to the traffic. To all this must be added the great convenience it affords to the public and to Government, and the impulse it gives to commerce, besides its strategic importance from a military point of view.

Encouraged by this result, another line, called the Mu Valley extension, is already well on towards completion. It starts from Sagaing, on the opposite side of the Irrawaddy to Mandalay, proceeds in a northerly direction, and will ultimately go as far as Mogaung in the far north of the country, some 300 miles from Sagaing. The laying of this line through the territory of the semi-independent little state of Wuntho was the last straw that broke the back of the loyalty of the sawbwa. From the first he had been awkward, and had given trouble, but the prospect of having a railway through his dominions was too much for him, and he broke out into open rebellion. There was nothing for it but to put down the insurrection, annex his petty state, and administer it. Civilisation and the general welfare cannot be expected to come to a standstill at the bidding of an ignorant little chieftain like Wuntho.

Another extension of the Mandalay line, from Meiktila to Myingyan on the Irrawaddy, is about to be taken in hand; and a second and more detailed survey is shortly to be made for that very important extension from Mandalay up to the hills, and across the Shan plateau in a north-easterly direction, to open up the rich Shan country, and eventually, in all probability, to connect Upper Burma with Yunan, the great westerly province of China, with eleven millions of inhabitants.

Railways bring new life to a country like Burma, and arouse men from the sleep of centuries. They pay well; they civilise the people by bringing together, in an amicable way and for their mutual benefit, races and tribes that formerly were enemies; they render it easier to get an honest living than to live by robbery; they not only stimulate trade, they create it; they help to solve the difficulties of demand and supply in the labour question, by making it cheap and easy for the people to get to and fro; and when times of scarcity and famine come round, they enable the Government to cope with them, and prevent or mitigate their horrors.