Four years in Upper Burma

by W. R. Winston

“At Pyinmana I saw Burmans buying opium, and at the same place the abbot of the Buddhist monasteries and one of the chief monks both told me that large numbers of the Burmans smoked. One of them bitterly complained that, whereas in the late king’s time he had power to stop these things, now he had none. At Yamethin, a prominent Burman official told me that there were numbers of purely Burmese villages in the neighbourhood supplied with opium from the Yamethin centre. I myself saw Burmans purchase opium there. At Kyaukse I saw Burmans served with opium. At all three of the opium centres at Mandalay I saw opium served to Burmans. One of the Chinese managers told me that the prohibition was only nominal, and he expected that it would be shortly removed ‘now that the Opium Act was getting into proper working order.’ At one of the Mandalay shops I saw three Burmans being taught to smoke by one of the Chinese assistants. A fourth was lying insensible. At Katha I saw a number of Burmans smoking opium in their houses in rooms quite open and visible, close by the court-house. At Bhamo, in the far north, I saw Burmans in crowds buying opium at the Government centre.”

Thus this legislative expedient we pretend to have adopted for keeping the Burman from opium completely breaks down, and is a mere dead letter. Nominally we are carrying out prohibition as we undertook to do, but really we are tempting the Burmans to their ruin by means of the licensed shops. Time was when Chinese opium vendors in Upper Burma, when caught, were disgraced in every possible way, and even flogged and imprisoned. Recently Mr. Justice Grantham, at the Durham assizes, was trying the case of one miner who had caused the death of another, while the two were drunk together in the Colliery Tavern. The prisoner was found guilty. Upon this his lordship directed the landlord of the Colliery Tavern to take his place beside the prisoner in the dock, and the landlord having done so, the judge proceeded to tell him in plain terms that he (the judge) would have felt more satisfied if the jury, instead of finding the prisoner guilty, had found the publican guilty of causing the death of the deceased. He had served the deceased with liquor when he was drunk already, and had undoubtedly thus caused the man’s death.

The Burman king’s way of looking upon opium vendors was the right way, and the judge’s rebuke of the publican was well merited; the misfortune is that so few can see it yet. The Chinese wealthy opium vendors in Burma now ride in first-class railway carriages, and are put forward into the honorary rank of municipal commissioners; whilst in England we go further than this, and admit to the peerage the heads of the great brewing firms!

We have carried the exceptional, “grandmotherly” method of legislation to a very absurd length in Burma, prompted on the one hand by our usual policy of regulating by licensing these vicious indulgences, and yet restrained by a natural horror for the mischief they do to the Burmese race, and by a well-grounded fear, founded on painful experience, that if we do not somehow keep the nation from liquor and opium, these vices will destroy multitudes of them.

Liquor can be lawfully sold in Upper Burma to Europeans, Eurasians, natives of India and Chinese, but not to Burmans.

Opium to Chinese only.

Both liquor and opium may be sold to Burmans in Lower Burma.

Gunja, a product of hemp, very intoxicating, and used largely by natives of India in their own country, is absolutely forbidden to everybody in Burma.

The absurd and illogical in legislation could hardly go further than the British have gone in these complicated enactments. In view of all this one naturally inquires, If it be right to prohibit gunja, why should it not be proper to forbid opium? If opium ought to be kept from every race in Upper Burma but one, and they immigrants from a foreign country and a very small minority, why not go further and shut it out altogether? If liquor and opium are denied to Upper Burmans, why should they be allowed to the same race in Lower Burma, where they have done so much mischief? If liquor is bad for Burmans in Upper Burma, how can it be good for Europeans, Chinese and natives of India?

We should have entire prohibition of the opium curse in Upper Burma if it were not for the Chinese; that lets in all the mischief. Why is this? Why indeed, unless it is that having forced opium upon them in China at the point of the bayonet, we cannot for very shame withhold it from them in Burma, but must grant them the indulgence, at any cost to the inhabitants, lest we become a byword and a laughing-stock among the nations. There is no consistent standing place between total prohibition on the one hand, and the cynical tone adopted by the advocates of licensing on the other: “It comes to this, that if the Burmans cannot learn to use these indulgences in moderation they must take the consequences.”