thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/world_news/Asia/article1277568.ece သည္ အျပည့္အစံုဖတ္၍မရပါ..၊အျပည့္အစံုဖတ္လိုပါက subscribe လုပ္၍ ႏုိင္ငံျခားေငြသြင္းရမည္ျဖစ္ေသာေၾကာင့္ The Sunday Times မွ ေဆာင္းပါးရွင္ Flora Bagenal ကိုယ္တိုင္ ေပးပို႔ထားေသာ သူမ၏ ေဆာင္းပါးအစအဆံုးကို ျပန္ေဖၚျပလိုက္ပါသည္ ။ � A GROUP of Burmese artists is campaigning to protect the house where George Orwell lived when he served in the colonial police force in the 1920s. The two-storey wooden and redbrick house, where the author set part of his first novel, Burmese Days, stands in an overgrown garden in the sleepy river town of Katha, in the remote northern jungle. The book is a contemptuous portrait of gin-soaked British colonials ruling over natives in the wilting heat of the tropics. “We have asked the government to let us turn the house into a museum,” said Nyo Ko Naing, an illustrator who heads the group of photographers, writers and painters fighting to protect Katha’s colonial relics. The town, disguised as Kyauktada in the book, is 12 hours north of Mandalay by a slow train crawling through the jungle, or two days along the Irrawaddy River by boat. Until recently it was visited by only a handful of travellers following the trail blazed by Orwell, then known by his real name, Eric Blair. But even Katha has been affected by the changes that have swept through the country since 49 years of isolation and military rule ended in 2011. The town is on a fast-expanding timber trade route between inner Burma and China. A rough road leads north to the Chinese border town of Bhamo, a transit point for legal and smuggled goods including opium, exotic animals, rubies and jade. Nyo Ko Naing and his friends want to save Orwell’s house and other historical sites from developers who have already bought up plots in and around Katha. “This country is booming . . . We are happy with the changes but we also want to stay connected to our history,” he said. Orwell describes in detail the gold mohur trees and the frangipanis and hibiscus of the tropical landscape. The flowers have gone from outside his house, which is overgrown with grass and partly concealed by creepers. George Orwell pictured in 1923 when he was serving in Burma in the colonial police force The family of a local official have been living in an annexe and their washing hangs on wooden racks outside. Inside, the drawing room with its ornate fireplace and chipped, green-painted walls stands empty. The staircase is draped in cobwebs and leads to a landing and two large bedrooms locked with a chain. The roof of the pantry and kitchen used by Orwell’s servants rotted years ago. A short walk down a tree-lined avenue is the former whites-only British Club, featured heavily in the novel as the place where Europeans go to escape the exotic world outside, fanning themselves in tepid air and sipping drinks cooled with dwindling supplies of ice brought twice a week from Mandalay. A government-owned co-operative uses the building now but some of the furnishings remain unchanged, as do the creaking floorboards once trodden by Orwell. Last week, a young clerk was typing up notes of a meeting on a rickety Second World War typewriter while Daw Nyo Nyo, the 72-year-old secretary of the group set up to protect the house and club, provided a tour of the grounds. She read a rare copy of Orwell’s novel translated into Burmese and said she liked it because of its honesty. “We learn something from the book about the bad things that happened and we know not to repeat them. Some things have changed a great deal — the British are no longer in power and our own government is becoming more democratic — but the bottom levels are the same as they were in the book.”
Posted on: Mon, 01 Jul 2013 08:28:47 +0000
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