Seventeen years ago, as the people of Burma filled the streets in mass protests against their military dictatorship, a striking, self-possessed woman rose to address a rally at the great golden Shwedagon Pagoda. At the time, nobody realized the price she would pay for her outspokenness.
The woman, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was visiting from her home in England to tend to her sick mother when pro-democracy protests swelled throughout the country in August 1988 despite a brutal response by the military that took thousands of lives.
In the months that followed she emerged, through a combination of charisma and pedigree, to lead what has so far been a futile opposition to the country's military leaders.
On Sunday, Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi will mark her 60th birthday under house arrest, where she has spent most of the intervening years, in an increasingly dilapidated house, more cut off than ever from contacts outside her weed-filled compound.
Her birthday has become an occasion for new international protests against a military junta that holds the country in its grip, jailing its opponents while ruining the country's economy and waging war against its ethnic minorities.
From one of the region's most refined and richly endowed nations, Burma has become its most desperate and reviled.
As the daughter of the country's founding hero, U Aung San, she held a nearly mystical appeal for people desperate to regain their freedoms and self-respect. With her dignity, self-sacrifice and perseverance, she has created a legend of her own.
She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and has joined the company of Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama of Tibet as international icons of a struggle for freedom. But in a contest between brute force and principle, between repression and the clearly expressed will of the people of Burma, it is the men with the guns who have managed so far to prevail, and the country's moral symbol who is their prisoner.
Calls for the release of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi have come from around the world in recent days, including statements from Washington and from Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations.
In Norway, the chairman of the Nobel Committee, Ole D. Mjoes, issued a rare statement about a past laureate, saying; "We ask that she be set free immediately. We look forward to the day that democracy again rules her country.
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But the generals have released her twice already, most recently in May 2002, only to be shaken and shamed at her continuing, overwhelming popularity: huge crowds that gathered wherever she appeared.
One year after her last release, her convoy was attacked by an organized mob in what some analysts believe was an attempt to kill her, and she was returned to house arrest after a period of harsh treatment in prison.
"She has become the only leader that the Burmese people have acknowledged since the death of her father in 1947," said Josef Silverstein, an expert on Myanmar at Rutgers University. "I would add that she has in every way possible emulated what her father stood for, which was for the right of the people to govern themselves and to have a free and democratic country."
Shortly after her address at the Shwedagon Pagoda, she explicitly assumed her father's mantle, saying she would dedicate her life to the people of her country as he had done.
She made that clear in 1999 when she chose not to visit her husband, Michael Aris, in England, when he was dying of cancer, because she feared that the government would bar her from re-entering Burma. The Burmese authorities had refused to allow him to visit her.
The United States, the European Union and other nations have responded to repression in Burma with economic penalties that have done little to affect its leadership. Burma's giant neighbors, China and India, with several other Asian nations, offer it an economic lifeline.
But opposition from the West is putting pressure on the junta now as it prepares to take over the rotating leadership of the regional 10-member political and economic grouping, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, next year.