Burma - where a miner's life really is the pits
The Stone of Heaven: the secret history of imperial green jade by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pounds 20) The Independent - United Kingdom; Jul 2, 2001
BY JUSTIN WINTLE
IN JULY 1998, an extraordinary article appeared in the magazine section of The Mail on Sunday. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark had somehow managed to penetrate Myanmar's most guarded site.
In the heart of what used to be called Upper Burma, they had visited a complex of valleys where a prized strain of jade was mined for the mainly Chinese market. But the tale they told was scarcely one of simple extraction. At Hpakant, the callousness of the Rangoon regime was grotesquely manifest.
From all over Myanmar, workers had been dragooned into a sealed system of profit and death. In a sprawling shanty city wages were part-paid in heroin and the rest spent on prostitutes. Needles were scarce (a solitary and illegal doctor estimated the share-rate as 800:1) and condoms disparaged. Among miners, a near-100 per cent HIV infection rate pertained. The few who escaped returned to their villages to spread the virus.
The whole show was not only sanctioned but organised by the generals.The army provided the heroin and licensed both shooting galleries and brothels. It also milked fat profits, either by mining the best seams itself, or taxing Chinese entrepreneurs.
For serious Burma-watchers, all this was and wasn't a revelation. The authors' exposures tallied too well with data filtering out of Myanmar, and with the growing acceptance that a regime that claimed to be fighting narcotics was overseeing their manufacture. But what astonished and dismayed was the sheer scale. Hpakant's floating, dying population was around a million.
How did Levy and Scott-Clark gain access? In The Stone of Heaven, they describe how, having been blacklisted as journalists, they forged fresh credentials as gem prospectors and returned through the front door. From there it was a matter of paying bribes: a scary ploy, given that no other Westerner had been allowed near Hpakant, but one that paid off. Accompanied by a bullying English-speaking corporal, they got to the mines.
This scoop is now expanded into the most damning chapters I have yet to read about Myanmar's criminal government. Greed, oppression, corruption and concealment are the only instincts of Rangoon's self-enriching militocracy. But the same chapters form only a quarter of the narrative, albeit the culminating quarter. The bulk is given over to the extraterritorial story of Burma's "imperial green jade", from the 18th century onwards.
Presumably, the purpose is to treat the reader to the largest possible tapestry of first oriental, then Western, venality, as a way of showing why Hpakant exists. Levy and Scott-Clark take us on a whirlwind tour of recent Chinese history. Cixi the Dowager Empress, Barbara Hutton and Madame Chiang Kai-shek are just some of the ghouls who crowd their pages. But,as historians, their skills lag way behind their talents as investigative reporters.
Mao Zedong was not a founder of the Chinese Communist Party, any more than foot-binding existed during the Han dynasty. Cixi mounted her "charm offensive" against Western diplomats after, not before, the Boxer rebellion of 1900. But if there are elementary errors, then so too do the broad brushstrokes fail, beginning with the Chinese emperor Qianlong's foreign policy. While he may indeed have been obsessed with Burmese jade, to infer that this was the overriding motive of his Burmese strategy is mistaken. Rather, he pursued a well-established programme of shoring up China's landward defences, and denying Ming loyalists space in which to operate.
Levy and Scott-Clark's vision of the past is speculative and tendentious, as though the bare mention of jade were sufficient explanation. Conversely, sifting through forgotten archives in New Delhi, they do shed light on early British activities in Upper Burma, while their wicked sketches of contemporary dealers - Christie's and Sotheby's as well as less honoured names in Hong Kong and Taiwan - are polemically valid. Compared, however, to their unquestionably heroic exploits in Hpakant, the surround does less than justice to the stone.