Unhiding a hidden land

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, botany, nations

One of the first songs my voice teacher in my teenage years had me prepare for a recital was "The Road to Mandalay", based on an 1892 poem by Rudyard Kipling. I did not know at the time that Mandalay was a former capital city of Burma, now named Myanmar. I didn't even bother to wonder what kind of road would have flying fishes playing! Only this week did I learn that the "road" was the Irawaddy River, which is navigable nearly from its headwaters in the Himalayas to its huge delta in the Bay of Bengal. It is the main "road" from Yangon (formerly Rangoon) to Mandalay and points north.

I learned about this "road" while reading The Weeping Goldsmith: Discoveries in the Secret Land of Myanmar by W. John Kress, a botanist with the Smithsonian Institution. The first chapter is about the Weeping Goldsmith, or padeign gno in Burmese, which is a folk name for Globba magnifica, a ginger plant highly prized for its flowers. Legend has it that no goldsmith has been able to produce a golden replica of this flower, and one who tries will end up weeping.

Dr. Kress is an expert in gingers. To those of us who know only Zingiber officinale as the spice Ginger, it may come as a surprise that the family Zingiberacea comprises 1,300+ species so far known. Many have uses as medicines or spices. The spices Turmeric and Cardamom are from this family, all of which the author calls gingers. On his expeditions to Myanmar from 1993 until 2002, he and his colleagues discovered dozens of new ginger species and a many more other new species of plant.

In addition to the ordinary apparatus of a scholarly book, an appendix illustrates 25 interesting (non-ginger) plants known chiefly from Myanmar, and 25 species of gingers and ginger relatives. Though I call this book scholarly, it is very readable, in the tradition of classic works such as Half Mile Down or Voyage of the Beagle. It is not a highly technical monograph, but a travelogue through the seasons of the year in Myanmar, gleaned from many visits, but focusing on the monsoon, because gingers sprout and flower during the rainy season. They're rather hard to find in the dry season.

Dr. Kress's colleague U Thet Htun, shown here with his family, was a great help to the author with the logistics and contacts needed to make several of his collecting trips. The honorific U formally means "uncle", but is used like we use "Mr.", though more frequently. The feminine honorific "Daw" corresponds to our "Ms". These prefixes are used throughout the book because Burmese names do not convey any sense of gender the way most Western names do.

U Thet Htun's wife and child are wearing a concoction of thanakha, made from the bark of the citrus Hesperethusa crenulata. It is much used as a sunscreen, and its attractive pale yellow color makes it a popular cosmetic also. It is painted on the face in intricate designs, much the way henna is used in Europe.

Myanmar may be the most intensely Buddhist country in the world. This vista of the plains near Bagan shows a few hundred of the thousands of pagodas to be found just in this area, and there must be many tens of thousands of pagodas throughout this small country (its area is similar to that of Texas).

A side story comes to mind. When we lived in South Dakota, we found that it was not too hard to drive to areas in which our presence and that of the road were the only signs of human life, right to the horizon in all directions. While driving to Oklahoma in 1986, by mid-Nebraska I realized that I could always see at least three or four grain silos, showing the locations of the towns and small cities. Skip eight years. On a business trip I visited Germany, near Aachen. I noticed while driving to Aachen from Düsseldorf, in very flat country, that it "felt" like Oklahoma. I looked around with new eyes, seeing towers in all directions, seven or eight of them: they were cathedral spires! That was the impression of western Germany that sticks with me: a land littered with cathedrals the way midwestern America is littered with grain silos…or church steeples.

I don't think the density of church steeples in America rivals this display of Buddhist pagodas, however. Buddhists don't "go to church" the way Christians do. They strive to live a life of merit, so as to earn a better station in their next incarnation. No Buddhist wants to live as a jerk and return as a mosquito. This has been fortuitous for forestry. The lands surrounding pagodas are considered sacred, and all the people take at least nominal care of them. But times are changing, as the Epilogue notes, and Myanmar's teak forests are being logged and trucked to China.

During his visits, Dr. Kress was able not only to collect and record specimens, but also to train numbers of young botanists and foresters. A few visiting scholars can do only so much. It is the people of Myanmar who must preserve its forests…or not.

One sign of the growing commerce with China is signs such as this, in Western letters, Chinese, and Burmese (this is the name of a town). Though the Burmese language is tonal and monosyllabic, like Chinese, it is written with a phonetic script, one that I find pleasingly loopy. They use consonants in combinations we find difficult to imagine pronouncing (such as in the name Htun), and have 33 consonants, including one that cannot be described in English! Then there are the 16 vowel sounds. At least a couple of these require an English tongue to do things that make it ache until one gets into practice.

Nonetheless, the author learned the language well enough to carry on basic conversation, and to follow the gist of others' conversations. He has hopes to return to a country and culture so different from his own.