Product Description

An unforgettable adventure story of two journeys, one hundred years apart, into the untraveled heart of Burma.

Part travelogue, part history, part reportage, The Trouser People is an enormously appealing and vivid account of Sir George Scott, the unsung Victorian adventurer who hacked, bullied, and charmed his way through uncharted jungle to help establish British colonial rule in Burma. Born in Scotland in 1851, Scott was a die-hard imperialist with a fondness for gargantuan pith helmets and a bluffness of expression that bordered on the Pythonesque. But, as Andrew Marshall discovered, he was also a writer and photographer of rare sensibility. He spent a lifetime documenting the tribes who lived in Burma's vast wilderness and is the author of The Burman, published in 1882 and still in print today. He also not only mapped the lawless frontiers of this "geographical nowhere"-the British Empire's easternmost land border with China-but he widened the imperial goalposts in another way: he introduced soccer to Burma, where today it is a national obsession. Inspired by Scott's unpublished diaries, Andrew Marshall retraces the explorer's intrepid footsteps from the moldering colonial splendor of Rangoon to the fabled royal capital of Mandalay. In the process he discovers modern Burma, a hermit nation misruled by a brutal military dictatorship, its soldiers, like the British colonialists before them, nicknamed "the trouser people" by the country's sarong-wearing civilians. Wonderfully observed, mordantly funny, and skillfully recounted, The Trouser People is an offbeat and thrilling journey through Britain's lost heritage-and a powerful exposé of Burma's modern tragedy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #982262 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-12
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .88 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Amazon.com
In The Trouser People, Andrew Marshall recounts his ambitious crisscrossing of contemporary Burma, which emerges as isolated, heartbreaking, fitfully resilient, and, to Western eyes, certainly, often exotically unfathomable. Marshall's compass is the life of a now-obscure Victorian adventurer, Sir George Scott. He draws distinct parallels between British imperialism and Burma's crushing, present-day military dictatorship. But The Trouser People is less analysis than witty, candid travelogue, highlighted by excursions into the remote territory of some of the country's many ethnic minorities. Most fascinating among these are the Wa, former headhunters who now control much of Burma's drug trade. Through their territory Marshall tramps in search of a mysterious lake, whose waters, Wa myth has it, were their birthplace.

This muscular, anecdotal narrative, by centering on individuals and the quotidian complexities of Burmese life, washes a country too often capsulized in black and white into bright color. --H. O'Billovitch

From Publishers Weekly
Beginning with an unusual Burmese monk who keeps a cell phone in his robes and negotiates with Thai border police regarding arms smuggled to the insurgent army fighting Burma's military regime, Marshall recounts his adventures in Burma over a five-year period, inspired by the diaries of late-19th-century Scottish adventurer Sir George Scott (The Burman). Scott furthered the interests of the British colonials (aka the trouser people) by mapping and photographing remote areas of Burma. As Marshall, chief Asian correspondent for British Esquire and coauthor of The Cult at the End of the World, follows in Scott's footsteps, he provides an informed history and his own observations of a country where most people "have never known true peace or true freedom." Burma is ruled by a brutal military dictatorship, and its democracy movement is symbolized by the house arrest in Rangoon of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi. Marshall retraces Scott's steps from Rangoon to Mandalay in 1880, when the despotic rule of King Thibaw, a reign that mirrors current political conditions, was coming to an end. All of the author's adventures will hold readers' interest, but his difficult journeys to tribal villages of the Shan Plateau, through drug-trafficking territory where head-hunting only ended in the 1970s, are particularly enthralling. Although Marshall's sardonic humor may not appeal to all, this is a valuable firsthand look at areas and living conditions in a country relatively unknown in the West. Avid readers of travel literature will love it.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Andrew Marshall lives in Asia and is the chief Asian correspondent for British Esquire. He is also the author of The Cult at the End of the World, a nonfiction account of the Asian Supreme Truth doomsday cult. He currently lives in Bangkok, Thailand.