LASHIO

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4529, 28 January 1942, Page 7

LASHIO

SUDDEN PROSPERITY FROM THATCH-ROOFED VILLAGE (By W.G.8.) Lashio is a town which has had greatness thrust upon it. There seems to be no special reason why the railway from Rangoon and Mandalay should have been extended as far as Lashio, except that the latter is administrative centre for the Northern Shan States, and consequently the resident town of the British superintendent. Until a few months ago it was a thatched-roof village, and the only accommodation for passing travellers was one of the Dak bungalows provided throughout the country by the Government. Now there are a dozen hotels in every main street. It resembles a town of the Wild West—a boom town of the gold-rush days, with stone double-story buildings going up beside the original bamboo plaited huts. It is bursting and toppling with activity. Trucks roll and swerve along narrow tracks built for bullock carts. Drivers curse and swear as they are pushed dangerously near the edge of precipitous cuttings. There is no plan to the place. Streets twist and wind according to the whim of the bullock-drivers and the tracks cut by their woodenwheeled waggons. Everybody is busy making money out of the boom which has struck the town. From the traders who sell to people stocking up in tooth paste, razor blades, and blankets at this last stop before China, to those with battered old touring cars who have set up as taxi drivers, everybody is raking in cash while the going is good. Prices are the maximum that can be extracted. Everything has to be bargained for. The hotel at which I am staying has been built only a few months. Within a stone’s throw of the front door is a clump of bamboo huts where villagers are carrying on their life as their forbears did a thousand years ago. The hotel has bare concrete walls and floors and no bathroom, but the tariff is 37s 6d per day. A CHANGED LIFE Prosperity has come to Lashio, and with prosperity all sorts of things new in the life of the Shan people. They wander about the town, bewildered by all that is going on. I saw one old couple standing hand in hand gazing raptly at two of their more sophisticated countrymen as they sawed through a steel girder with a hacksaw. One sees groups of them squatting about, their huge-brimmed double hats pushed back on their heads, watching builders and mechanics at work with evident amazement.

Life is seen at its best in the market place. Here the villagers come in the covered bullock waggon to sell their sparse products. A few mar-ble-sized tomatoes, ginger roots, egg plants, paw-paw, and green oranges are offered on mats spread out on the ground. The womenfolk are left in charge of the stalls, while the men wander about, probably to see what bargains can be picked up among those new stalls recently set up by Chinese and Indian traders.

Beads, padlocks, aluminium spoons, pocket knives, safety pins—all sorts of things never dreamed of before—can be touched and fingered. The women have on their best festival clothes the Palaungs with handwoven red and black trousers, which cling tightly to their calves and reach within six inches of their ankles; the Kachins, with bare legs, short black coatees, and heavy skirts which fall within a few inches of the ground. Round their heads, if they are married, is wrapped a turban of light cloth. A shopping bag hangs down their back, with its long, broad carrying strap coming up over the head, forming another head dress. Heads are hard and well adapted for carrying weights. THE MOUNTAIN PEOPLE These mountain women have a wild, gypsy-like beauty, with their round faces, orange-coloured smooth skin, and beautiful deep brown eyes. If they are virgin, their lank dark hair is parted in the middle, and falls in a bob to their shoulders. They smile more frequently than in other parts—possibly because they, too, have a share in Lashio’s new-found prosperity. Everybody smiles here, and cheating is carried on in a more friendly spirit than in any other place I know. The taxi driver who demanded five rupees from me for a drive worth two did so with the friendliest of smiles, as if knowing he had no hope of getting such an exorbitant fare. He smiled just as broadly when I called him a thief and gave him three rupees. ON THE ROAD Lashio is likely to be a boom town for some time to come. At present there are between 1500 and 20Q0

trucks on the Burma Road every day of the week. Within a few months it is hoped to increase these figures, which means more traffic and consequently .more money for Lashio. The whole of the traffic organisation is being overhauled, so that the dozens of governmental and semi-govern-mental transport companies operating the road will be centralised in one single organisation. American transport experts are helping to organise a more efficient system, not only to improve the existing service by arranging servicing facilities to prolong the life of the trucks, but also to make possible a smooth functioning of the enormously increased traffic the road will soon have to bear.

Private transport companies had been making small fortunes out of the traffic until recently. The governmental and semi-governmental concerns can handle Government freight only

at a set rate. Private companies were taking in ordinary commercial goods at a price two or three times that of the Government charges—a price willingly paid by private firms, who have no other way of importing goods. This has now been stopped, and all trucks must carry exclusively Government goods. If the Burma Road set Lashio on the map, the Burma-Chinese railway will make it a permanent international fixture. Of the railway little has been heard, but here in Lashio one quickly becomes aware of its existence. Much preliminary work hats already been done on this line, which will link Lashio by rail with Humming and eventually Chungking. Th e Chinese have about 300 miles to build, the British far less. The Chinese boast they will have their section built first. Sleepy old Lashio, with its lovely

purple hills and bamboo-clad valleys, with its quiet market place and lum-

bering bullock carts, is being shaken and pushed into shape by the march of world events, which pass over the heads of the inhabitants without touching them. The bamboo village has become a world transportation centre, with goods from the seven seas passing through its winding streets in an unceasing stream. The last picture I have of it is looking back along the road as our car leaves for Kumming. The valleys are filled with heavy rolls of white mist, an orange-pinkish band of sky shows between mauve mountains and equally mauve clouds. Just behind us an ancient Palaung tribesman is urging his bullocks up a slope to regain the road, from which he has been pushed by our driver. Ahead is an endless line '! of trucks, bound for the most bombed city in the world—Chungking.