The foreign secretary was caught on camera in Myanmar being a klutz again. But despite the furore, the poem Mandalay wasn’t an argument for colonialism
During the foreign secretary’s visit to Myanmar last January his hosts in the former capital, Yangon, took him across town to see the Shwedagon Pagoda, which as the repository of eight hairs from the head of Gautama Buddha is Myanmar’s most sacred Buddhist site as well as a piece of spectacular architecture, gilded and bejewelled, that has been a prominent feature of the city’s skyline for at least 10 centuries. Rudyard Kipling wrote of his visit to Yangon (then Rangoon) in 1889 that “a golden mystery upheaved itself on the horizon, a beautiful winking wonder that blazed in the sun, of a shape that was neither Muslim dome nor Hindu temple-spire … Under what new god, thought I, are we irrepressible English sitting now?”
Boris Johnson’s reaction to the pagoda, so far as we understand it, wasn’t quite so verbose. Perhaps it might be described as irrepressibly English. A now famous piece of footage in last Sunday’s Channel 4 documentary Blond Ambition shows him being taken round the temple with the British ambassador, Andrew Patrick, when he is invited to hit an enormous bell. Johnson obliges, the bell tolls, and the voiceover says that the sound “seems to dislodge some half-remembered verses” from Johnson’s childhood. Cut to Johnson, surrounded by a small crowd of dignitaries, reciting “The temple bells they say / Come you back, you English soldier” – lines the voiceover identifies as fragments from “the pro-colonial classic poem” Mandalay, by Kipling. As Johnson continues his recitation, the ambassador warns that a microphone is picking up his words, and that the poem probably isn’t a good idea. “What? The Road to Mandalay?” asks Johnson. “No, not appropriate,” says the ambassador.
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