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 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?”
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