Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1270182 in Books
• Published on: 1996-12-31
• Binding: Hardcover
• 390 pages

Synopsis
This is an account of a perilous 2275 kilometre journey through northern and eastern Burma, made by the author and his wife in the 1980s. It documents the Kachin and Shan states' 40-year war against Burmese army rule.

Customer Reviews

A gripping tale of real exploration in modern times
Most of us accept that the great feats of exploration more or less ended with Fleming and Maillart's trek across Tartary in 1935 and Thesiger's traverses of the Rub al-Khali in the late forties. Our nostalgia for Bruce, Mungo Park, Livingstone, Baker and those other demigods of intrepidity and daring is imputable, at least partly, to the fact that few places remain to be explored.
Northern Burma must be one of them. At an horoscopically chosen moment before dawn on 4 January 1948 Burma received its independence. Eleven weeks later the Communist rebellion erupted. Before another year passed the Karens, Mons, Karennis, Pa-Os and some units of the Kachin Rifles revolted. The Shans came in in 1958 and, three years later, the Kachins. As the insurgency among the hill tribes on the borders spread, the Burman government in Rangoon became increasingly insular and zenophobic, and, when Ne Win expelled the missionaries (1962-65), outside contact with most of them ceased. It was into their hidden areas that Bertil Lintner, a Swedish journalist, and his Shan wife, Hseng Noung, ventured in 1987.
Indian Nagas linked with the National Socialist Council of Nagaland smuggled them to Kohima, where Mrs. Lintner gave birth to a daughter and Mr. Lintner was concealed under a bed, and across the border at Longva, near Mon. NSCN guerrillas escorted them to their headquarters, which was attacked by the Burmese Army shortly after the arrival there of a column of the Kachin Independence Army. Two KIA soldiers (who were among those to whom the book is dedicated) died in this engagement. The column's survivors escorted them through the Hukawng Valley to KIA 2 Bde HQ on the Tanai Hka (Upper Chindwin), and other KIA columns over the Kumon Range and through the Triangle to KIA GHQ, then located at Na Hpaw in the Sima Hills. At KIA GHQ they met and interviewed the Kachins' leaders, Brang Seng and Zau Mai, and the half Indian leader of the Shan States Army, Sai Lek, and later, at Panghsang, on the Nam Hka in Kentung State opposite the Yunnanese village of Meng A, the near legendary leader of the now almost defunct Communist Party of Burma, Ba Thein Tin. In the company of Gen. Kyi Myint, an ex-Red Guard who commanded the Northern Bureau of the CPB's Peoples Army, Mr. Lintner witnessed an attack on Burmese Army units dug into positions overlooking the Lashio-Wanting sector of the Burma Road. They eventually managed to reach Jinghong in Yunnan, whence, after the Swedish Embassy interceded with the Chinese government, they were deported to Hong Kong one year, six months and six days after entering Burma.
Land of Jade: A Journey Through Insurgent Burma is therefore what its title promises, a tale of original adventure in which Mr. Lintner, who has now authored six books and numerous articles on Burma, has managed to include uniquely authoritative and original observations on the Naga, Kachin and Wa struggles for dignity in their own land.