The Strand Hotel, Yangon

“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.” – Aung San Suu Kyi

Editor’s Note: There is another challenge to the New Administration in Washington, which is a new Administration in Myanmar, a nation once known as Burma. There is speculation about how it will be handled, Chinese issues, and it seemed appropriate to being up my preferred hotel in Yangon, which used to be known as Rangoon. I will try to keep it to that this morning. The book it came from- “Boondoggle” will be published shortly.

– Vic

Roxy Music and Brian Ferry did a song a thousand years ago called “Do the Strand.”

It came out the year I graduated from college and began to wander the wide world. It was the first song on the second album, For Your Pleasure. The tune starts abruptly, without fanfare, and it attempted, successfully, to get me to spontaneously begin to jerk spasmodically in something that I imagined might be “the Strand. ”

Back then, Burma was still Burma, and if we thought about the place we thought of be-speckled UN General Secretary U Thant, who rose to the position in 1961 after dashing Dag Hammerskjold died in a plane crash. Mr. Thant- the “U” is an honorific, by the way, really only had one name, like a rock star. He died of lung cancer in New York the year after the song was issued. He was not welcome back home, and though he might have heard the tune, I don’t know if he ever listened to alternative music.

I did wind up doing the Strand, in a place now called Yangon. I had a thoroughly minor role in the temporary liberation of a Nobel Laureate, and when things get ugly in that country, as they do with discouraging regularity, I like to think that sometimes even when you make a difference, it doesn’t matter.

I am filled with awe at the courage and dignity of The Lady. I was escorting one of the current Presidential candidates at the time, who was then a Congressman who ran his own sort of private State Department. He was a progressive then and now, and pragmatic, though he has currently had to stake out political territory to the left of Hillary and Barak, which is fairly well out there.

He should get the credit for springing Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, but I got him the visa to do it, and arranged the trip, and I am particularly proud of the hotel.

My hobby then was to collect stays at great hotels. On that particular junket we got the Oriental in Bangkok, the Metropole in Hanoi, the Rex in Saigon, and the fabulous Peninsular in Hong Kong for a little down-time before heading to Beijing and Pyongyang.

I did some research on lodging in Yangon at my desk on the fifth floor of the Pentagon. It was not as easy as things are now. It was 1995, and Myanmar had been closed since 1988 when strongman Ne Win stepped down and the modern trouble began.

I had contact with some Burmese folks in New York who made the recommendation to stay at The Strand, at 92 Strand Road in Yangon. One of the family would accompany the delegation on that leg of the trip, a woman named Mimi. She was a graceful lady who turned out to be the granddaughter of Mr. Thant.

It was a curious business, the whole thing.

Of all people, Hillary Clinton was involved in it as well. The Congressman was riding with the First Lady on a trip to Kirkland Air Force Base, since he represented that District then. I was supposed to scoop him up after Air Force Two landed, and deliver him to LAX, where we would jump on an Eva Air 747 and fly to Taipei for further transportation to Yangon on one of his unofficial missions.

It sounds wildly improbable today, though I have a little crystal cow that was given to us in the First Class section of the airplane by a pert Chinese flight attendant, and I recall the men from the non-Embassy on Taiwan who came to meet the Congressman in the transit lounge before transferring to Royal Thai Air for the leg onward to Myanmar.

The Country Team met us there in Rangoon, and I will stop being politically correct. The people on the ground called it Burma, and that is the way I will always think of it. They began to talk immediately in the sedans, the situation being as unsettled that week as it is today. There was no US Ambassador, a protest over the State Law and Order Restoration Committee’s dictatorship.

That made it harder for the diplomats who had to deal with the situation in person, which is one of the many things they told us in a series of surreal briefings at the Embassy. I don’t know about Calvin and Mimi, the other two members of the party, but I was dead exhausted and seeing the white façade of the Strand Hotel was about the nicest thing I had ever seen when the official sedan finally dropped us off.

When Burma was still a part of British India, the Strand was the finest hotel in all Mandalay. It was built to the highest standards of the Raj in 1901 by the Sarkies, the Armenian brothers who also owned the Raffles Hotel in Singapore.

I would have booked us there, too, if Singapore had been suffering some egregious human-rights issue worthy of the Congressman’s attention. So much injustice, so many hotels, so little time.

We were going to do the Strand.

The Strand was an elegant colonial palace, all native teak and white marble. It was the favorite of the British rulers and a symbol of Rangoon’s wealth. It hit the skids during the Japanese Occupation, when the bar was used as a stable, and then went further downhill after 1947, the year that The Lady’s father, General Aung San negotiated independence from the White Queen. He did not survive the year. Rivals assassinated him two months after. The Strand’s clientele turned more to the back-pack set as decades of decrepitude followed the slow-motion freezing of Burmese society.

The Junta was determined to turn thing around with tightly controlled tourism. They turned to Adrian Zecha of Amanresorts who led the restoration in 1993. It was a Herculean task to clean out the Augean stables, but he delivered the Strand as the flagship residence for the capital, polished like the gemstones that the regime depends on for export trade.

When the porters dragged the bags in, the hotel was a vision in ivory white and polished hardwoods. The central lobby soared up seven floors to the roof. Palms and rattan furniture were placed tastefully against the dark wood. It reeked of colonial opulence, or perhaps that is just the smell of the brass polish and the oil that makes the wood gleam.

We were supposed to meet the SLORC the next day, and the Country Team was clearly nervous about what the Congressman might get them into. There were Burmese who wanted to talk privately, of course, and arrangements had to be made for sedans in the night.

U Thant’s granddaughter was there to ensure that we saw the right people, and the SLORC had attached the last American-trained military officer to the party to make sure they knew precisely what was going on. The only person we really wanted to see was The Lady, but she was locked down in her residence, surrounded by troops, under house arrest.

The bellmen carried the luggage up to the rooms, where a butler waited on each landing to cater to our every whim. The rooms were perfect period pieces, more teak and rattan, big comfy beds, ceiling fans, and colonial shutters. I booked a table in the Grill for later, after an attempt to catch a few winks. There was no need. It was expensive enough that we were just about the only people there, and the scallops and lobster thermidor were perfectly splendid.

We had a fine cigar in the lobby afterwards. That late in the year the temperature had cooled nicely, and the streets outside were still. The Sedan was going to take us to meet an old Colonel who had no fear and wanted to get the Congressman a message from the opposition to take back to Washington. Shortly after midnight, we left the Strand for someplace in the darkness, accompanied only by a tail of SLORC security goons who did not have to bother to be discrete.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
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