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that I look back with the keenest interest and pleasure to the events which at the time were torture 
unassuaged. 
Imagine, then, how I gloried in the low of the silken waters about the ship, in the fantastically 
immaterial outlines of the Arakan hills, in the gloom of the gracious frondage of the forests, in the 
curves of the cobra coast, in the sinister stories of wreck and piracy which haunt that desolate abyss 
through which we were steaming, where for nine months of the year one can scarce distinguish 
between sky and sea, so dark and damp is the air, so subtly steaming the swell of ocean; while 
beyond, as in a hashish dream, arose the highlands of china, provinces all but unknown even to 
civilized Chinese themselves. There, primrose to purple, was the promise of undreamed-of tribes of 
men, strangely tattooed and dressed, with awful customs and mysterious rites, beyond imagination 
and yet brutally actual, folk with sublimity carven of simplicity and depravity woven of the most 
complex madness. 
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I went toward China, my veins bursting with some colossal bliss that I had never yet experienced. I 
boiled with love for the unknown, the more so that my brain was overcharged with grisly imaginings 
bred of Octave Mirbeau's Le Jardin des Supplices, combined with fervid actualities born of the 
feeling that I was (after all) treading, though reverently and afar off, in the footsteps of my 
boyhood's hero, Richard Francis Burton. 
The approaches to Rangoon are of the most turbulent kind. The river is always the same violent 
angry dirty flood. It seems to be desperately annoyed with itself about something, possibly at having 
to pass through Rangoon, which is a wretchedly provincial and artificial town, saved from utter 
insignificance by one crowing glory, the Shwe Dagon pagoda. 
The Buddhists of Burma cannot be induced to do anything which might contribute to their welfare 
or that of their religion; but they are ridiculously lavish in building new dagobas or regilding old 
ones. Shortly before my arrival an immense sum of money had been collected to lay plate of pure 
gold on the Htee of the Shwe Dagon, and while this operation was in progress, a tigress indiscreetly 
walked into the city one night, climbed the scaffolding and was shot by an Englishman. The outrage 
to the community, which objects to the slaying, even by accident, of an insect, was causing serious 
political trouble. Their most holy shrine defiled by deliberate murder! There was also considerable 
friction between the petty English authorities and the Buddhist ponggis of European extraction who 
were trying to settle in Rangoon, live the holy life and revive Buddhism as a missionary religion. 
European officials in a colony are necessarily nuisances to themselves; the consequently try to pass 
it on to somebody else, on the principle of school bullies --- the prototype of the administration. 
I personally met with the greatest courtesy and kindness from the authorities in Burma, but the 
country is not so settled socially as India, and the climate is so abominable that there is every 
excuse for irritability on the part of anyone unfortunate enough to have to live there. It is, 
however, a pity that the administration should look with such provincial suspicion upon people like 
Allan Bennett, that they should fancy political dangers when a European chooses to study native 
religion. This disfavour extended to their own officials whenever they happened to have sufficient 
intelligence to take a sympathetic interest in the people and their customs and beliefs. Fielding 
Hall, a judge, found himself quite unpopular in official circles on account of his excellent though 
somewhat sentimental book The Soul of a People. 
The Englishman in all the colonies that I have visited, except in India, which is not a colony, is 
childishly jealous of his supposed superiority to the native. He has convinced himself that he 
represents a step ahead in evolution and he is fantastically afraid of "going fanti"; so he has his knife 
into anyone who has a good word to say for the people. 
{461} 
Allan Bennett, by becoming a Buddhist monk, was a lining witness that some Europeans thought 
Burmese beliefs better than their European equivalents; and the idea --- so far as an idea may be