Word: rangoon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...rough and unfamiliar plainness. His head is round, his mouth seems rather large for his face, and his brown eyes fix visitors with peculiar intentness. His manner is sedate; his piety is apparent, and sincere. He betrays no concern that a Rangoon magazine is currently serializing a novel called Man the Wolf of Man (written in 1943) with a remarkable autobiographical preface by its author...
...University of Rangoon, where he graduated in philosophy, U Nu wrote sonnets, "mostly to lampoon rival football teams," and read avidly-Shaw, Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, Karl Marx. Then he became a schoolteacher, wrote some plays with Freudian themes, and directed his sonnets at Mya Yi, the school board chairman's daughter, with whom he later eloped. Under the spell of a learned Rangoon editor named U Ba Cho, the young playwright got interested in both Buddhism and his country's fight for independence. The zealotry of his politics and religion astonished his friends...
...Friends. The fight for freedom was a young man's fight: Burma's middle class and middle-aged were standing aside, and the University of Rangoon's young radicals could go far. U Nu re-entered the university as a graduate law student. One year later he was leading the celebrated Students' Strike of 1936, burning the Union Jack before Rangoon's colonial Law Courts. U Nu joined the intensely nationalist "We Burmans" Society, whose members defiantly called each other "Thakin" (or "master"), the word the British expected subservient Burmese to call the white...
...behind Burma's stars lurked violence: on July 19, 1947, three assassins strolled casually into Rangoon's Secretariat, burst into the council chamber and sprayed the ministers with Sten-gun bullets ; General Aung San and six of his colleagues were killed, and nowhere in all Burma, it seemed, could experienced men be found to replace them. Unwillingly, a would-be playwright laid aside his pen. "I am glad to inform you," the British governor told the saddened land, "that Thakin Nu has agreed to form a new council...
...astrologers), Burma's six-starred flag arose in total independence from the British Empire. Only two other nations had so quit the Empire before: Eire and the 13 American Colonies. The British governor drove off through the crowded streets to H.M.S. Birmingham, and that night in Rangoon, the nation rejoiced ; musicians beat ancient drums with sticks made from lions' bones, and surging, golden-skinned Burmese chanted their national anthem...