The trouser people

By Andrew Marshall

Subjects: Journeys, Description and travel, History

Description: Part travelogue, part history, part reportage, The Trouser People is an enormously appealing and vivid account of Sir George Scott, the unsung Victorian adventurer who hacked, bullied, and charmed his way through uncharted jungle to help establish British colonial rule in Burma. Born in Scotland in 1851, Scott was a die-hard imperialist with a fondness for gargantuan pith helmets and a bluffness of expression that bordered on the Pythonesque. But, as Andrew Marshall discovered, he was also a writer and photographer of rare sensibility. Scott spent a lifetime documenting the tribes who lived in Burma's vast wilderness like the Padaung "giraffe women" and the headhunting Wild Wa, who claimed, curiously, to be descended from tadpoles. His book The Burman, first published in 1882, is still in print today. Scott not only mapped the lawless frontiers of this "geographical nowhere" -- the British Empire's easternmost land border with China -- but he widened the imperial goalposts in another way: he introduced soccer to Burma, where today it is a national obsession. Inspired by Scott's unpublished diaries, Andrew Marshall retraces the explorer's intrepid footsteps from the moldering colonial spendor of Rangoon to the fabled royal capital of Mandalay. In the process he discovers modern Burman (Myranmar), a hermit nation misruled by a brutal military dictatorship, its soldiers, like the British colonialists before them, nicknamed "the trouser people" by the country's sarong-wearing civilians. Wonderfully observed, mordantly funny, and skillfully recounted, The Trouser People is an offbeat and thrilling journey through Britain's lost heritage -- and a powerful expose of modern Burma's tragedy. - Jacket flap.