MAYMYO DAYS

STEPHEN SIMMONS

Description

Hill. Station. Two ordinary, utilitarian words, yet words which when conjoined, create an exotic exciting vision of those days when the subjects of the British Colonial Government gloried in the Hill Stations of India and Burma.

Beautifully constructed rest, recuperation and holiday towns all built at 3,000 feet or more where people flocked to escape the heat of the plains. India had Simla, Java had Buitenzorg, Penang had the Crag and Cambodia had Bokor. Burma had Maymyo, high up in the Shan hills east of Mandalay.

All of these Hill Stations attracted some characterful people, but there was something about Maymyo, something indefinable, something in the air perhaps which seemed to attract some extraordinary, gifted, capable, artistic, often courageous individuals.

This book tells the stories of some of those people for whom Maymyo really was a heaven ‘lost in the clouds’.

 “Maymyo Days is one of those invaluable books that rescues stories from the scrapheap of history and opens a window onto a world and lives long gone. Through photographs, paintings and ephemera gleaned from a wide range of archives and private collections, Stephen Simmons brings ‘old Maymyo’ back to sparkling life. By all accounts, Maymyo was a magical place and this charming book conjures it up splendidly.”

Emma Larkin, author of Finding George Orwell in Burma