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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Volume 2

LANGUAGE AND CONTROL

LANGUAGE AND CONTROL

ROGER FOWLER, BOB HODGE,

GUNTHER KRESS AND TONY TREW
First published in 1979 by Routledge and Kegan Paul
This edition first published in 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 1979 R.G. Fowler, G. R. Kress, A.A. Trew, R.I.V. Hodge
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-138-34952-0 (Set)

ISBN: 978-0-429-43466-2 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-34986-5 (Volume 2) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-43621-5 (Volume 2) (ebk)

Publisher’s Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this
reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies
may be apparent.
Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and
would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to
trace.
Language
and control

Roger Fowler · Bob Hodge ·

Gunther Kress · Tony Trew

Routledge & Kegan Paul

LONDON, BOSTON AND HENLEY
First published in I979
by Routledge €5 Kegan Paul Ltd
39 Store Street, London WCrE 7DD
Broadway House, Newtown Road,
Henley-on-Thames, OxonRG9 rEN and
9 Park Street, Boston, Mass. 02Io8, USA
Set in rr/I2 Monotype Ehrhardt 453
and printed and bound in Great Britain at
The Camelot Press Ltd, Southampton
© R. G. Fowler, G. R. Kress, A. A. Trew, R.I. V.Hodge
No part ofthis hook may be reproduced in
any form without permission from the
publisher, except for the quotation ofbrieJ
passages in criticism
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Language and control
I. Sociolinguistics
I. Fowler, Roger
JOI.2 1 I P40
ISBN o 7100 o288 2
 Contents

Preface I

I Orwellian linguistics 6
Bob Hodge and Roger Fowler
2 Rules and regulations 26
Roger Fowler and Gunther Kress
3 The social values of speech and writing 46
Gunther Kress
4 Interviews 63
Gunther Kress and Roger Fowler
5 The ideology of middle management 8r
Bob Hodge, Gunther Kress and Gareth Jones
6 Theory and ideology at work 94
Tony Trew
7 'What the papers say': linguistic variation and
ideological difference IIJ
Tony Trew
8 Newspapers and communities I$7
Bob Hodge
9 Birth and the community IJS
Bob Hodge
ro Criticallinguistics r8s
Roger Fowler and Gunther Kress
Notes 2I4

Index 223
Preface

This book explores three related proposttlons about the way

language functions in social and political practice. First, the lan-
guage which we use and which is directed to us embodies specific
views- or 'theories' -of reality. This thesis has been developed in
the writings of the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf.
Whorf applies it to whole languages: any speaker of Hopi (an
American Indian language) views the :<Vorld differently from any
speaker of English, he maintains, because the structures of the two
languages cut up the world in radically different ways. We show how
this works in varying choices of words and constructions within one
language. Different styles of speech and writing express contrasting
analyses and assessments in specific areas of experience: not total
world-views, but specialized systems of ideas relevant to events such
as political demonstrations, to processes such as employment and
bargaining, to objects such as material possessions and physical
environment.
Second, variation in types of discourse is inseparable from social
and economic factors. Different social strata and groups have differ-
ent varieties of language available to them. The same is true of
institutions and media. So the discourse of managers is different
from that of workers; the language of television news reporting
contrasts with that of pub or club conversation. These variations are
regular and, once this characteristic of language has been under-
stood, quite recognizable. Linguistic variations reflect and, what is
more, actively· express the structured social differences which give
rise to them. They express social meanings. Among these social
meanings are, importantly, the systems of ideas mentioned in the
first paragraph.
Third, language usage is not merely an effect or reflex of social
organization and processes, it is a part of social process. It constitutes
social meanings and thus social practices. Necessarily, we speak and
write and listen and read within actual social and interpersonal
contexts. If our discourse articulates social meanings, then the act of

I
PREFACE
articulation in.context affects the situations and relationships which
formed these r.1eanings in the first place. Very often the effect is to
reaffirm and consolidate existing social structures. A good example
of this conservative reinforcement is provided by interviews. In
typical interviews, there are marked differences between the speech
of interviewers and interviewees. These differences express the
socially ascribed status of the interviewer, and allow him or her to
manipulate the behaviour of the interviewee. There are both prac-
tical and ritual (ultimately practical also) functions in these inter-
actions. In practical terms, the interview is a mechanism of control of
one individual by another; the 'ritual' function is the reaffirmation of
the interviewer's right to control the interviewee, and this ritual is
part of the legitimation of the roles of 'more powerful' and 'less
powerful' which society has ascribed to the participants. Language
with its strong encoding of social meanings is then both a mediator
of interpersonal relationships and a force in the perpetuation of the
social relationships which underpin them.
Interviews are from our point of view not simply a random
example of the role of language in social practice. Their embodiment
of inequality of power and their use as an instrument of control make
them a typical example. A major function of sociolinguistic mechan-
isms is to play a part in the control of members of subordinate
groups by members of dominant groups. This control is effected
both by regulation and by constitution: by explicit manipulation and
by the creation of an apparent 'natural world' in which inequitable
relations and processes are presented as given and inevitable. Power
differential provides the underlying semantic for the systems of
ideas encoded in language structure. The provocativeness of this
fact is hardly noticed by the practitioners of sociolinguistics, the
academic discipline devoted to the study of language in society.
Sociolinguists are, therefore, at best naive in accepting the social
structures they describe as neutral, while at worst they collude in a
view of existing social structures as unchangeable. Our book was
designed not as yet another academic study in sociolinguistics so
much as a c0ntribution to the unveiling of linguistic practices
which are instruments in social inequality and the concealment of
truth.
This concern with language and control explains the inclusion of
our first essay, on George Orwell. Orwell recognized some of the
connections between langm..ge, ideas and social structure which are
at the centre of our argument, and in his nqvel I984 he explored the

2
 PREFACE
notion that language-structure could be mobilized to control or limit
thought. His concepts of 'doublethink', 'newspeak' and 'duckspeak'
rest on recognizable principles of language-patterning. However, a
broader range of linguistic devices, and, above all, the syntax of a
language, needs to be studied for a more comprehensive analysis of
the language of control. In the chapters which make up the bulk of
the work we attempt to describe the social, interpersonal and ideo-
logical functions of a much wider range of linguistic constructions
than Orwell refers to.
Our materials are all samples of real language drawn from a wide
variety of discourse contexts: newspapers, printed rules and regula-
tions, three different kinds of interview, a child's spoken response to
a story in a picture-book, even the minimal language of greetings
cards, birth registration certificates and newspaper birth announce-
ments. We show how linguistic structures are used to explore,
systematize, transform, and often obscure, analyses of reality; to
regulate the ideas and behaviour of others; to classify and rank
people, events and objects; to assert institutional or personal status.
Many of the processes mentioned here happen automatically, elud-
ing the consciousness of source and recipient. If they were generally
subject to conscious scrutiny, they would be less effective.. Since we
regard many of the effects as undesirable, one of our practical goals
is to expose these processes to open examination. This requires
some quite searching linguistic analysis, but not an enormously
complicated linguistic methodology.
The linguistic apparatus we have used is a composite of a number
of sources. The natural basis for this kind of work is a 'functional'
model, that is to say a theory of language which proposes that the
structures of language have developed in response to the communi-
cative needs that language is called upon to serve rather than a
linguistic model which assumes that structures are natural, universal
properties of the human mind and so unaffected by social function.
We have chosen the most fully developed of contemporary func-
tional theories, that of M. A. K. Halliday, whose recent work is very
compatible with our aims in insisting that the functions of linguistic
structures are based in social structure. Halliday's linguistic model is
still in the process of development, and we have freely selected from
it and adapted it to our purposes. We have also supplemented it with
concepts from other linguistic models: for instance, we have used
transformational descriptions of syntax where appropriate, and have
also taken concepts from speech act theory. We must emphasize

3
PREFACE
that we are not offering a full and definitive model, but a mode
of analysis which is still being refined and systematized, and which
at this stage aims at practical applicability rather than theoretical
neatness.
We believe that the apparatus is simple and consistent enough to
be applied by non-linguists in a ~do-it-yourself' critical linguistics of
texts which interest them professionally or personally. The fact that
discourse is social as well as linguistic, and provides so much of the
material used in sociological investigation,·· should make these
methods useful· as a means for extracting more from such materials
than linguistic theory has hitherto made· possible;

We began writing this book when all four authors were teaching at
the University of East Anglia, Norwich, around 1975, Much of the
material has been discussed in out undergraduate seminars and
lectures, and we owe much to our·students of that period for enrich.;.
ing and correcting our analyses. The linguistic theory emerged
through many valuable experiences of team-teaching shared by
various pairings of the authors, and many hours ofless struCtured
discussions which also helped us realize and develop our common
intellectual and practical aims.
The book was devised, planned and revised in a co-operative
mode; and we are all in general agreement about its contents and
claims. The individual chapters were written by the people to whom
they are attributed in the list of contents, but all were submitted to
the other authors for criticism, and most were extensively revised as
a result. There remain minor inconsistencies, but that is a conse-
quence of the provisional nature of the linguistic theory. Some differ-
ences in the area of social theory will also be evident. But this book
does not aim or claim to be a final, agreed, synthesis. It is a demon-
stration of work in progress towards what we regard as an original,
critical and practical theory of language in society.
Our thanks go to Susan Hoffman, and to Isobel Durrant and Bod
Wright, for recording, transcribing and discussing in essays the
interviews used in chapter 4; and to Gareth Jones for making avail-
able to us his research texts, on which chapter 5 is based, for
contributing to the writing of that chapter and for reading and
commenting on much of the other material from a sociologist's
perspective.

4
 PREFACE

A note on further reading

Language and control discusses questions which are the concern of

linguistics, sociolinguistics, sociology and political theory. However,
our approach does not fall within any of those disciplines as they are
traditionally conceived. In fact, it is strongly critical of the dominant
currents within the disciplines as they are presently constituted,
especially linguistics and sociolinguistics. Existing work which is to
some extent compatible with our approach is not completely so, or
not immediately so. For this reason we have decided not to select a
list of books recommended for supporting reading. However, we
have of course drawn many specific analytic concepts and terms
from the available theories, and our sources are given in the notes.
These references are not intended merely for documentation or
authority, and readers are strongly recommended to follow them up,
guided by the discussion in the particular points of our text where
they are introduced. Together, these references constitute our list of
recommended reading.

5
I · Orwellian linguistics
BOB HODGE and ROGER FOWLER

The Government have concluded that this section (section 2 of

the Official Secrets Act I9II) should be replaced by an
Official Information Act.
(Merlyn Rees, British Home Secretary,
Statement in House of Commons, 22 November 1976)

Our response to this statement contains simultaneously outrage and

a sense of its ordinariness. We habitually accept such perversions of
language from government officers and agencies, yet there is still a
sense of shock at the precision and openness of the lie, the naked
insanity of its logic. There is a word in English for this sort of thing:
Orwell's 'doublethink', from his great political novel I984. Short,
blunt and unerring, the word gives a liberating sense of control over
the phenomenon. Rees's Act, of course, recalls I984 unusually
closely. The 'Official Information Act' is designed to suppress rather
than publish information, just as Oceania's Ministry of Truth in
I984 is devoted to the falsification of historical records. Orwell's
novel is now part of our culture's understanding of itself, and even
people who have not read it can project its terms onto the West-
minster and Whitehall of the decade before 1984. But like Winston
Smith, the hero of the novel, we find the term is not so simple after
all. We think we know that Merlyn Rees must know it is a lie to call
'secrets' 'information', and we know that, even knowing this, we will
adopt the usage when the Act becomes law. We are sure- almost-
that Mr Rees must realize that the whole process conjures up the
world of I984, yet he can still get away with it, and like Winston
Smith we continue to accept an Oceanic regime.
But for a novel which has had such an impact on our general
consciousness about the language of politics, I984's analysis of this
topic is curiously underestimated. It is as if the talismanic words
'Newspeak', 'reality control' and 'doublethink' have passed too
quickly into the English language. They have been so memorable
that they make the novel seem redundant. As Orwell said of New-

6
 ORWELLIAN LINGUISTICS

speak, the extreme compression of the language eliminates the

complex of ideas in the full concept, which is neutralized and
replaced by something much simpler. But there are other reasons
why Orwell has proved difficult to interpret. One is the confusedly
partisan criticism that his work has received, and invites by its own
partisanship and contradictions. So Animal Farm, as a satire on
Soviet Russia, was seized on with delight by cold-war intellectuals
of the right, but Orwell claimed he really meant it to expose the
betrayers of the revolution, which would make it ultra-left rather
than reactionary. I984 has ·a similar ambiguity. Was he really pre-
dicting a horrific totalitarian society growing out of the rule of the
post-war Labour government ('Ingsoc' from 'English socialism')?
But the terms of his materialist analysis of the language and society
of Oceania come from a lifelong, if ambivalent, involvement in
left-wing politics and thought.
Another difficulty in interpreting Orwell's significance as a thinker
on language comes from the fact that his major contribution has the
form of a novel. He wrote a number of essays on the subject, but
these are brief, informal and insubstantial. On the basis of these
essays Orwell might seem like just another product of Eton, de-
nouncing the decay of the English language from the columns of the
Daily Telegraph. In his essays 'Politics and the English Language'
(Collected Essays, vol. IV, pp. 156-7o)1 and 'The English Language'
(Collected Essays, vol. III, pp. 40-6) he complains that English is 'in
a bad way' and in a state of 'temporary decadence', and protests
against such 'abuses' as dead metaphors, pretentious and foreign
diction, vacuous words, euphemisms, ready-made phrases, etc.:
modern writing ... consists in gumming together long strips of words
which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the
results presentable by sheer humbug ('Politics and the English Lan-
guage', ed. cit., p. 163).
Except for the useful abbreviations 'i.e.', 'e.g.', and 'etc.' there is no real
need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English
(ibid., pp. I6o-I)
American is a bad influence and has already had a debasing effect ('The
English Language', ed. cit., p. 45).
Such statements as these, articulated with Orwell's usual unrelent-
ing anger, sound as if they belong to a familiar conservative, purist
and chauvinistic tradition which stretches back to Sir John Cheke's
condemnation of 'inkhorn terms' in the sixteenth century. Orwell's

7
ORWELLIAN LINGUISTICS

patriotism and his pessimism lead to these negative and apparently

r~actionary judgments. But his real affiliation is with a line ()f
sceptical, critical thinking about the misuses of language which
overlaps. confusingly with the reactionary, .conservationist line in
that hoth share a similar list of alleged abuses. For the conservation-
ist, the threat is that the cultural values impregnated in English will
be superseded, weakened or obscured by misuse or ·tainting of the
language. For the critical thinker, the danger is that slovenly
language will inhibit thought and turn us into helpless victims of the
manipulators who currently hold power. On this point, Orwell's
ideas have affinities with, and in some cases are influenced by, the
arguments of such people as C. K. Ogden, I. A. Richards, Count
Korzybski and Stuart Chase. 2 Chase, for instance, passionately
warns us that words are not things, that a great deal of the language
to which we are exposed delivers no content but mere valueless
abstractions: political and commercial language is often mendacious,
pretending to deliver the goods but actually just giving vent to.noise
(cf. 'Duckspeak', below). One reason Ogden used to justify basic
English is that it
gives us a .chance of getting free from the strange power which words
have had over us from the earliest times; a chance of getting clear about
the processes by which our ideas become fixed forms of behaviour before
we ourselves are conscious of what history and society are making us say, 3
Orwell's list oflinguistic abuses given in 'Politics and the English
Language' contains examples of most of the misuses oflanguage that
have become the favourites of indignant letter-writers of any per-
suasion. Of dead metaphors like 'ring the changes on', 'take up the
cudgels for', he says 'many of these are used without knowledge of
thdr meaning'. Pretentious words - his examples include 'pheno-
menon', 'categorical', 'virtual'- 'are used to dress up simple state-
ments and given an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments'
and to 'dignify the sordid processes of international politics'. I-Ie
cites 'strictly meaningless' words in art criticism, and worse still,
political words like 'democracy', 'socialism', 'freedom' which are
'often used in a consciously dishonest way' and 'with intent to
deceive'. Summing up, he refers to 'this catalogue of swindles and
perversions'. This seems a vague and emotive judgment. However,
Orwell means what he says, and what he is saying is not essentially
conservative. His main targets are not Stalinists or long-haired
adolescents, but the leaders of English political and intellectual life,

8
 ORWELLIAN LINGUISTICS

who he believes are guilty of large-scale perversion of language, and

calculated acts of deception.
However, I984 is Orwell's major work onlanguage. The fact that
this work is a novel and not an essay or treatise raises special difficul-
ties of interpretation. A novel's content is refracted through its form.
It is anelementary kind of misreading to regard every opinion in a
nqvel as the author's, yet the majority ofcommentators on I984have
donejust that. The result has been to make himseem more definite
and more simple-minded thanhe was. But the id.eas in I984 always
hav~ a source in the novel itself, which is clearly distinguished from
the author's consciousness. The world of the novel is seen. mostly
through the eyes of Winston Smith, whos.e experience is totally
contaminated by the manipulative techniques of Ingsoc. Into the
narrative is.inserted a treatise by Goldstein, arch-heretic against Big
Brother, or probably another fiction from high up in Minitrue, the
Ministry of Propaganda. Attached to the work is an Appendix on
'Newspeak', the language programme of Oceania, Whose voice
speaks in the Appendix,- Orwell's? Hardly. These are the opinions
of an orthodox worker from the middle levels of Minitrue, someone
like Syme but less critical. Orwell himself is everywhere but
nowhere. The novel presents deliberately limited ideas, along with
some of the means for understanding and criticizing these limita-
tions, tracing them to sources in a particular social and political
order. How far Orwell consciously worked through this critique we
can never know, and this novelistic method of presenting ideas
encourages such uncertainty. When does Orwell's understanding
end, and his readers' own speculation begin? It is often impossible
to say. In this situation the critic can only try to avoid two extremes.
Qneis to claim Orwell's critical activity as his own, the other is in
effect to rewrite Orwell's. novel so that it confirms· a new orthodoxy.
Both perversions would find a happy home somewhere in Minitrue-
another illustration of how relevant Orwell's satire is to .the condi-
tions of intellectual production in our society. But Orwell leaves us
no si11gle choice. By writing in this form, he has produced something
that is tailor-made to be appropriated by contrary interests. Qyalities
that are admired in works of art, like irony, ambiguity, and multiple
levels of meaning, are kinds of doublethink.
The action of I984takes place in London, chief city of'Airstrip I',
a province of Oceania. The world seems to be dominated by three
large blocs, Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia, in a permanent state of
war, always two in alliance against the third in a war that may not

9
ORWELLIAN LINGUISTICS

exist, whose function according to Goldstein is largely economic and

political, ensuring full employment, and justifying an austere and
repressive regime. Oceania itself is said to consist of three groups,
Inner Party (2 per cent), Outer Party (13 per cent), and Proles (85
per cent), or high, middle and low to use Goldstein's categories. The
Inner Party are a ruling caste. The Outer Party see themselves as
part of the governing class, but have no real power.
This unreliable account of the basic structure of Oceanic society is
none the less the key to understanding the structure and function of
the languages of Oceania. The Appendix refers to two languages,
Oldspeak and Newspeak, with Newspeak destined to replace Old-
speak entirely by 2050, after which time Oceania will once again be a
single linguistic community. However, what we are shown has a
different structure and significance. The Proles speak a form of Old-
speak, and clearly will continue to do so. Newspeak is an artificial
language, spoken by no one as a first language, probably understood
only by Party members. However, Party members habitually use
Oldspeak amongst themselves, and Goldstein writes in Oldspeak.
This form of Oldspeak is very different from Proles' Oldspeak. The
difference can be clarified through two terms associated with the
modern sociolinguist, Basil Bernstein, 'elaborated code' and 'restric-
ted code'. 4 For Bernstein, a restricted code, or use of language, is
characterized by simple sentence-structures, limited reference and
lack of abstract concepts and self-reflective operations. Elaborated
code has the opposite qualities. Bernstein argues a correlation
between restricted-code use and working-class speech in England,
leading to working-class disadvantage in the educational system. He
claims that the professional middle class have mastery of the two
kinds oflanguage, both restricted and elaborated codes. The middle-
class speakers, in this view, have all the advantages of a restricted
code, and also have access to a more powerful modeoflanguageand
thought.
Orwell's I984 suggests an interesting variation on this scheme.
Newspeak has many features of a restricted code: complexity is
severely reduced, abstracts are limited, evaluation and criticism
almost eliminated. So Newspeak turns out to be a particular kind of
restricted code, one specifically designed for the ruling class. Proles
seem unable to transcend their restricted code in I984, but party
members are similarly limited by their own highly prestigious
restricted code. Orwell here seems to have anticipated Bernstein's
categories and Bernstein's emphasis on language and class> and

10
 ORWELLIAN LINGUISTICS

language as an instrument of control, and he has added a devastating

judgment on middle-class language and on the flexible options
Bernstein saw as open to the middle-class speaker. The prestige
language developed by the middle classes may be just another
restricted code.
Orwell's account oflanguage was based firmly on his understand-
ing of forms of consciousness which he saw as growing directly out
of prevailing modes of social and political organization. For Orwell,
the rulers in a stratified society like post-Empire Britain or Stalinist
Russia needed systematically to deceive the populace about their
society's relationship to material reality. But plausible and systematic
lying requires self-deception too, a willingness to entertain convic-
tion about what one knows to be untrue. Since this self-delusion is
voluntarily induced, it is doubly duplicitous. It is a kind of willed
schizophrenia, to which Orwell in I984 gave the definitive name
'doublethink'.
In the earlier essay 'Politics and the English Language', Orwell
described the typical forms of the language of doublethink he found
in contemporary discourse, in terms that are still applicable today.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the
indefensible ... Thus political language has to consist largely of euphem-
ism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages
are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the country-
side, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary
bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their
farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can
carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.
People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the
neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called
elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one
wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them ('Poli-
tics and the English Language', ed. cit., p. 166).
In the essay the political function of this kind oflanguage is clear,
but Orwell makes no attempt to understand the subtleties of the
associated state of mind. This is the advance to be found in I984.
Here is the memorable evocation of Winston Smith's experience of
doublethink in the novel:
His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know
and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which
cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of

II
ORWELLIAN LINGUISTICS

them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim
to it, to believe that democracy wa.s impossible and that the Party was the
guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget,
then to draw it back into memory again at. the moment when it was
needed, and then promptly forget it again: and above all, to apply the
same process to the process itself. That_was the ultimate subtlety: con-
sciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become
unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to
understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink
(1984, ed. cit., pp. 31-2).
Orwell in 1984 was fascinated with doublethink and the role of
language in the processes of reality-control, but he. did not lose his
strongly commonsense and materialist convictions .. Minitrue uses
massive censorship and lies as well as language reform, and Minitrue
is complemented by Miniluv and the Thought Police, who use
physical torture on dissidents like Winston. It is against this back-
ground that the seemingly quaint devices of Newspeak gain a
sinister power and significance. In the Appendix we are shown
Newspeak as an ingenious experiment in the mutilation of language.
In the novel we see Newspeak in action. The action is the curious
kind of censorship that is Winston's job: rewriting past issues of
The Times to falsify the records on which history is based. So the
forms of Newspeak are intimately involved in the processes of
censorship, or more generally the processes of 'reality control', as it
is called in the novel.
The example Orwell explores at length in the novel is not in fact
pure Newspeak, but a form of telegraphese; which is revealed as the
target of the satire at this point. This is the instruction sent to
Winston from some anonymous source:
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons
rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
He gives a translation of this into Oldspeak:
The reporting of Big Brother's Order for the Day in the TimesofDec-
ember 3rd rg83 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes reference to non-
existent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher
authority before filing.
In the expanded form the message seems dear enough. It's an
instruction to Winston to perform the immoral act of falsifying
records again. Though it is Winston's job to perform this act every
day, day after day, he is still troubled by it when he is at home or

12
 ORWELLIAN LINGUISTICS

alon~. and. able to reflect. But at the moment of performing it, he is

filled .With excitement. He especially enjoys difficult problems,
jobs so difficu'lt and intricate tbt you could lose yourself in them as in
the depths ofamatheniatical problem - delicate pieces of forgery in
which you had nothing to-guide you except yoi:tr knowledge of the prin-
ciples oflngsoc and your estimate of what the Party wanted you to say
(ibid., p; 38).
This gives us a clue about the function of the form itself. It is an
instruction to rewrite which itself has to be rewritten to be under-
stood. It is a curious kind of censorship, one that is designed to be
seen through, or decoded. The problem of decoding is probably not
difficult 'for Winston, but even a small problem helps. The new
language is related systematically to the standard English form by a
series· of transformations, mostly deletions. The first sentence will
serve to illustrate:·
(The) reporting (of) B(ig) B(rother's) Order (for the) Day (in The)
Times (of) December 3(rd) (rg)83 (is) extremely unsatiifactory (and)
(makes) ref(erence)s (to) non-existent persons(.)
Bracketed words or parts of words have been deleted and italicized
elements have been substit.uted. There is some minor re-ordering.
We can summarize the operations under three categories:
I Deletions:
articles (the)
prepositions (of, for, i:n)
conjunctions {and)
modality and tense (is/was)
punctuation
2 Substitutions:
Oldspeak value-judgments by Newspeak value-judgments
('extremely unsatisfactory' by 'doubleplusungood'), words
by numbers.
3 Reordering (shift of indications of place and time to early
poSition)
The transformations seem to have two main functions. Indications of
relationships between words or parts of a sentence are suppressed.
Word-order takes over some of this function, but not all. Second,
indications of the truth-value of the utterance are no longer possible.
For instance, we can't say whether the reporting is now unsatisfac-
tory or whether it always was. It isn't clear what is a noun and what is

13
ORWELLIAN LINGUISTICS

a verb; 'refs' could be either. If it is a verb it might be past or

present, if a noun it has no tense. The result is a drastically limited
language in which to represent complex relationships, but a useful
language in which to be vague about when things happened, and
whether they are certain, probable or only hypothetical. Value-
judgments seem prominent, unambiguous, but uncomplex. These
are the aims of Newspeak, according to the Appendix, but here we
are shown them achieved by different linguistic means, not the
childish grammar of Newspeak but something much more recogniz-
able and adult, the language of memos, the language of administra-
tion.
Orwell seems to have regarded standard English as a neutral form
of communication. However, even the language of the full version he
gives is full of suppressions, using devices from the grammar of
standard English to achieve the aims of Newspeak. Let us take the
first phrase 'The reporting of Big Brother's Order for the Day'.
Underlying the first three words is a sentence with the form '(X)
reported'. We don't know who X is. He was some anonymous pre-
decessor of Winston's, who has been made a linguistic unperson in
this sentence. This form is so common and regular that it seems
entirely innocent, to be explained purely on the grounds of economy.
Maybe. But in this case it is emotionally convenient for Winston for
there to be no mention of his superseded predecessor. This has the
effect of dehumanizing the original 'error'. A further convenience can
be seen later in the sentence, when we come to 'references'. This
similarly comes from an underlying form '(X) refers to'. Again we ask
who X is. The answer is interestingly uncertain: either the first
X, or another unstated person Y, or Big Brother himself. It may seem
probable that Big Brother was the person who made the erroneous
reference, but both the others are possibilities, so that if the thought
of Big Brother making an error seems unthinkable, the reader is
given something else to think.
The syntactic form allows the blame to be shifted on to unperson
X, who misreported the original speech, but this process of blaming
him, which would perhaps trouble Winston since he knows better,
is left implicit and unconscious. The blame, then, lands on both, and
neither: a fine example of doublethink.
The surface form typical of this kind of language is achieved
mainly by two related transformations. One is nominalization,
turning verbs into nouns, e.g. 'report' to 'reporting', 'refer' to
'references'. Orwell describes the interchangeability of nouns and
 ORWELLIAN LINGUISTICS

verbs as characteristic of Newspeak. The rule in the present case

seems to be: nominalize all verbs, except imperatives. The effect of
this rule is to remove tense and modality, i.e. indications of time or
truth-value. The second rule is: delete all agents, except Big Brother.
The effect of these two rules together is that the only kind of action
which is coded as an action (i.e. through use of a verb) is the exer-
cise of authority bywhoeveris doing the ordering: and the only active
agent is Big Brother.
The effect of these transformations, which are very common in
standard English, is similar to that of telegraphese, which only
carries the process a stage further. Both kinds work by suppressions.
Both involve a degree of censorship, but in neither is the censorship
impenetrable. Through the compressed surface the underlying
meaning is discernible, with effort. Or more precisely, meanings,
because what is allowed is a multiplicity of meanings which are hard
to criticize because they are only partially glimpsed and guessed at.
So though a kind of censorship is involved, a more prominent
function seems to be mystification, or doublethink. If we regard the
expanded, standard English form as a kind of elaborated code, we
reach a surprising conclusion. Oldspeak and Newspeak, far from
being opposed as Orwell seemed to think, have essentially the same
function. Newspeak merely carries the process one stage further.
Winston Smith's task is to rewrite the 'erroneous' article. The
Order for the Day had praised an organization called the FFCC,
singling out Comrade Withers for special mention. FFCC was now
dissolved, and Comrade Withers and his associates had become
unpersons. Winston is shown reflecting on what he will do, running
through various. alternatives before deciding on his solution. The
solution was to replace Comrade Withers and the whole story by a
piece of fiction about Comrade Ogilvy, an exemplary citizen of
Oceania whose heroic death Big Brother will eulogize.
Orwell's satiric target here is not fictionality as such. Total
fabrication of this kind was probably rare even in the media of war-
time Britain. Orwell's real concern is with a perverse relationship
between language and reality, shown by the kind of reasoning
Winston uses. He is not turning experience and thoughts about
experience into words. The input is a piece of language, plus an un-
specific instruction to change it. Winston first analyses it structurally,
and deduces what is wrong with it. He toys with possible drastic
changes but decides on what is structurally a simple change. The
original was, in outline, 'Big Brother praises FFCC and Comrade

I5
ORWELLIAN LINGUISTICS

Withers'. His version is 'Big Brother praises ·Comrade Ogilvy'.

So all he has done is to delete the forbidden organization, .and
replace 'Withers' by 'Ogilvy'. At a more abstract level, he has in fact
preserved the original structure. Sinc.e Big Brother only praises what
is plusgood, the original sentence had an underlying abstractfor111..:
'Big Brother praises X (who is plusgood and male)'. Withers
formerly had fitted this specification. Now that he is out: of favour,
he no longer qualifies for his place in the original sentence. The
person and the name of Withers was less important than his spec~fi­
cations. So the substitution of the fictitious Ogilvv serves to restore
the equilibrium.
Orwell is showing here a kind of communication in which the
individual does not start from meanings he wishes to communicate,
about experience which is important to him. In 'Politics and the
English Language' Orwell had condemned the situation where 'The
writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently
says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his
words mean anything or not'. 5 Here in r984 Orwell shows this fault
taken to an extreme. The complete article Winston produces comes
from something as impersonal as a machine into which languageis
fed at one end, out ofwhich comes fully formed apparently rational
discourse. Winston describes the end product .as 'a piece of pure
fantasy' (r984, ed. cit., p. 40) but it is far from pure. Even the details
that Winston invents, such as Ogilvy's precocious refusal of all toys
except a drum, a submachine gun and a model helicopter at the age
of three, are not a personal fantasy, they are the kind of detail which
is prescribed by the Ingsoc ethic. The submachine gun might have
been replaced by a rubber truncheon, as 'Ogilvy' could replace
'Withers', but a doll or a book would have been not permissible.
In this kind of communication, the material is always pre-
packaged. It is the experience (real or imaginary) of others, alr,eady
processed and coded in language. The basic meanings are pre-'-
scribed, in the form of an underlying structure determining the
required features and their permissible relationships. The individual
has only the freedom to substitute particular details which conform
to the underlying specifications. This makes therealmeartingofthese
utterances their underlying structure. The actual surface forms ar.e
only stylistic variants. The real meaning of both Times articles; the
Withers and the Ogilvy versions, is the same: Big Brother praises
what is plusgood. This itself is a tautology because the only possible
definition of 'plusgood', when everything else can be rewritten, is

16
 ORWELLIAN LINGUISTICS

that which Big Brother praises. So the whole article is simply an

expansion of 'plusgood' in the language-system, directly reflecting
the ideology oflngsoc. But though this is what Winston does, it is
not what hestipposes he is doing. He feels personal pride at having
accurately produced a new meaning, in the very tones and syntactic
forms of Big Brother. He even half-believes in the reality of the
fiction he thinks he has created.
Orwell, himself a journalist,·probably had in mind the conditions
of journalistic production. Stndies ·have ·shown· how journalists
rapidly learn the ethos ofthe particular paper they work for, and its
standard treatment of staple topics. They find out which copy is
accepted substantially unchanged, and which is rejected or altered
beyond· recognition. Professional pride such as motivates Winston
leads them to try to predict what will be accepted. The rules at issue
are never spelled out but are understood a1ld internalized, and the
system· becomes self-regulating through anticipatory self-censor-
ship.6 Whatever comes in to the press office will be processed and
reprocessed ·by a succession of people ·on the editorial staff till it
conforms· to these underlying ·stereotypes. The person ·responsible
for the final form will, 1ike Winston, have nofirst~hand knowledge of
the truth or falsity of the story. He will be working on material
already worked over by others, and his concern will be to make sure
it is a 'good story' (by the standards of that paper), not a true one.
Winston carries out the whole process of rewriting with a mini-
mum· of guidance. He has to decode his instruction, and then
interpret its real significance and try to obey it, using his intuitive
sense of the unstated rules. This is a general featUre of Oceanic
society:
the individual has no. freedom of choice in any direction whatever. On
the oth~r hand his actions are not regulated by law or by any clearly
formulated code of behaviour. In Oceania the!,'e is no law. Thoughts and
actions which, when detected, mean c:;ertain death, are not formally for-
bidden: (i984, ed. cit., p. r6g).
At first this seems a strange paradox. Oceania is the imageofa totally
regulated society yet has no regulations. The solution of this paradox
lies in the mode of existence of the networkof rules and regulations
whiCh control the actioris of all members of the society, especially
party members. The rules and regulations exist, hut they have been
totally deleted, so that they are disembodied, invisible, and hence
unassailable; Without sanctions, of course, laws in. this form would
ORWELLIAN LINGUISTICS

have no force. If there are effective sanctions, however, Orwell's

paradox contains an important insight. When the language of control
is backed up by the reality of power, the more massive the deletion,
especially of the fact of power and coercion, the more powerful,
mystified and irrational is the control. Anyone who can give orders
without even acknowledging this in the surface of his utterance has
access to an insidiously powerful form of command. For instance,
someone who can say 'the door is open' and be interpreted as saying
'close the door' has issued an imperative which has been totally
deleted yet is fully effective. The person who obeys accepts the
reality of a power that has not been claimed, which has been com-
pletely mystified into the form of an apparently neutral, factual
observation.
At the other extreme from an over-ingenious reinterpretation of
utterances is the phenomenon Orwell calls 'Duckspeak' in the novel.
This is the language used by party hacks. The writer of the Appen-
dix refers to it as
a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this
was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and
especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as
possible independent of consciousness (I984, ed. cit., p. 248).
In the novel we are given an example of 'Duckspeak' in use.
Winston is sitting in the cafeteria with Syme, a fellow worker in
Minitrue, who is an expert on Newspeak. Syme gives an orthodox
definition of Duckspeak. Winston observes what is happening at
another table in the cafeteria, where a man is talking to a girl who
Winston assumes is his secretary.
From time to time Winston caught some such remark as 'I think you're
so right, I do so agree with you', uttered in a youthful rather silly femi-
nine voice. But the other voice never stopped for an instant, even when
the girl was speaking. The man's head was thrown back a little, and
because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the
light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was
slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of
his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just
once Winston caught a phrase- 'complete and final elimination of Gold-
steinism' - jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like
a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quack-quack-
quacking (ibid.).
This dramatization allows us to generalize the phenomenon and

r8
 ORWELLIAN LINGUISTICS

apply it more widely to a more familiar world of discourse. The con-

versation is clearly not an exchange, but a kind of ritual in which the
power of the male boss over his secretary is asserted and acknow-
ledged as the sole content of communication. The message the boss
is transmitting is not in fact about Goldsteinism but about his own
orthodoxy and the power that accrues from this. The secretary
similarly signals only her complete acceptance of the subordinate
role. What the man says is almost incomprehensible. The surface
form of his speech has almost no structure. The components have
fuse@ together like solid cast type. The lack of a surface structure
deprives his speech of any deep structure, any deeper level of inter-
pretation at which his speech makes sense. What he says would pre-
sumably make sense, or seem to make sense, if he slowed down his
rate of delivery. It then would be jargonistic Oldspeak (not New-
speak, as the writer of the Appendix implies). Even more than with
Winston's article, its content would be prescribed. The major
difference would be in the way in which the prescription worked.
With the article, a deep structure meaning determined the interpre-
tation of the surface forms. In Duckspeak, the surface forms are
independently produced in large chunks. Presumably the deep
structure interpretation of the speech as a whole would reveal chaos
and incoherence, but the words are said too quickly for this deep
structure incoherence to be perceived.
Duckspeak itself is incompatible with doublethink, since it doesn't
even allow singlethink. However, Duckspeak has a role to play in the
operation of doublethink. We can see this in the discussion of words
like Comintern in the Appendix. This word comes from 'Communist
International' by an irregular transformational process, where
'munist' and 'ational' are deleted, and the two remaining parts fused
together into a single three-syllable word. The parts taken out and
the parts left are in both cases not meaningful units and this irration-
ality is part of the point. The result is 'a word that can be uttered
almost without taking thought, whereas "Communist International"
is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily'
(r984, ed. cit., p. 248). Clearly Orwell sees it as a contemporary form
of Duckspeak, but 'almost' is the giveaway. The difference between
'Communist International' and 'Comintern' is a difference of degree,
not kind. Both are Duckspeak. Both allow doublethink, which in this
case is a contradiction between a definite deep structure, and a
re-appropriated surface structure. The difference between double-
think and Duckspeak is to be found not in the form of words
ORWELLIAN LINGUISTICS

themselves, but in how these are understood by whoever says or

hears them. The higher up in the party, the more intense is the exer-
cise of doublethink, according to Goldstein (ibid., p. 171)~ Someone
in the Inner Party like O'Brien might know the history of the word
'Comintern', which parallels the history of Socialism, so in using the
shortened, irrationalized form he might both know and not know
that history. The result for him would be doublethink. Someone like
the man in the cafe overheard by Winston could have used the fuller
form, 'Communist International', without comprehension of that
history or the component meanings of the word. For him the result
is Duckspeak. So the fundamental antagonism between social
classes in Oceania is expressed not only in different languages -
Prolespeak and kinds of Newspeak- it is expressed in contrary ways
of producing and interpreting the same language. The principle of
contradiction becomes the condition of consciousness of the indivi-
dual, even an individual as comparatively lowly in status as Winston.
And even Inner Party members at times have recourse to Duck-
speak. Doublethink and Duckspeak are alternative ways of coping
with irrationality and contradiction. Duckspeak, which involves less
thought and less effort, would be a necessary relief.
As we have seen, the account of language in the Appendix is
usually inadequate for the world of r984 as it is presented in the
novel. Clearly we need to look again and more critically at the whole
programme offered in the Appendix. If it is not a description of the
language situation to be found in Oceania, what is it? The obvious
answer is that this is a satire on language-planners and experts on
language, not a prediction about developments in the English lan-
guage. These are the theories about language which are encouraged by
the rulers of Oceania. The ministry experts confidently predict that
the Eleventh edition of the dictionary which is about to be produced
will be definitive, and that 2050 will be the year for the final change-
over to Newspeak. These predictions should be treated with the
same scepticism as the periodic announcements that a final victory
over Eastasia/Eurasia is at hand. The theories on which these predic-
tions are based are offered for critical inspection by a sociologist of
linguistics. The relation of this critique to Orwell's own views·is
intriguing, since the Newspeak theorists are trying to carry out a
reform similar to the Basic English programme of Ogden, Chase and
others, which Orwell in the 1930s saw as a positive weapon against
the degeneration of English.
The basic premise of the Newspeak programme is a very crude

20
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 In the distance on the other side of the line the Western Yomans now
appeared: they are lower than the Eastern Yomans, and do not rise much
above four thousand feet. The window pictures went on changing: little
streams full of tree-climbing perch; small fisheries—everyone of them taxed
to swell the revenue; bright coloured bee-eaters, the only insectivorous birds
that build in the earth and not in trees; corrugated iron—oh! very much
corrugated iron—even in the smallest villages, it is used for the hut roofs
wherever the railway goes.

I was now passing through the home of the hamadryad, that serpent of
temerity and unprovoked assaults, but soon came nearer to the foothills and
the edge of the jungle. It was about five o'clock, the time when at this season
of golden paddy-fields the jungle fowl come out to steal the rice—peacocks
with tails longer than they grow in captivity, and even more numerous than
those unnumbered I have seen in the grounds of Warwick Castle. About this
time of year, when he has been feeding on rice for a few weeks, your
peacock is considered very good eating and is not difficult to get on a
moonlight night. He gives three calls before he settles to sleep, just to tell
anyone who may be interested which tree he is in.

Pale and feathery the tall tufts of elephant grass quivered gently, and
through them I could see a village stockaded against dacoits. A fellow-
traveller told me that any man who owns ten houses has to fence the village,
and remarked that two hundred dacoits were killed hereabouts during the
previous year. My companion was a well marked man. He had a white scar
on his chin where he had been clawed by a leopard, and a mark on one arm
where he had been shot by boxers in China.

We were passing Kanutkwin, which means "the crooked place," and was
the scene of great man-eating operations a few years back, when one tiger
killed twenty-five people before he was accidentally shot! A man was out in
the jungle after birds with a shotgun, and seeing something move near him,
fired precipitately and with great luck ended the career of that four-footed
dacoit.

The night was cold and the early morning colder still. I noticed that the
third-class carriages were crowded with passengers—long compartments
with a third row of people on a long bench down the middle. Rolled up in
shawls or thick wadded and quilted coats, the natives kept their heads in
woollen wrappers, hoods or "Balaclava helmets," while up on the racks and
heaped at the open ends of the carriages were the huge bamboo hats, looking
like savage shields or targes, which would be needed in the heat of the day.
Some men also carried long swords, for here in the Shan States a man may
go armed without question.

At Sedaw, a little after seven o'clock, I reached the beginning of the hills,
and about three of that afternoon, with a live hen and some provisions
obtained while the train waited at Maimyo (a station where there is a native
Indian mountain battery), I got out at Gokteik—Gokteik of the famous
bridge—Gokteik of the gorge and the cave and the highest graded railway in
the world. But if you asked a Shan to take you to Gokteik, it is not here he
would take you, but to a Shan village many miles away, surrounded as all
Shan villages are by thick clumps of bamboos.

Along the steepest part of the railway track are laid a second pair of rails,
which lie covered with sand between wooden side-slips, so that in case of
brakes failing a runaway train could be switched on to these as retarders. At
Gokteik Bridge I think the only purpose for a railway station is for the
convenience of the engineer, who has occasionally to come up and examine
the structure. I found a dak bungalow near the station, with clean rooms but
without any cook, so that Tambusami, my servant, had an opportunity of
showing his skill with the pots and pans placed there for the stranger's use.

I left him to attend to the kitchen and crossed the long trestle bridge of
steel girders—it is 820 feet above the torrent at the bottom of the gorge;
then, following the railway line through a couple of short tunnels, I climbed
out on to a spur of the mountain from which I could look back at the gorge.
The torrent below comes out through a vast stalactite cave or tunnel, the
lower opening of which is like part of some great cathedral dome. The rock
above crosses like a natural arch 500 feet high, and it is upon that arch that
the stupendous, though spidery-looking structure of the viaduct has been
raised by an American firm. Their tender was very much less than that of
any English house, and although it is possible that American engineers have
had more experience in this kind of work, it is suggested that the lowness of
the tender was partly to ensure a big advertisement. Walking alone high in
air across the 750 yards of that narrow bridge, which has no kind of railing,
was certainly one of the "sensations" of my journey, and in a thick mist the
experience must be weird in the extreme.

The present engineer of the line was, at the time of my visit, also staying
at Gokteik (investigating a suspected change of curve through heat
expansion), and he took me in the early hours of the morning through some
of the dense jungle in the gorge above the feet of the bridge. The engineer
carried a Winchester repeater, and I was armed with a good double-barrelled
rifle, but our hopes of seeing certain stripes reported to be near were vain.
We crept for a long time stealthily through dense jungle-growth, with a
variety of prickles and spikes, and came upon fresh hoof-marks of wild boar,
small deer, saumbur and buffalo but no sign of a tiger, and I could not
remain for a second attempt.

My next stopping-place was Hsipaw, a town of some size, in which is the

palace of Sawche, the Sawbwa of Hsipaw. I was sorry to find that this
gentleman's English adviser, to whom the authorities had promised to write
about my coming, was away on leave. There was no other English resident
at Hsipaw except the keeper of the refreshment-room at the railway station,
which included the usual accommodation of a dak bungalow. This was a
man with a pronounced Cockney accent and a humorous twinkle in his eye,
and in view of the approaching Christmas season he had laid in a large
number of cured hams, which hung all round the room. At Hsipaw that
evening there sat at table with me two other passengers who were changing
trains; one, the medical officer for the Shan States, whom I had joined on
leaving Gokteik, and the other, a mining engineer who had had blackwater
fever at Buluwayo and had come to Burmah for a change of air.

The doctor was on the look-out for plague cases, and where he had
native assistants they waited at the railway stations to report to him as he
passed through. Thus at Kyankine I had heard a native assistant tell the
doctor that a Shan woman, who was selling bringalls in the market, had
declared she had seen four or five people dying at an outlying village.

"Can you rely on her statement?" said the doctor.

"I can't exactly say."

 "You should have sent for the poogi" (the "poogi" or "pudgy" is the
village headman who collects the taxes and takes them to the "Nabang," the
head of a circle of villages and responsible to the Government). "You should
have sent for the poogi," said the doctor.

"I did, sir," the assistant answered, "but he said he had not heard
anything about it."

"What about the Jaremai Nabang—isn't he here?"

"He is away from here, sir; he goes sometimes to Lashio—the woman

said it was seven or eight days ago, but the poogi did not know anything
about it."

"Well, keep your ears open and find out all you can. I'll run that poogi in
—wire for Chatterjee for any bad case."

I was amused at the Cockney talk of the keeper of the refreshment-room

as he brought in the dishes, when the mining engineer said to him as he came
up to the table:—"I don't want to be offensive, but a man at Tongu told me
you have committed bigamy."

"Let 'em prove it," said the Cockney, "let 'em prove it—that's what I say.
I'm not a going to give myself away to you gentlemen nor to my own frens
—what I say is, they've got to prove it. I'm not a-saying, mind yer, that there
isn't nothin' I've been foolish about or no mistake as I 'aven't made in the
past. They tried 'ard to arrest me yesterday—yes, they did, doctor, but they
couldn't do it, not they."

"But the man at Tongu showed me a marriage certificate," said the

mining engineer. Here the doctor applied the closure and we got on with our
dinner.

When it was over I took a Shan boy as a guide to find the Sawbwa's
house. Tambusami, my own Hindoo servant, was, of course, useless here as
regards conversation. The Shan boy knew some English, being able to say
"yes," "no," and "railway station." It was just after eight o'clock when we
started, and after walking one and a half or two miles along a white road and
turning twice, we crossed two small bridges over a stream or moat, and I saw
in front of us some large buildings. When I asked at a guess if this were the
house of the Sawbwa, the boy assented "Sawbwa."

Under a covered arcade two men were crouching in the cold over a fire
of sticks, watching a giant kettle, which I think was copper and not brass.
The arcade led into the hall of a large house whitewashed and with a
coloured pattern running round the wall and across several doors. At one
side was a staircase leading to the floor above, and at the bottom of the stairs
eight or ten pairs of plush slippers were scattered about untidily near a large
red-lacquered box and a cat, which was eating from a round dish.

Some kind of guard or policeman in a red turban and bearing a long

sword outside his ample cloak came to have a look at me, and was soon
joined by another in similar uniform. I talked to them and the men by the
kettle and thought they understood that I wanted them to take my card to the
Sawbwa, and that I wanted to see him. They all put their heads on one side
with cheek on hand and shut their eyes, by which I supposed they meant he
had gone to bed. It was not yet nine o'clock, however, and as I had been told
that Sawche had been educated in England, I doubted such early hours and I
persisted in pretending that I did not understand.

I walked up and down the covered way, and presently a little lady, with
her face painted white, crept gingerly down the stairs and into the hall,
furtively peeping at me. As soon as she knew that I could see her she
scurried back like a frightened rabbit, and there was another long silence.
Two big hounds, as tall as great Danes but with sharper noses, came strolling
up and allowed me to pat them. It was bitterly cold, but at last I persuaded
one of the men with swords to go into the house and presently he returned
with the following message:—

"His Highness the Sawbwa has gone to sleep. If there is anything to be

said please leave a chit to the policeman or come to-morrow again at about
noon. Nothing is able to wake His Highness at present. This note is sent to
explain what the policeman at the gate wanted to say."
 IN THE SHAN STATES: GUARD AND POLICEMAN.

The next morning I was calling again at the house of the moat, when I
beheld the Sawbwa approaching through the grounds carrying a black
umbrella and followed by a dozen men, walking slowly behind him. He was
rather thin and small-limbed, had dark eyes, not Mongolian in type, and a
small moustache over a delicate mouth with a small narrow chin. On his
head was a yellow turban, which added a little to his short stature, and he
wore a dress or gown over-all of black silk with woven black pattern, fine
black silk rolled round his neck for about five inches up to the chin. Thin
white trouser-ends showed beneath the gown over dark socks and patent
leather dancing-pumps with black ribbons. Of jewellery he wore little, his
chief ornament being a fine ruby in a gold finger-ring.

The Sawbwa shook hands delicately and said, "How do you do?" and
chatted in good English for a few minutes. He explained that he was
extremely busy with an important case at the Court and asked me to join him
there. He is a busy man, whose position is by no means a sinecure involving
the direction of the three Shan States of Mihung, Hsunhai and Mintoung, and
all the magisterial work of the district.

The Court-House was a two-storeyed wooden building, with a veranda

and a balcony opposite the gate of the palace compound on the other side of
a white dusty road. In the Court-Room the Sawbwa sat on a rotary chair
upon a raised platform, and an arm-chair was placed for me beside him.
Sawche had now discarded the yellow turban and wore a piece of rose-
coloured silk round his head in the ordinary Burmese fashion. Behind us
hung a portrait in black and white of Queen Victoria, and in front, on the top
of a wooden railing, was a red narrow box, two feet long, tied in the centre
with crossed tapes and containing some sacred writings for oath
administration. On the platform beside the Sawbwa's chair, upon a low,
round stool of red lacquer ornamented with a gold pattern, were china cups
and teapots.

A man stood in one of two small docks or railed enclosures, and a

number of people with documents in their hands squatted upon the floor
outside.

I could not understand any of the speaking, and after he had been talking
quite a long time to the man in the railed enclosure, the Sawbwa turned to
me and proposed in his soft voice that he should send someone to show me
round his compound. The moated house I had called at previously was far
from here within the town.

Conducted by one man who spoke a few words of English and followed
by another who did not, I crossed the road and entered the compound
through red gates. It was surrounded by tall wooden palings, ten or eleven
feet high, which were roughly whitewashed, and in the centre of the road-
front, with small doors in the hoarding at each side, were these large wooden
gates with a little rude carving about the top of them. Within, upon a rough
cylinder of red brick in the middle of a level space of poor coarse grass,
flying a little white fork-shaped flag, a tall flagstaff was set in front of the
palace, which is built of wood upon a raised platform of cement and stucco-
covered bricks, five or six feet from the ground. It is partly old and in the
centre is surmounted by a series of gables, one above another, with well-
carved barge boards. In the middle of the front, as well as at the two ends of
the building, a flight of steps with low side walls leads to the top of the
cement platform, and the centre flight is closed below by a small green
railing with a wicket gate. Within, through the outer square-cut wooden
pillars, you can see the red round stucco columns of the hall of audience.
Outside, from the centre of the roof, a tall, very narrow spire shoots up
above and behind the gables, and the top of this is richly ornamented and
gilded like the "hti" of a pagoda.

The residence of the chief queen, the Maha Devi, a Shan woman, adjoins
the palace immediately behind. A girl stood on the veranda bending forward
and combing out her long black hair, which fell to the ground, and behind
her between two of the posts of the veranda hung a large piece of tapestry
with figures worked upon it in gold thread. Further back among trees are the
houses of the second, third and fourth queens, and two for the twenty-six
wives of minor importance. Here they live from one year's end to another,
very rarely leaving the compound, and dwelling, though without its austerity,
in the same seclusion as that of a nunnery.

Whatever influence it has had upon his ideals, an Oxford education has
not led the Sawbwa to adopt Western practice in his matrimonial relations;
yet it is doubtful if the Cockney keeper of the railway refreshment-room
would have so far discounted his sense of superiority to an Asiatic as to have
envied him even such privileges as these.

Soon after I returned to the Court-House the Sawbwa adjourned the

sitting, and we were talking together upon the balcony when he went up to
the railing and pointing to a figure upon the ground below said to me, "This
is one of my gardeners."
 I had noticed the man earlier; he was a thin tall Hindoo who had walked
very slowly to the Court-House, and as if with much difficulty. He was
dressed in a white robe and had squatted upon the ground, wrapping the
drapery round him and over the top of his head. A fat man with a large buff
turban had strolled after him and was walking up and down. It appeared that
the latter was a doctor. The Hindoo gardener was suffering badly from
dysentery, but was unwilling to go away to the hospital because he had a
Shan wife and feared she would run away while he was shut up. "If he
goes," said the Sawbwa, "I will keep his place for him and let him come
back to work when he is cured." The man, however, was still unwilling and
resisted all persuasion. "Then let him die," said the Sawbwa, and went on
talking to me about England.

Although Sawche has so many wives he has only one son, a boy of
twelve or thirteen, named Maung Nyo. I saw him coming through the central
avenue of the bazaar, dressed in rich silks and with his face whitened like a
woman's with ground sandalwood. He was being wheeled slowly along upon
a smart plated bicycle by two men, while another pair of attendants carried a
long-handled gold umbrella on each side of him. In a few days Maung Nyo
was to enter upon his period of Hpoongi or priest-training, in accordance
with orthodox Burmese custom.

The bazaar at Hsipaw was chiefly interesting on account of the Kachins

who had come in from a distance. They carried gaily ornamented
haversacks, and their women-folk, strong-looking and heavy-faced, wore
about the waist and ankles large coils of bamboo as thin as fine string and
black in colour.

The usual rows of bazaar shops were ranged under long arcades roofed
with corrugated iron, and out in the roadway double and treble lines of
sellers from outlying places had spread their market produce on plantain
leaves. Of dried fish there was certainly an extraordinary variety—thirty
kinds at the very least, but there was no profusion of strange fruits and no
showy display of silks or finery, and the scene was animated without being
gay.

The air was free and wholesome at Hsipaw, and the Shans had that
healthy look which seems to be the common heritage of all people of the
hills.

CHAPTER III

UP THE IRRAWADDY TO BHAMO

A group of white pagodas glowing in the sunlight: a flat shore rising to

little hills further up the river—little hills with more pagodas on top of them,
and beyond in the distance pale ghostly mountains almost lost in a faint
haze. Perhaps there is no scene more typical of Burmah than this I looked
upon from the deck of a steamer at Ferryshaw Siding, that meandered slowly
across the wide water, just stirred by the least possible ripple.

A train waited on the far side above a stretch of loose grey sand. I was on
my way to Katha to join there one of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company's boats
on its way up to Bhamo, and my dinner was eaten that Christmas evening in
a small railway refreshment-room decorated with some prints after Landseer,
and one of a sentimental girl's head called "The Soul's Awakening." Another
man shared the same table in unbroken silence until, with some very bad
coffee, the Hindoo "butler" brought the bills. "Excuse me," I said to the
stranger, "but you are an Englishman, and this is our Christmas dinner—will
you drink a glass of wine with me?"

So we drank toasts in port that was thick enough to have pleased Alfred
Tennyson, and slept none the worse for it on the jolting lumbering train.

There was a dense mist at Katha when I left the railway for the river-
boat, and progress was slow until the air cleared and long flat sandbanks
became visible and a green tree-clad plain with blue mountains to the north-
west. Teak rafts drifted past us downstream on their long journey to
Poozoondoung Creek, and the old tusker Mpo Chem and his "lady helps."
Many rafts of bamboos passed us also, supporting heavy teak logs below
them, for teak is not easily rafted till it is three years dead, and recently-
felled logs float reluctantly as if possessing still enough of life to tell their
sorrow at leaving the upland forests.

Katha.

It is not many decades since rafts freighted with human bodies, more
nearly still in touch with life than the new teak logs, floated down this river.
Our captain, whose name was Teeldrup, a Dane with Icelandic blood, ran
boats for the Irrawaddy traffic some years before the final annexation, and
described to me a passage on this very piece of the river when no less than
thirty unfortunate Kachins came floating down the stream crucified upon
bamboo frames. "A lot has been talked of the cruelties," said Captain
Teeldrup, "but I think the poor devils were generally soon put out of their
misery."

Mora and Segaw we passed—villages on the banks—taking on a few

native passengers from small boats that came out to us, and at eight o'clock
in the evening we anchored in mid-stream. The deck was quite covered in
with canvas, and canvas also covered all the cabin windows.
Notwithstanding these precautions, however, the mist in the morning was so
thick that when I came to dress all my clothes were thoroughly damp. At
half-past seven the fog began to lessen somewhat, but there was no question
of starting, although we were already many hours behind time. Lumps of
brown spongy froth kept appearing to float past and out of sight again in the
little space of thick muddy water visible round the boat.

Hours later we got away, and at length sighted Bhamo late in the
afternoon. I could just make out the red building of Fort C and a white spot,
which I was told was the "bell" pagoda. Of the two existing forts, A is for
the military police and C for the regulars, B, the intermediate fort, having
been done away with a few years ago.

The broad river with its innumerable eddies comes swirling down
between its level sandbanks, and as the scenery was at Katha so it was at
Bhamo—just a level plain of tall grasses and trees and beyond these, distant
mountains now the colour of a ripe plum's bloom. Then suddenly slate-grey
landing-flats appeared against the sand, and in a few minutes I was again on
shore.

At Bhamo the agent of the Flotilla Company is a white-haired

Frenchman, who once held an influential position in Burmah as minister to
King Thebaw. He had gone to the East as a Bourbon exile and after years of
unsuccessful schemes and vain intrigue, discredited and ruined by the failure
of his own plans, Monsieur D'Avera, in a steamship office, now lavishes the
distinguished courtesy of an old French family upon American tourists and
such wayfarers as myself, and is said to have written an astounding book of
memoirs for posthumous publication.

It is in trade that Bhamo's claim to attention lies, and in the street of

Chinese offices and stores for the exchange of Manchester for Chinese
goods. A Burman, to whom I had been talking on the boat, was related by
marriage to the family of a Chinese merchant, and in the evening he took me
to call at a house with the top of the gateway curved up at the ends in a way,
he said, only affected by Chinamen of official position. The merchant was
apparently some kind of consul, and over and above the details of his own
business, watched on behalf of the Chinese Government the interest of his
Bhamo compatriots.

The Chinese merchant himself was away, but his sons showed me over
the warehouse and gave me tea in a living-room, where there was an
aquarium of goldfish, and which was decorated with a few pieces of lacquer
and long strings of Chinese New Year cards nearly a twelve-month old,
which hung across the room near the ceiling.

Sitting there drinking tea I could see through the series of now dusky
storerooms to the street entrance, and from little lattices at the sides of these
rooms noted the glint of lamplight and saw that the clerks were busy over
their books.

That night I went to another "Pwe," given this time under cover. A large
bamboo structure upon the sandy shore of the river, which had been erected
by Government for a recent durbar, had been rented by the "Pwe" impresario
for use as a theatre, and as the affair was, in this case, entirely a business
venture (a kind of Burmese touring company), a charge was made for
admission, varying from four annas to one rupee.

The orchestra was very similar to the one I had seen at Rangoon, but
being nearer to it I could see the performers better. It consisted first of a big
drum slung in the air from a long horizontal dragon, whose fantastic head
rose above the front of the stage; next, a circular wooden well frame or box,
within which were placed a series of between twenty and thirty small drums,
each about four to six inches across; then a lower circular enclosure with
metal balls and cups in place of the drums. These three items were put in a
line immediately in front of the stage, and inside the circle of small drums,
with candles round him on the edge of the surrounding woodwork, sat the
chef d'orchestre, who tuned up his drums, which he struck with his bare
fingers, through all the intervals between the passages of music.
 On one side of the chef sat a man at the big dragon drum and on the
other one playing on the metal cups, while behind squatted several players of
wind instruments and three or four men with split bamboo rods, four or five
feet long, which made a loud clapping noise when suddenly closed. The
playing of the tiny drums was extremely skilful, but the wind instruments
were wheezy and screechy, though I thought the general effect of the whole
orchestra was rather pleasing.

AT A BURMESE PWE.

My Burmese acquaintance had come with me to the "Pwe"; and his

knowledge of English, which he spoke with a peculiarly soft and gentle
intonation, enabled me to understand the thread of the narrative. The
entertainment was sophisticated enough to include some simple drop-scenes
which, however, had no appropriateness nor any connection with the story,
and a curtain which rarely descended as the divisions of the drama were of
great length.

There was again a terpsichorean heroine, the daughter of a powerful

nobleman, and after she had danced for half an hour there followed a very
long scene between a king and his ministers. In dancing the hands and arms
were moved more than the feet, and there was much jerky and angular
movement of the body. The costumes were again of old Burmese court style,
and a curious detail was that the hats worn by the four ministers were tall
domes, which curved over at the top in the same manner as the head-gear of
Venetian doges. The king, who wore on his head a veritable pagoda, was
haranguing his ministers about revenue and the unsettled state of his
frontiers, but my Burmese friend explained that he only instructed his
ministers by suggestion and not with direct orders. The story was wrapped
round the raids of a great dacoit who had been harassing border country and
had carried away and married the ever-dancing heroine. There was a very
amusing scene between the lady's father and her two servants, comic parts
which were acted with such droll and humorous gusto that it was a delight to
watch them, even without a key to their words. Indeed this scene had a
motive worthy of Molière, and recalled to me at the same time the incident
in Yeats' play—Where there is nothing there is God,—in which an English
owner of land is tried for the uselessness of his life by Irish tinkers in a barn.

The foolish master agrees that one of the servants, who has explained
that he is himself very wise and the master very foolish about all things,
shall take the place of judge and bids him sit in the middle of the stage to
conduct a mock trial in which he, the master, is the accused. The scheme
breaks down, of course, and when the master finally goes for his servant and
trounces him well, there is wild rough and tumble on the stage and riotous
laughter from the audience.

No people in the world can give themselves more gladly and light-
heartedly to enjoyment than the Burmese, and there was not a single member
of the audience—man, woman or child—who looked as if there were such a
thing as care.
 BURMESE ACTORS AT BHAMO.

Another droll scene was in the house of a timorous villager. This was
supposed to be at night and quite in the dark, though the lamps hanging
along the top of the stage (there were no footlights) were not lowered at all,
so that the acting of the dark was not obscured by any attempt at realistic
effect. The dacoit and his followers were groping and feeling about the stage
to find the villager, who quaked and shook as if paralysed with terror; then
one of the searchers would come upon him and touching some part of his
motionless body would describe it to the dacoit as something other than the
part of a man, and go on groping round the room till he once more
encountered the quaking villager.

Men, women and children shouted, shook and rolled in a very ecstasy of
delight at this piece of pantomime. Really it should not be difficult to govern
such people as these! Unfortunately, however, his natural love of pleasure is
combined in this short dumpy man, Jack Burman, with an indolence fatal to
business success. His mortgaged land falls into the hands of the chetty, and
in commercial matters he is being quietly walked over.

Burmah, so rich in natural resources, in spite of the statements of school

geographies, must look for the future to be exploited not for peaceful
improvement of its own comparatively small native population, but for the
speculators of Capel Court and Wall Street, and the hordes of Hindoos and
Chinamen flocking through its doors. There is in all countries a clash of
interests between practical success (which implies the largest possible
aggregation of healthy, well-nourished bodies having freedom of action) and
ideal success (of which I might dream indefinitely without continuing this
book), and it is that eternal combat that makes at once the bitter and sweet of
government.

I left the "Pwe" at last to go on unravelling its long story till dawn, and
myself got some hours of sleep in readiness for a morning in the Chinese
quarter of Bhamo.

This is a wide street with a gulley or gutter about 4 feet wide along the
front of the shops, with four or five wooden planks laid across it close
together as an approach to each. There were coolies under bamboo yokes or
shoulder-poles bearing crates and baskets, Shan men on ponies bargaining
green fodder, and Chinese women, with the traditionally contracted feet,
making quilted woollen coats, while fat babies played securely in movable
wooden pens. An Indian policeman, khaki-clad, with his legs in puttees, was
trying to make himself understood by a party of Kachins—two men and an
old and young woman. Three out of these four possessed large goitres,
hanging wallets of flesh, which made them look dewlapped like bulls. La
Naung was the name of the older man, and both the women were named
Makaw. The girl was bare-headed and had her short hair cut in a thick fringe
over the forehead, and had round her neck three large stiff rings. They
carried the same gay-coloured haversacks I had seen at Hsipaw, and wore
upon waists, arms and legs similar coils of thin black bamboo.

In the chief Chinese temple or joss-house two standing figures, about

four times life-size—Shotsa and Quan Pin—were placed on either side of a
central grille high up in the wall, through the meshes of which could be seen
the long-bearded face of Quansa. The latter's expression might be described
as benevolent; but that of the giant Shotsa, who held a mighty blade in the
air with his left hand, was horrible enough to draw from an American lady,
who came in while I was there, the remark:—"I guess if I stayed here that
face'd just skeer me into religion," (Her companion replied:—"That's the
only way you would get it!")

In a hall of this polytheistic temple beyond the one of Quansa, was a

Buddha with small figures all round the walls, and in front of these as boxes
for offerings an incongruous series of Huntley & Palmer's biscuit-tins, still
decorated with their original paper coverings.

The Burmese houses at Bhamo are very different from the Chinese
shops, being built on tall wooden piles with long flights of wooden steps up
to them, and in sunset light a group of such houses is a pretty sight,
especially if some silk cloths are spread to dry and some girls are looking out
over the veranda.

Of course Bhamo has its pagoda too, and of more recent years its race-
course and polo-ground, but I had only a peep at these before rejoining the
river steamer.

On the return journey I had good views of the defile below Sinkan
village, where the hills rise steeply from the edge of the water, and in some
places sheer walls of bare rock rise precipitously several hundred feet—
gaunt perpendicular cliffs more like some piece of scenery near Balholm or
Dalen in Norway than any I had yet seen in the East, and doubly welcome
after the comparative monotony of sandbanks. Most of the hillside was
clothed with dense jungle, which made more effective contrast with the bare
treeless places.
 A VILLAGE ON THE IRRAWADDY

On the right bank, a little distance from the big rock of the defile, there is
a village and this is where Lala was lost. Lala was a little black bear an
engineer told me about. "It was one of those honeybears," he said—"had a
white V-shaped mark on the chest." They kept chickens on board in a coop
and one night Lala pulled a chicken out of this coop, practically skinning it
between the bars; the Sakunny, the wheelman, declared that Lala took a
piece of his bread and deliberately placed it in the chicken's trough outside
the bars and waited till the bird put its head out. He was not the sort of man
to make up such a story, but the engineer could hardly believe him and asked
to be called the next time the Sakunny could see the bear was after the coop.
Whether the engineer was in bed or not, Lala used to sleep not far from him
on a mat by the engine-room door. One night the wheel-man called him up,
and he actually saw the bear take along a piece of his bread and drop it into
the trough. He was ready to cuff Lala if he touched a fowl, but the bear was
too quick for him, and the very moment a hen put her head through the bars
whipped it out clean through. The engineer never gave Lala meat, but
somebody got feeding him on "bully beef," and that seemed to make him
restive. He never really bit anybody, but the engineer felt it was safest to get
rid of Lala. He got off one day at the village near the defile and took the bear
a mile and a half away into the jungle and "lost" him.

Soon after the villagers petitioned the engineer to take the bear on board
again. It seemed that Lala was haunting the village and stole chickens
persistently. So there was nothing for it but to take him on to the steamer
again. Then he gave him to the Rangoon Zoo.

It was months after that the engineer went to see Lala. He took with him
a retriever, which had been a great chum and playfellow of the bear. When
he asked about it at the gardens they said it had got very wild and would not
take its food. I'll give the rest of the story in the engineer's own words.

"They were just going to give it rations, so I said, Give me the food and
I'll go into the cage myself. I took the retriever in with me, and I'll never
forget the way that bear looked at me as long as I live. The poor thing just
stood up and put its forepaws on my chest and looked into my eyes as much
as to say:—'Is this what you've done to me?' No, I'll never keep a wild
animal again."

Below the defile the stream widened again and the banks were low sand-
flats as before. The sun blazed on the water, but little pieces of tin tied to
floating bamboo marks gleamed brighter than the water surface. In the
evening a long wraith of white mist lay across the grey-blue of the
mountains, and in the reflection of the afterglow bamboo stakes swung from
side to side with the current, tied to the bottom by their sand-bags and
shaken to and fro as a soul tethered to mortality quivers in the stream of
circumstance.

On each side of the steamer a man was now trying the depths with a long
pole, which he swung round in the air; like some monotonous prayer he
chanted the depths of the water—Sari ache balm—ache balm—ache hart—
chanted these words again and again.
 BURMESE MURDERERS.

The easy charm of the river-road gains a hold upon the traveller. There is
none of the irksome noise and shaking of the railway, and even the huge
cockroaches seem friendly. At every riverside village stopping-place there is
a bright scene of talk and laughter. The people on shore get all their news
and do all their shopping on the steamer's arrival, and friendliness is as
pervasive as the sunshine.
 One night on the Irrawaddy I slept on deck among a crowd of
passengers, and my immediate neighbours were three chained criminals.
Two of them had killed somebody and were handcuffed together, a chain
from the handcuff being fastened to an iron stanchion. When brought on
board they were roped as well, but the ropes were removed and they smoked
cheroots comfortably enough. Two Punjabis and a couple of smart little
Burmese policemen had charge of them, and the Punjabis slept, but all night
the Burmese police took turn about to watch. Whether it was the influence of
the river or of the tobacco I know not, but the murderers seemed no more ill
at ease than the rest of us; only, whenever there was a little chink or jingle,
the policeman's eyes brightened.

Slowly the mountains darkened and the mirrored magic of a little moon
floated upon the ever-moving stream.

CHAPTER IV

THE DEAD HEART OF A KINGDOM

How the wheels of that bullock-cart did creak!

The reason they had never been greased was because the driver loved the
sound. He believed that the Nats (who are supposed to throng the
neighbourhood) dislike it, and that while the wheels creaked the Nats would
keep away.

I had just come down the Irrawaddy by steamer from Mandalay, and
very early on the second morning had reached Nyaungoo. At three o'clock
Tambusami (my Hindoo servant) appeared at my cabin-door in a state of
excitement. I looked out and saw the boat's searchlight playing about the
shore, three or four brown bodies jumping into the water, and the usual
Flotilla Company's landing-stage—then the steep sandbank and collection of
stalls with their oil-lamps. The air was full of the shrill voices of women
talking, shouting and laughing. I dressed hurriedly, while fellow-passengers
lay peaceful in the ghostly seclusion of mosquito curtains. The electric fan
whirled on with fitful spits. There was no mist and the stars were bright.
Cocks crowed and dogs barked—the red ends of many cheroots glowed
from the bank, where people squatted smoking and talking.

When the steamer moved slowly away I and my servant were left, a little
before dawn, upon the steep sandy bank pitted with innumerable foot-treads.

Tambusami had laid in food supplies at Mandalay, and dividing

ourselves and our belongings between two bullock-carts at the top of the
bank, we jolted along the road through Nyaungoo. The higher clouds were
just caught by the new daylight as we passed under the tamarind trees of the
village. The walls of the houses were mere screens of plaited bamboo,
though often there was also an outer fence of bamboo posts 6 feet high.

A wan amber light now began to bathe the tops of a grove of 50-foot
toddy-palms.

After leaving the village I began to pass tall cactus hedges and then a
dilapidated pagoda with old grinning leogryphs, pale lemon in colour, and a
gilded dome. There were broken masses of crumbling red brick, and under
the now dove-coloured sky the glass facets of tall bird-topped votive poles
gleamed brilliantly. Then the road entered the district of a myriad ruins and
long lines of broken gods. Purple and violet and fiery orange-red, a
multitude of small clouds scattered across the pale steely-blue. Tall trees of
cactus with small leaves on spreading branches, as well as the upright
column cactus springing green from the sand, now bordered the road.
Suddenly all the red of the clouds changed to gold, the purple to pale soft
heliotrope, and in a burst of golden light the sun rose over a line of violet
mountains. Past stray bushes of wild cotton, with their mauve blossoms and
pale-bluish leaves, men were carrying loads of red lacquer bowls. These
bowls, packed in column and swinging in nets from the shoulder crosspole,
looked like bundles of giant red sausages.

Mile after mile we jolted and creaked and presently passed between two
great piles of red brick with a Buddha in a porch on the exterior of either
side—all that remained of the great gateway—or one of the great gateways
—of the ancient city of Pagan.

The building of Mandalay was only commenced about fifty years ago;
Pagan was founded before A.D. 200. In Mandalay there are now close upon
200,000 inhabitants; at Pagan there are eight miles of brick-strewn sand and
a few poor villages. Mandalay, situated where the Irrawaddy is joined by its
chief tributary, is likely to become a great railway centre; Pagan, in the
dryest part of the dry zone, has had no practical importance since it was
sacked by Kubla Khan in 1286. But in that wilderness of rubble and cactus
the remains of 5000 pagodas and monasteries (it is said there were once
13,000) can still be traced, and among them are certain buildings in a good
state of preservation, vast in size and of quite peculiar interest.

A few small black pigs and a number of very mangy dogs loitered about
some huts. I was now in a land of ruins. Dismantled shrines, broken pagodas
and dilapidated temples stretched in every direction, but here and there were
vast structures of plaster-faced brickwork, either unharmed by time or
restored in spite of the popular belief that there is no merit in mere
reparation.

The Circuit House which I reached at last is a substantial building of iron

and teak, and letting daylight and air into the empty rooms, which reeked
with new varnish, I chose a suite upon the upper floor which has a wide
covered balcony. Hitherto travellers who wanted to visit Pagan have had
either to take camping equipment with them or else to sleep at Nyaungoo,
five miles away. In preparation for a recent visit of the Viceroy, however, a
large and comfortable circuit house was built near the riverside, in the very
centre of the ruins, and for the future there need be no difficulty in obtaining
"lodging for the night." The Viceroy, on the occasion of his visit, abode in
his launch, and I was told I was the first stranger to sleep at the Circuit
House. I had obtained the key of the cupboard, which harboured plate and
kitchen utensils, and while I went off to look round, Tambusami prepared a
welcome breakfast.

From the house you look over the wide river, which is not more than a
quarter of a mile away, to a range of mountains beautiful at every hour of the
day. I walked inland a little way to the Thatbyinnyu Pagoda (the Temple of
Omniscience), the loftiest of the buildings at Pagan, 200 feet high and
standing upon rising ground. It is square in plan but with a large projecting
porch on one side. The middle portion is a huge quadrangular mass of
brickwork supposed to be solid, but between this solid centre and the outside
there are upon the lower three of the five storeys of the building external
terraces and internal corridors with stairways connecting the floors, in the
thickness of the walls. Dark and sombre within, it is easy on descending
from the upper storeys to choose wrong stairways and to wander about as in
a maze. Upon the third storey, on the side of the great projection, there is in a
recess against the inner wall a colossal seated Buddha.

PAGAN.

Again and again I found myself groping alone in the silence of dark
passages, and after such an approach there is a strange solemnity about
sudden intrusion on the presence of a mighty seated figure so grandly
peaceful, so splendidly aloof and so serenely lasting.

Looking towards the river from the white terraces of this pagoda, another
of somewhat similar design to the Thatbyinnyu, appears on the right among
a number of smaller buildings mostly in ruins. This is the Gawdawpalin
Pagoda, built as a thank-offering by Narapatisezoo, a king who reigned in
Pagan through the last quarter of the twelfth century A.D. One day he
boasted "I am the best of all kings who ever sat on the throne of Pagan,"
whereupon he was struck blind, nor could any doctor cure him; but when
told what he had said, his ministers advised him to make images of the great
kings he had insulted by such a boast of superiority and to do homage to
them. Narapatisezoo did this and regained his sight, and then had the
Gawdawpalin Pagoda erected in gratitude to Buddha.

I came again to these terraces in the late afternoon when the more
mellow light of a low sun made everything glow with warm colour, as if it
wanted to give back the heat of the day before night came. And standing
then with my back to the river and looking inland I saw in front of me the
great Ananda, the most beautiful as well as the most curious of the Pagan
temples.

In the Ananda there is a large projecting porch on each of the four sides
of the square, adding about 40 feet on each side and making thus a cruciform
plan 280 feet across. The highest of its seven diminishing storeys is shaped
like a tall pyramid with four sides curved vertically as in Hindoo temples.

An ingenious feature of the Ananda is the lighting of the four colossal

figures of the Buddha which stand in niches of the central mass and face the
four porches. They are all standing figures and are higher than the arches,
the pointed arches of the entrance porches, and are lighted from above by
hidden openings in the wall. Running round the central portion are two
colonnades which cross the porch approaches to the four shrines. The gilded
figures of the four Buddha dispensations, Gautama, Kathaba, Gawnagon and
Kankkuthan, tower up gigantic, and in each case the mysterious illumination
of the head and shoulders adds to their grandeur. Under tall white arches, as
in some Gothic church, I walked slowly along the pavement, watching the
upper portion of the statue appear as I advanced. In the west porch there is,
about the middle of the transept, a raised circular slab with a pair of Buddha
footprints cut in stone in conventional arrangement, and covered with
engraved symbols. In the niche facing this porch the gilded figure is that of
Gautama himself.

The horizontal circular slab is raised upon a four-sided white plinth to

about the height of a man's waist. Looking across it the next tall archway is
seen flanked on either side by 'guardian' figures, each with the arm towards
the arch close to the body, except for the hand which is stiffly bent outwards
and upwards. The other arms are bent sharply at the elbows and have the
hands raised. To right and left of these figures the transverse colonnades
cross parallel to the outer walls.

From the stone slab with the impress of the feet you cannot quite see the
head of the great image in the distance, the top of the farthest arch still
hiding the upper part of the face. The figure is gilded all over and stands
upon a lotus. In front there is a low railing composed of thick glass balusters,
and having two little doors in the centre. Approaching nearer you see at last
in brilliant light the benign countenance.

Of the four of these colossal statues that called Kankkuthan on the north
side is believed to be the original figure, though it has been frequently
repaired. The hands are pressed together in front of the breast. The figure
wears a garment with sleeves close-fitting from the elbow to the wrists, but
from the elbows hanging straight down in a line with the upper arm to make
a conventional shape, which stops at an angle and ends in a slightly curved
border which meets the legs just above the ankle. The background of the
niche is covered with very elaborate glasswork, and on the silvery face of
some of this are patterns in a kind of gesso.

About the white walls of the corridors are numerous small niches in
which in high relief, coloured in red and gold, are representations of scenes
in Buddha's life. Parts of the corridors have tier above tier of similar niches
right up to the top of the wall, almost as in some Roman columbarium.

In a similar niche on the right as you walk towards the centre through the
western portico there is a small figure of the builder of the Pagoda, King
Kyansittha, a remarkably intrepid warrior whose chief adventures happened
before he came to the throne in the reign of his mightier predecessor, King
Naurata.

Naurata was the greatest of all the kings of Pagan—it was under his rule
that its territory increased till it stretched from Siam to Kachin and China,
and from Chittagong to Tonquin, and it was Naurata who destroyed Thaton
and brought 30,000 prisoners thence to Pagan, including artists and
craftsmen, as well as a king and queen.

Kyansittha was in disgrace for some years before Naurata was killed by a
white buffalo in the jungle. It was all about a certain present to Naurata from
his vassal, the King of Pegu. The present was a princess in a golden
palanquin, the King of Pegu's very beautiful daughter; and Kyansittha, who
seems to have been able to resist everything except temptation, lifted the
purdah, with the disastrous consequence of Naurata's jealous wrath. He only
returned from banishment upon Naurata's death, and the building of this
Ananda Pagoda was the chief event of a reign apparently much quieter than
that of his stormy and zealous predecessor. Verily, great building is more
lasting than the kingdoms of men!

On the outside of the Ananda Pagoda I saw a line of green glazed tiles
upon the outer walls. All round the base a series of such tiles a foot square is
let in just above a lower flange in the position of a dado. Each of them is a
separate figure illustrating a Jataka story, and each has the title underneath it
upon the tile in old Burmese characters. Many have been restored in an
absurd way (which has led to their being wrongly described) and some have
disappeared, but a great number remain, and careful drawings should be
made of these spirited reliefs before it is too late.

Near the Ananda there is a small museum containing a number of stone

slabs found at Pagan, covered with inscriptions in the old Burmese square
lettering. Among the objects in the museum are some good small bronzes,
wooden figures of Nats and some small votive bricks in the shape of a
pointed arch, within which Buddhas have been stamped upon the clay. So
little interest, however, are any English visitors expected to take in these
objects that the labels are only in Burmese characters.
 On one of my days at Pagan, Tambusami drew my attention to someone
riding towards us on a white horse. This was Mr Cooper, who had come over
from Nyaungoo to call upon me. Tambusami and a Burman did the best they
could to make a show with our diminished stores, and after dinner on the
wide veranda we found that we both knew Haslemere and the old
Portsmouth Road and Paris, and then Mr Cooper, who was a subdivisional
magistrate, told me about the kind of cases that are brought before him in the
Pagan district,—about an island for one thing. Now at Salay, just along the
river, there is an island which has been steadily growing in size. Originally it
was the property of one village on the mainland. It had been allotted to the
villagers after it had first appeared, and then some time ago it increased
suddenly in size a great deal more, coming up out of the river. Then the
headman of another village, on the strength of saying that he had a verbal
order from the Barman township magistrate, allotted plots to his own friends
and relations. Naturally the people of the first village were objecting.
BURMESE DWARF (3FT. 5IN. HIGH) SUFFERING FROM CATARACT.

Most of the cultivated land here pays revenue at the rate of four annas an
acre, and as assistant collector in revenue work, Mr Cooper had to put things
right.