Shortly before dawn on 4 January 1948 dozens of diplomats prized themselves from their beds and proceeded to don official clothing and regalia. Burma 's independence and exit from the Commonwealth had finally come to pass. Terrified by the memory of the assassination of Aung San, Burma's youthful leaders had consulted numerous astrologers. They had insisted that the date should be moved from 6 to 4 January and that the proclamation itself should take place at precisely 4 o'clock in the morning to take advantage of a favorable conjunction of the stars. Later that day Thakin Nu gave a speech setting out his high hopes for the new republic. He traced the history of Burma, from its great medieval past through the humiliations of British rule and Japanese invasion. The spirit of Aung San was heavy in the air; he had made 'the last sacrifice on the altar of freedom'.1 True to tradition in the Buddhist world, the new country's president announced a purge of Burma's religious establishment to match the prime minister's political revolution. 'Evil practices' such as 'caste, begging, pagoda and monastery slavery' would be abolished.2 The new national flag fluttered incongruously over the neo-Gothic government house in Rangoon, where a few years earlier, as Burma fell to the Japanese, Reginald Dorman-Smith had roamed amid what he saw as the jeering portraits of his predecessors. A significant number of men and women born before 1885 had lived to see their nation free again. That evening in Delhi, Mountbatten, presented to the Burmese ambassador a table, that once belonged to the last independent ruler of Burma, King Thibaw. General Bucher, now commander-in-chief of the Indian Army, was unimpressed by the item, which, he wrote, 'looked not unlike a very superior wash stand'.3

Out in the Shan hills of eastern Burma, where Balwant Singh, the district magistrate of Indian descent, was now posted, the ceremonies were more prosaic. Balwant Singh felt a thrill of anticipation as the Union Flag was lowered and the Burmese flag went up in that chilly early morning. Yet, he remembered; somehow our ceremony seemed mundane and the newly liberated citizenry unconcerned. When the district commissioner, U Aung Pe, officially declared that Burma was independent, it seemed a flat statement. The ceremonies continued. As the police marched past, the district commissioner took their salute, looking to me rather odd in his silk pasoe, dark jacket and pink headdress. There was something awkward about the way he saluted.4 To Balwant Singh's disgust, officials also instituted a policy of burning villages whose inhabitants were suspected of collaboration with the communists and forcibly relocating others away from influence of the insurgents.5

John Furnivall, the 71-year-old left wing agrarian expert, was the only former British official invited to return to the country as an adviser. Furnivall had written a number of books that denounced 'colonial capitalism' and indicted the British for exacerbating ethnic differences in Southeast Asia.6 In the 1930’ Furnivall had got to know Nu and the other nationalist leaders while he helped to run a socialist book shop in Rangoon. Later he worked with the government in exile at Simla, advising on the reconstruction of Burma, but he was always fiercely critical of Dorman-Smith, whom he accused of promoting the return of British firms to exploit the Burmese.7

Coming back to Burma after nearly a decade, Furnivall was struck by the changes in Rangoon: ' Rangoon is no longer an Indian city', he wrote.8 Burmese, not Indians, now predominated among Rangoon dock workers. The Chinese, too, were more or less invisible as they had adopted traditional Burmese dress during the war. But at the same time traditional Burmese costumes were giving way to new fashions for the aspiring new nation. People wore trilby hats and pith helmets, once a symbol of the white rulers, rather than Burmese turbans.9 Furnivall also mentioned the popular celebrations accompanying independence. Shortly after his return he went to a dramatic performance, a pyazat: 'It ended with a scene depicting a free people dancing in a rain of gold and silver. That was a dream in which almost everyone indulged.'10 In this drama, 'the peasants and artisans triumphed over capitalism and imperialism'.11

Many of the monks sweeping the platform of the now glistening and restored Shwedagon pagoda believed equally firmly that a new age of dharma, or spiritual virtue, had arrived. State and religion were about to be united again. They knew that this cosmic event was to be celebrated at a ceremony at which Nu, their reluctant prime minister, would distribute great quantities of food and gifts to the serried ranks of saffron-robed monks at the pagoda. Celebrations lit up the streets in Rangoon. In Mandalay, the half burnt-out city was beginning to rise again; ugly concrete blocks sprang up from the ashes of the pretty wooden shop houses. Burmese traders looked forward to inheriting everything left by departed Indian magnates. Burmese peasants rejoiced at the prospect of the cancellation of their loans from the resented Chettiyar moneylenders. Edgy young soldiers and militiamen, toting their rifles on the streets and taking a cut from passing buses and taxis, confidently expected that the new government would expand the armed forces and raise their pay. Across the country, however, the peoples of the frontier areas, along with Christians, Anglo-Burmans, the few remaining British settlers, Karens, Kachins and Shans, waited tensely to see whether the new regime would honor the concessions made to them by Aung San at the Panglong conference and in other statements. No one was sure whether the millennium or an apocalypse lay ahead.

The new government got to work on 5 January with a huge head of steam behind it. Edgar Snow, an American journalist and veteran of Mao Zedong's 'long march', visited Rangoon a few weeks after independence. Snow had had his first taste of Burmese radicalism when he met Thein Pe in India in 1943 and was persuaded to write a preface to the latter's What Happened in Burma. On his visit to Rangoon Snow stayed with Furnivall.12 It was from Furnivall, the British Foreign Office thought, that Snow had got the rather inflated figures of the pre-war profits of British firms that he used in an article 10 justify the forthcoming nationalization of British assets. An official in London remarked sourly of Furnivall that his 'socialist antipathy to British firms in Burma, acquired during his long ICS service, is well known'.13

Snow marveled at the youth of the new leadership. Nu himself was 'an old man' of forty-two; the interior minister was a stripling of Ihirty-six.14Snow was charmed by the youthful enthusiasm, of his smiling hosts. The government's two-year plan for the economy was most impressive: Stalinism with a smile. Land would be given back to the tiller, as had been the case before the British invasion. Snow put down the slightly unorthodox enthusiasm of the young Burmese rulers to the old national habit of mixing astrology, spirit worship and Buddhism. Burmese were 'competent' and pragmatic. They picked and mixed from every ideology on display. But even the amiable and left-leaning Snow worried about what the future would really bring to this small, young country wedged between two huge expansionist neighbors and perched atop the outposts of the British Empire, spruced up and given a new lease of life by its American cousin: 'It's like power and responsibility being suddenly handed to a student union, to realize the Utopia they have long demanded from their hopeless elders,' he mused.15

Furnivall also shared these misgivings. When he first entered his new office, the Burmese minister of planning pumped the hand of the old ICS man and said: 'Now we have independence, give us a plan.' Nu, Furnivall thought, was charming and enthusiastic but 'perhaps over-prolific of ideas'16 Central to the health of the new republic was indeed the genial figure of Thakin Nu. The new prime minister epitomized the Buddhist socialism that was to be the hallmark of Burma 's independence. Always pining to return to the monastery, Nu was nevertheless no traditional man, but more a kind of intellectual magpie. He had been and continued to be a prolific writer and lecturer. His 1940 novel in Burmese, Man, the Wolf of Man, was so called after Thomas Hobbes's dictum 'Man is to man a wolf'. In it he had expatiated on the evils of colonial capitalism, asserting that the patient Burmese peasantry must be freed from debt to reach their true potential as spiritual beings. He said he had been influenced by writers as various as Sir Thomas More, G.F. Hegel, H. G. Wells and Sigmund Freud.17 His was a modernist Buddhism which opposed the mistaken use of the doctrine of karma - cosmic retribution which, he thought, encouraged uneducated people to be passive and accepting of exploitation. Instead, Buddhism was a science to perfect the human soul. Popular dramatic performances propagated this idea. Nu saw no contradiction between Buddhism and socialism either, though, as Furnivall tartly pointed out, this was perhaps because 'although an enthusiastic Marxist, he knows little and understands less of Marxism'.18

One group of people who knew exactly what was about to happen were the communist leaders who had broken with the AFPFL in 1946 when Aung San had brokered his deal with Rance. Red-flag communists, led by Thakin Soe, had been joined by Than Tun's 'white' communists, who had come to blows with the AFPFL more recently over the Nu-Attlee agreement. Than Tun was a longtime associate of Nu and his rebellion shocked the prime minister. To some degree, the new 'white' militancy resulted from the changed international situation. Soviet communism was going on to the offensive and its followers in eastern Europe, India and Southeast Asia followed suit. The Indian Communist Party hosted a major conference in Calcutta in February 1948, which was attended by Than Tun along with delegates from Malay and Indo-China. But Than Tun was also over confident. (Trager, Burma, pp. 97-8).

He predicted that the 'bones' of the AFPFL politicians would fill to the brim the Bagaya Pit near Rangoon. He was buoyed up by the huge gatherings of peasants that came out to hear the leftist leaders in February and March. Than Tun may have misinterpreted the peasants' enthusiasm for communism: they were probably just looking for some excitement, now that independence had finally dawned and the colonial policemen had retreated from the country. Another communist leader, Thein Pe, believed that Than Tun had made a fatal doctrinal error. The AFPFL was not simply an imperialist and capitalist front; it had a serious 'mass' following. (Thein Pe Myint, 'Critique of the communist movement in Burma ', 1973, Mss Eur C498, Oriental and India Office Collection, London,British Library).

Than Tun and the others should have been good Marxist believers and waited for a bourgeois revolution and not allowed a workers' and peasants' putsch to go off half-cocked. The British felt that Thein Pe's moderate communism might be even more insidious than that of the white and red revolutionaries. (Dossier on Thein Pe including his manifesto of 19 March, enclosed in Bowker to Foreign Office, F037I/69517, The National Archive, Kew, London)

The communist ideologues, led by Than Tun and Hari Narayan Ghosal, the latter an Indian labor organizer, had scoured the history of the Russian revolution to come up with an analysis of their present situation. Ghosal was a student labor activist at Rangoon University in 1940-I. He had been evacuated to India during the war and worked as a war correspondent for People's War, the Indian Communist Party journal, and was a close aide of P. e. Joshi, the party's Secretary General. He returned to Burma in 1945 and later went underground. In a long, verbose minute, written in the unmistakable leaden language of international communism, Ghosal set out his justification for an immediate Burmese insurrection which was to take place in March 1948 at the latest. ('On the present political situation in Burma ', January 1948, enclosed in Bowker to Foreign Office, 20 July 1948, F037I/69516, TNA).

He argued in retrospect that Aung San and Thakin Nu were not really leaders of a revolutionary people but representatives of a new 'Burmese bourgeoisie' that would cooperate with international imperialism. They would allow British, American and even the hated Indian businessmen to carry on exploiting the Burmese people. The British services mission set up in the Nu-Attlee agreement reflected the last flicker of the tradition of the Indian Army. John Freeman, a future British High Commissioner in India, had negotiated a treaty with Burma in the summer of 1947. The official doctrine was that it was undesirable that Burma should go outside the British Commonwealth for arms or military advice. The Labour government wanted a 'stable and friendly' Burma. It worried about an outbreak of 'anarchy' that would compromise the defense of both India and Malaya, encouraging communism and damaging British business as it struggled to recover from war. London and the Rangoon embassy both believed that the army was in a state of near chaos. As late as 1940 there had been no Burmese officers in the army and all the technicians, engineers and clerks had been Indian. Withdrawal of British and Indian expertise and experience could only lead to disaster. 'Their fighting, like their politics, is essentially medieval', haughtily minuted Peter Murray, who was in charge of the Burma desk in Whitehall. ('Establishment of British Services Mission in Burma', 9 February 1948, F037I/6948I, TNA).

The head of the services mission, Major General Geoffrey Bourne, had the difficult task of persuading the Burmese to form an efficient military force which they could also afford. He had to offer firm strategic and organizational advice without appearing to be running the show. Bourne had some things going for him. Above all, he had good relations with the new head of the Burma Army, Major General Smith Dun. 'Four-foot' Smith Dun was the Christian Karen army officer who had fought in the first Burma campaign, staging an ultimately unsuccessful rearguard action to protect the Indian Army as it withdrew into India. To the British, who knew, from long experience, exactly how to patronize him, he had 'all the Karen's courage and loyalty', but was not very bright. A minute noted that he always allowed himself to be pushed around by political magnates. Once, when he was refused a government aircraft to fly him to Maymyo to lecture at the staff college there, Smith Dun had meekly booked himself on to a crowded passenger flight. Later, as the Karen revolt gathered pace, Smith Dun was to find his position untenable and was probably unsurprised to be sent on 'indefinite leave'. (Smith Dun, Memoirs of the four-foot Colonel: General Smith Dun, first commander in chief of independent Burma 's armed forces, New York, 1980, pp. ii-vii.)

It is easy to see why he succumbed to the steely ruthlessness of General Ne Win. Still, as the old Burma hand B. R. Pearn minuted in the Foreign Office, quoting Erasmus: 'In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. 'By far the most effective parts of the army were the Karen, Kachin, Shan and Chin regiments, which were descendants of the old colonial Burmese and Indian Army units and not the nationalists' Burma Defence Army with which they had been merged by Mountbatten and Aung San. But in order to expand the army's payroll the politicians had to cut back on the purchase and renovation of transport. As early as February 1948 the British services mission to Burma noted that the army's strength had risen from 20,000 to 23,000.Many of the better officers of the old Burma Army reluctantly realized that help from their former imperial master was essential if the country was to stay in one piece. But they resented the tone and manner of the professional British officers. Lieutenant Colonel Maung Maung, head of the officer training school at Maymyo, barked: 'I don't need any British advisers. I am the Commandant now and I will soon get rid of all of you. (Rangoon to London, 15 May 1948, minute by Bourne, F0371/69482, TNA).

Relations were further embittered by the fact that the remaining British officers occupied 90 per cent of the decent married accommodation at the major army bases. The Burmese, sporting their new national badges and epaulettes, were pushed out into leaking tents or bamboo huts as the first monsoon of independent Burma broke with patriotic violence. But, worse, there was a ghost at the feast: the Japanese. The most difficult thing of all to counteract, the British believed, was 'the legacy of Japanese influence'. (Ibid.) Many of the nationalist officers had been trained by them in 1941-2 and thought that the secret of Japan's success had been the deployment of lightly equipped forces with a minimum of administrative control; they believed that their own army would be highly successful if trained along these lines. Despite Britain 's victorious fight back in 1944 and 1945, the Burmese thought that the British military tradition was burdened with red tape, and immobilized by protocols. And once the communists and their other radical opponents began to accuse them of selling out to the old empire, the AFPFL began publicly to distance itself from the British mission. To the exasperation of the War Office in London, however, Nu and his colleagues freely combined public denunciations of unspecified 'scheming imperialists' with pathetic private appeals for aircraft, spare parts and ammunition, The Burmese government continued to demand second hand Oxford trainer aircraft, Spitfires and, above all, ammunition. (Rangoon to London, 9 April 1948, F0371/69481, TNA).

The War Office was alarmed because the Burmese demand for 6 million rounds was merely one among dozens of requisitions from newly liberated and newly embattled countries around the world from Greece to Malaya. There were two other particular embarrassments. Much of the new Burma Army's equipment was Japanese. The British had to go cap in hand to the Americans in Japan to get them to release stores. Secondly, there was a nagging fear in the War Office that they were about to make a serious error. In China a great deal of Japanese war materiel had fallen directly into the hands of the communists or the Soviets in 1945. As summer arrived the mandarins' nightmare was that the ammunition ships, Spitfires, Oxfords and all would enter Rangoon on the very day that the provisional Soviet Republic of Burma was proclaimed and the AFPFL was abruptly replaced with the red flag. (Peter Murray, minute, 14 September 1948, F0371/69484, TNA).

As it turned out, everything was much more fragile than the authorities thought. The youth in the villages and in the volunteer organizations were deeply frustrated. The millennium had been promised for three years, it had dawned and nothing much had changed. The towns were doing better, but there were still areas of deep misery in the countryside, hungry for basic commodities let alone consumer goods. Land reform was in train but already it seemed that the people who were getting 'peasant holdings' sequestered from the Indian, Chinese and other landholders were the hangers-on of the AFPFL village committees and not young PVO men who had fought for their country. (Furnivall to Dunn, 29 February 1948, Furnivall Papers, PP/MS 23, vol. I, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London).

Indian moneylenders still collected their interest in the delta villages. Arrogant Europeans 'still patrolled the teak forests. Communist propaganda was quite effective. The young believed that Britain was still milking Burma of its resources and, worse, that the Burmese government was paying compensation to it for the nationalization of unprincipled British firms. Burma 's military forces were not even its own, as could be seen by the presence of the British services mission. Quite apart from these local resentments, a deep sense that the world was changing had trickled into even remote areas. Something called communism, which promised to get rid of landowners and capitalists, was sweeping across eastern Europe. Burmese communists joined Indian ones at their great congress in Calcutta in February 1948, perhaps the high point of radical communism in India. The Party had finally began to throw off the taint that it had collaborated with the British during the war.

Back in Burma, nationalist defeats in China crept closer to the northern border and army deserters flooded into the Kachin and northern Shan states. A new charismatic name began to be heard among the youths arguing in the meeting places of small towns: Mao Zedong. There is little evidence that the Chinese communists had even the most distant relationship with the red- or white-flag communists in Burma before 1948, but Burmese translations of Mao's works began to appear in large numbers in the early months of that year. Mao's military language and insistence that the peasantry could be the vanguard of revolution appealed to young people whose world had already been turned upside down once in their short lives. It meant much more than the arid, Moscow-style logic chopping of orthodox communists and their Bengali admirers. Even the British embassy began to hear rum ours of Mao. They telegraphed to London asking for English translations of his works. Yet no one in London seemed to know who he was. ('Effect of Communist Party advance in China on communists in Burma', Rangoon, 4 December 1948, F0371/69522, TNA).

Hari Narayan Ghosal and his allies must have sensed this change in public mood, so rather than risk being caught off guard by an outbreak of uncoordinated popular uprisings in the delta and the north, they began in the early weeks of 1948 to plan a coordinated uprising for the late spring. (Bertil Lintner, The rise and fall of the Communist Party of Burma New York, 1990, p. II.) Then, as the monsoon set in and the already stretched and immobile government forces became bogged down in the mud, these base areas could be linked together. A working-class rising in the Rangoon docks and the southern oil installations would accompany a coup d'etat which would foreshadow victory over imperialism and the Burmese bourgeoisie. As it was, the government, which was partially informed of these plans, made the first move. On 23 March several communist leaders were rounded up by the police and interrogated, but the operation was bungled and many of the most important leaders scattered into the hinterland. (Thein Pe Myint, 'Critique of the communist movement in Burma', 1973, Mss Eur C498, ff. 26, Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library).

By 1 April the political situation in the country was very uneasy and a week later the typical signs of a Burmese insurrection were plain to see. Telegraph wires and bridges were sabotaged across the delta and police stations were under attack in a way reminiscent of the revolt against the Japanese three years earlier. Some of those more traditional symptoms of a coming, uprising which generations of British officials were taught to expect had also begun to appear. People had their skin tattooed to ward off'-evil and insurgents tried to make themselves invulnerable to government bullets with spells.' (Rangoon to London, 26 May 1948, F0371/69515, TNA). The old prophecies of the 1880’s about Burma 's future were ransacked once again and spirit dancers at the nat spirit shrines mouthed apocalyptic premonitions. Villages were burned and police stations attacked across a wide range of territory in the south and the north-central part of the country. James Bowker, the British ambassador, described 'a state of mind bordering on panic' in the Rangoon secretariat.’ (Bowker to Foreign Office, F0371/69481, TNA).

To add to its troubles, the government got into a long slugging match with the press about one of Burma 's periodic political sex scandals. The minister of agriculture was accused of seducing a 'respectable' married woman. The minister denied this and the AFPFL leadership began attacking newspapers and encouraging mobs to destroy several newspaper offices and presses. It mattered little that the public later discovered that the woman concerned had gone through no fewer than five husbands before she was twenty-four. (Furnivall to Dunn, 28 March, 9 April 1948, Furnival Papers, PP/MS 23, vol.I , SOAS). The two years of press freedom which Burma had enjoyed effectively came to an end, never to return. The government realized that the police were unreliable, the volunteer brigades were hostile and the army was split down the middle. It vacillated, embarking now on a half-hearted purge of the army and pleading secretly for help front the British. At the same time, though, it confused matters by trying to improve relations with the communists in private discussions. To the annoyance of the British government, Nu again publicly denounced 'imperialists' - in an attempt to favor with his leftist former colleagues.  Nu's speech stirred up a flurry of pained letters from the British ambassador on to Stafford Cripps, a trimming that cut little ice with the communists. (Nu to Cripps, 7 October 1948, Cripps-Nu correspondence, CAB1271 151, TNA).

In Rangoon itself there were persistent rumors and allegations that the British military supply board (a civilian organization) was in cahoots with local Anglo-Burmese and Indian businessmen. Rather than selling to government, it was secretly disposing of war surplus to the highest bidder, in the best traditions of the old 'black-market administration' of 1945. (Rangoon to Foreign Office, 3 July 1948, F0371/69483, TNA).

Besides denouncing the British, Nu tried other ways to revive national unity and outflank the communists. In early April he masterminded a final burial ceremony for the embalmed remains of Aung San and his colleagues. Medical opinion supported the interment; the bodies, still lying in state in the Jubilee Hall, were decomposing rapidly. But Furnivall understood the political motive behind the ceremony: Nu's attempt to invoke the spirit of Aung San to revive the old wartime nationalist alliance. Members of the armed forces drew Bogyoke's bier to his last resting place and some communist leaders attended the burial, but past comradeship could not hide present differences. On 8 May the final act of this older drama was played out. At dawn on this cloudy morning U Saw walked out of his prison cell wearing his usual jacket and a longyi. He chatted briefly with his guards and shook the hands of the men who were about to hang him. (Maung Maung, A trial in Burma: the assassination of Aung San,The Hague, 1962, p. 68).

All appeals, private and public, had failed. Dorman-Smith could do nothing for him, even though he had written a letter to him claiming that the trial was biased and had publicly declared, 'I know U Saw. I know him to be an honest man.' (the Sunday Despatch, Rangoon,15 February 1948). In fact, Dorman-Smith's appeal for mercy on behalf of U Saw was perhaps the most certain way of ensuring his execution, as most Burmese believed that Dorman-Smith was somehow connected with the assassination of Aung San.

With U Saw dead, almost the last link with the Burmese high politics of the 1930’s had been severed. By early June the situation had deteriorated further. Burmese Muslims were on the point of rebellion in Arakan. To the far north sporadic rebellions among hill Karen, Shan and Kachin peoples became entwined with the politics of opium. In the south, in the countryside around Pegu, rebels showed a new level of determination, fighting on during the monsoon when once they would have retired to await drier conditions. They were also prepared to mount strong attacks on Burma Army units and police stations, taking heavy casualties in the process. This too was a new development. It was already, the British mission conceded, 'a small civil war, and the Irrawaddy valley was virtually dominated by the rebels. The only thing that held the rebels back was a shortage of ammunition for their predominantly Japanese weapons. (See Bertil Lintne, Burma in revolt: opium and insurgency since 1948, Boulder , 1994).

Embattled prime minister U Nu now lived alone in Windermere Park, a heavily fortified, barbed-wire protected enclosure patrolled by trigger-happy guards who occasionally shot dead civilians who inadvertently got too close. (News Chronicle, Rangoon, 27 August 1948).

A couple of months later a British press correspondent compared Rangoon to 'a Mexican border city expecting a raid by Pancho Villa. It is a city of non-descript uniforms, sombrero wearing gunmen with pistols lashed to their thighs, multi-guarded politicians, funk holes and fear. (News Chronicle, 23 September 1948).
 

1. Cited in Frank N. Trager, Burma: from kingdom to republic (London, 1966), p.108.

2. Burma's Independence Celebrations (Copygraph London Ltd, 1948), p. 15.

3. Roy Bucher to Miss Elizabeth Bucher, 5 January 1948, Bucher Papers, 7901/87-5, National Army Museum.

4. Balwant Singh, Independence and democracy in Burma (Ann Arbor, 1993) pp.67-8.

5. Ibid., pp. 74-5.

6. Notably, J. S. Furnivall, Netherlands India : a study of a plural economy ( London , 1939), which compared British administration in Burma and Malaya unfavourably with Dutch Indonesia; see also Julie Ph am, 'Furnivall and Fabianism: reinterpreting the plural society in colonial Burma ', Modern Asian Studies, 39, 2 (2005), pp. 321-48.

7. J. S. Furnivall to e. W. Dunn, 9 April 1948, Furnivall Papers, PP/MS 23, vol. I, SOAS.

8. Furnivall to Dunn, I I January 1948, ibid.

9. Furnivall to Dunn, 28 March 1948, ibid.

10. Furnivall in New Times of Burma, 10 April 1949.

11. Furnivall to Dunn, II January 1948, Furnivall Papers, PP/MS 23, vol. I, SOAS.

12. Marginal notes in F037I/6I595, TNA.

13. P. J. Murray, note 20 August 1948, F037I/69518, TNA.

14. Edgar Snow in Saturday Evening Post, 29 May 1948, F037I/69515, TNA.

15. Ibid.

16. Furnivall to Dunn, II January 1948, Furnivall Papers, PP/MS 23, vol. I, SOAS.

17. Richard Butwell, U Nu of Burma (Standford, 1963), pp. 73-84.

18. Furnivall to Dunn, 4 July 1947, Furnivall Papers, PP/MS 23, vol.L, SOAS.
 

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