The Trouser People

Product Description

An unforgettable adventure story of two journeys, one hundred years apart, into the untravelled heart of Burma. Part travelogue, part history, part reportage, The Trouser People is an enormously appealing & vivid account of Sir George Scott, the unsung Victorian adventurer who hacked, bullied & charmed his way through uncharted jungle to help establish British colonial rule in Burma. Born in Scotland in 1851, Scott was a die-hard imperialist with a fondness for gargantuan pith helmets & a bluffness of expression that bordered on the Pythonesque. But, as Andrew Marshall discovered, he was also a writer & photographer of rare sensibility. He spent a lifetime documenting the tribes who lived in Burma`s vast wilderness & is the author of The Burman, published in 1882 & still in print today. He also not only mapped the lawless frontiers of this ”geographical nowhere”
- the British Empire`s eastern-most land border with China
- but he widened the imperial goalposts in another way: he introduced football to Burma, where today it is a national obsession. Inspired by Scott`s unpublished diaries, Andrew Marshall retraces the explorer`s intrepid footsteps from the moldering colonial splendor of Rangoon to the fabled royal capital of Mandalay. In the process he discovers modern Burma, a hermit nation misruled by a brutal military dictatorship, its soldiers, like the British colonialists before them, nicknamed ”the trouser people” by the country`s sarong-wearing civilians. Wonderfully observed, mordantly funny, & skillfully recounted, ` The Trouser People` is an offbeat & thrilling journey through Britain`s lost heritage & a powerful expose of Burma`s modern tragedy.