Perhaps inevitably, my study of Myanmar's place in the development of popular Western music drew me into a search for the origins of Rudyard Kipling's poem “Mandalay”, and the development of its many musical variations. After correspondence with various members of the UK-based Kipling Society, I wrote this article for its journal.

Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as: ‘For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say, / ‘Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!’.

It is difficult to overestimate the impact on popular perceptions of Burma— indeed, of the “Far East” more generally—of Rudyard Kipling's poem “Mandalay”. It first appeared in the literary weekly The Scots Observer on 21 June 1890. It was subsequently included in Barrack Room Ballads and Other Verses (1892). In the years that followed, the poem was found in most collections of Kipling's works and became widely known, both in the United Kingdom (UK) and further afield. It not only inspired dozens of adaptions and imitations, both in verse and music, but it also helped shape Western images of Burma and Burmese society in ways that still resonate today.

The history of the poem has been well documented. In March 1889, aged 23 and relieved of his responsibilities to the Allahabad newspaper The Pioneer, Kipling set off from Calcutta for London, via Rangoon, Hong Kong, Yokohama and San Francisco. Although at the time the “pacification” of Burma was far from complete, the capital Mandalay had fallen to British arms in 1885 and the Burmese king had been exiled to India. On 1 January 1886, the rump of his domain was annexed by the UK and added to the Indian province of British Burma, which had been created in 1862 after two earlier Anglo-Burmese wars. Kipling was familiar with all these developments. He had already written a short story and three “newspaper verses” which specifically referred to Burma, namely “The Taking of Lungtungpen” (1887), “A Nightmare of Names” (1886), “The Grave of the Hundred Dead” (1888) and “The Ballad of Boh Da Thone” (1888).