On a 3,000-mile journey, the journalist meets disparate peoples and discovers a world too often veiled, piecing together a fascinating modern history of a country blighted by corruption and conflict
Clare Hammond began her career as a journalist covering the financial markets in Hong Kong, before moving to Myanmar. From 2014 to 2020, she worked freelance for various news outlets and as digital editor of Frontier, a Yangon-based magazine of investigative reporting. Her work covering the country’s many civil conflicts, and exposing corruption in the handling of its natural resources, obliged her to travel to parts of the country closed to tourists. She discovered a map of “shadow tracks”, railway lines that the military junta of Than Shwe (1992-2011) built using forced labour, under laws created by British colonials. Although some were less than 20 years old, many of the tracks were already falling into disrepair.
“The country’s dilapidated railways were beginning to capture my attention,” she writes of her first months in the country. “Within a year, I would find myself embarking on a 3,000-mile journey, by train, to the far reaches of Myanmar, to discover how the country had been shaped by these tracks.” For Hammond these barely used railway lines were symbolic of Myanmar’s history of haphazard, corrupt government, and provided her with a narrative structure to begin to make sense of its history. “In a country where rumours routinely assume the power of facts, [the railways] were a rare historical text that could not be easily erased.”
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