The Trouser People: A Quest for the Victorian Footballer Who Made Burma Play the Empire's Game

by Andrew Marshall (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2002

  $4.20

  Sir George Scott was an unsung Victorian adventurer who hacked, bullied and 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 and a bluffness of expression that bordered on the Pythonesque. Stepped on something soft and wobbly , he records in his bush diary one dark night. Struck a match, found it was a dead Chinaman . George Scott was also a writer and photographer who spent a lifetime documenting the outlandish tribes who lived in Burma's wilderness - tribes like the Padaung giraffe women and the headhunting Wild Wa, who quaintly claimed to be descended from tadpoles. Scott also extended the Empire's untamed border with China, then famously widened the imperial goalposts in another way: he introduced football to Burma, where today it is a national obsession. A century later, Burma is a hermit nation misruled by a brutal military dictatorship. Its soldiers, like the British colonialists before them, are scathingly nicknamed the trouser people by the country's sarong-wearing civilians. Inspired by Scott's unpublished diaries, Andrew Marshall retraces the explorer's intrepid footsteps from the mouldering colonial splendour of Rangoon to the fabled royal capital of Mandalay, then up into the remote tribal heartland where Scott had his greatest adventures. Marshall recalls the opulent lives of the Western-educated chiefs who in Scott's time ruled hilltop fiefdoms half the size of England, and has his own encounter with the Wild Wa, who today run a huge drug-trafficking empire. Driven by the untold story of an extraordinary Scotsman, The Trouser People is an offbeat and thrilling journey through Britain's lost heritage - and a powerful expose to Burma's modern tragedy.

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $3.26

  This text presents a journey through Burma in two respects - a journey through history with Andrew Marshall travelling Burma in the present day but also visting the Burma of the last century. Sir George Scott, an eccentric Victorian adventurer, inspired Marshall to visit Burma. He spent weeks deciphering Scott's diaries and found himself on an oddly obessive quest to rescue this singular man from historical obscurity. Born in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, Scott was an imperialist with a fondness for pith helments and football - he introduced the sport to Burma and widened the goalposts of the British Empire in his own peculiar way. The Burmese love the game, Scott noted, because it's just like fighting. All through Burma he was a local legend, he reported for the London Evening Standard on matters royal and military and negotiated jungle paths.