On the Road to Mandalay - from Rudyard Kipling to Daphne Du Maurier

Without realising it, the first time I heard of a distant place called Mandalay was when I was about five years old:

The head of the herd was calling

Far, far away

They met one night in the silver light

On the road to Mandalay

It seems Nellie the Elephant, made famous by this nursery rhyme, packed her trunk and traveled all over flipping Asia and back again when I look at these lyrics now, Bombay - Hindustan - Mandalay - where next?

Aside from the irresistible nostalgia sesh, my reason for bring up Nellie is that Mandalay for some reason over the years has become, through literature, this romanticised city. The 'silver light' of Burma.

Most famously, Rudyard Kipling wrote his famous poem, 'On the Road to Mandalay' which was subsequently put to music , most notably by Frank Sinatra:

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,

There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;

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!"

So I think, as much as I love Nellie, Rudyard Kipling is probably the main culprit when it comes to the romanticising of Mandalay. When we drove into the ex-Burmese capital, I was on the lookout to see whether or not there was anything in what Kipling had to say.

"Everyone comes to visit," our guide was telling us, "expecting to find a beautiful old Asian city. But it's not! It's a big modern city with a lot of cars!" And he was right. It is a busy modern city with lots of cars, but then it occurred to me - Kipling this whole time has been writing about the ROAD to Mandalay, not the city itself. Even Nellie only headed out in the direction of Mandalay. Who knows if she ever got there. And the road to Mandalay really is beautiful. A basin between two mountain ranges, the land is flat, lush green farm land with idyllic lakes and the iconic teak bridge, an image used in numerous depictions of Burma and on the front of Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace.

I think, though, that the main reason for the continued romanticising of the city is wrapped up in its mystery. For decades Myanmar has been cut off from the world. Even before that, the city itself is built around the last royal palace of the Burmese monarchy and it is vast - 413 hectres to be precise, and 2km square, with huge towering walls and a 64 metre wide moat separating it from the rest of the city. The last king never once left the palace walls until he was sent into exile, enforcing a sense of mystery at the literal centre of the city.

This sense of mystery is, perhaps, epitomised in Daphne Du Maurier's appropriation of the name, Mandalay (or Manderley, as she writes), for the ghostly manor in her novel, Rebecca.

I don't even know if Kipling went to Mandalay, perhaps he only made it to the road on its way there? But the surrounding countryside really is beautiful, and the city, which yes, has some traffic, don't they all?, was actually great. I got to walk around the different working districts - marble carving, gold leaf making, silk weaving - and climb to the top of Mandalay Hill at sunset to see it all from a distance. It's a great city, so maybe now that the country is open again, Kipling's poem will bring more curious people to its gates?