Reviewed by Wendy Law-Yone

Sunday, April 21, 2002; Page BW07

THE TROUSER PEOPLE
A Story of Burma -- in the Shadow of the Empire
By Andrew Marshall
Counterpoint. 308 pp. $26

BEYOND THE LAST VILLAGE
A Journey of Discovery In Asia's Forbidden Wilderness
By Alan Rabinowitz
Island Press. 300 pp. $25

Burma (also known as Myanmar) is a country about which very little is known to the world outside, and that little usually derives from bad ink. Given the scarcity of good news from this isolated land -- thanks to a government whose brutality is exceeded only by its greed -- it is heartening to have two new books that redress this scarcity by reminding us of the good rather than the grim.

The Trouser People takes its title from the days when the sarong-clad Burmese were ruled by trouser-wearing white colonialists, and its subtitle from the shadows cast by Sir J. George Scott -- Victorian adventurer, colonial administrator and obsessive chronicler of Burmese history, customs, languages and folklore. Scott was a "natural imperialist" with a literary style to match: "Stepped on something soft and wobbly. Struck a match, found it was a dead Chinaman."

One of the few trouser people who deigned to wear sarong and sandals, Scott also sported a traditional Burmese tattoo on his arm, dutifully (if somewhat grandiosely) bequeathing the scrap of tattooed skin to the Royal College of Surgeons. His bequests to the Burmese were rather more useful: his magnum opus, The Burman (published, with a characteristic mix of arrogance and self-effacement, under a Burmese pseudonym); the whopping five-volume Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan State; a stockpile of his excellent photographs; and, no less important, the game of soccer, a sport he introduced to Burma, where it remains a national passion to this day.

The Trouser People is less about Scott, however, than about what has become of Burma in the century since his exploits there. Armed with a volume of the Gazetteer, British journalist Andrew Marshall sets out to visit the territory and tribes so minutely categorized by that Victorian polymath in the years when he was busy pacifying and mapping the northeastern frontier. Along the way, the author visits the effete grandson (now in his late seventies) of the last Burmese king; attends a rowdy football match (where the public delights in hurling abuse, with impunity for once, at officialdom); watches a traditional handkerchief dance performed in the official National Races Museum ("it was a lot like Morris dancing, except not so silly"); and meets a travel agent who quotes the minister of tourism. "The only thing I know about minorities," says the minister with unimpeachable candor, "is how to kill them."

Inevitably, Marshall comes across the usual traces of state-sanctioned violence for which the Burmese military regime is renowned: persecution, murder, torture and rapacity on a scale that beggars belief. But appalling as these facts appear in the recounting, they leave less of an impression than the funnier, sunnier aspects of the author's encounters: with the Wa and their mythic lake, for instance. The Wa are a minority group given to "fits of headhunting," who "claim tadpoles for their rude forefathers," in the words of Scott. Marshall's eventual discovery of their lake is only one of many memorable moments in this enlightening and charming book -- though not quite as memorable as this lovely sentence: "Brahminy geese, said to mate for life, paired off and canoodled in the sparkling shallows."

Alan Rabinowitz's Beyond the Last Village describes a different sort of journey -- or series of journeys -- in the shadow of another Victorian authority on Burma, the great naturalist Frank Kingdon Ward. Retreading the ground covered by Kingdon Ward (as described in his 1940s classic, Burma's Icy Mountains), Rabinowitz undertakes a grueling 500-mile trek from Putao, in the Kachin hills, to the no-man's-land at the foot of the Himalayas -- in itself an almost unheard-of experience for any Westerner in the past half-century of Burma's xenophobic rule. It's difficult to say which is the greater feat: the author's travels or his hard-won success in gaining government cooperation for a project to establish a vast national park in that remote region -- especially with a government that has trouble caring about human rights, let alone animal rights.

Rabinowitz is a zoologist with the Bronx Zoo's Wildlife Conservation Society; his previous book, Chasing the Dragon's Tail, is a colorful account of his efforts to study and save the wild cats of Thailand. Beyond the Last Village describes an even stranger journey of exploration, giving the lie to the popular assumption that we have run out of worlds to explore, that "the time for great discoveries is past, and no student of nature should go out expecting to find a new world," in the words of a 19th-century explorer. Rabinowitz was determined enough to do just that -- and the results speak for themselves in this gripping book.

In the rugged highlands of the Great Boundary Divide (where Tibet, Assam and Burma meet), the author discovers a world where "the greatest necessity is salt, where people plow the earth using themselves as the beasts of burden, and where the main source of meat is a group of primitive species that are little known outside the region." It is also a world of obscure tribes such as the Daru, the Rawang and the Taron, the only pygmies of Asia, a group now poignantly facing extinction.

The Rabinowitz expeditionary force consists of Burmese soldiers, porters, scientists (including an orchid collector) and a Buddhist monk who develops a huge crush on their leader. Forging through the wilderness of ecologically varied life zones, through the transition area "where the sun bear . . . overlapped with the Himalayan black bear," they reach the snowy environs of the very "last village" in the Adun Wang valley. Along the way, Rabinowitz comes across wildlife so rare as to be almost mythic (the red goral, the golden takin, the wild serow); identifies four new mammal species (including the tiny leaf deer, a member of which species he carries live all the way back to Rangoon); and uncovers the age-old trade in wild animal parts and salt (two of the most expensive commodities in the region).

Fascinating as these discoveries prove to be, Beyond the Last Village is as much about the human species as it is about wildlife. In fact, the author's encounters with humanity -- his own, as well as that of others whose lives touch his, whether they be strangers or intimates -- are what make this a sincere and deeply moving testimony as well as an eye-opening record of "a world that might have disappeared before we even knew it existed." •

Wendy Law-Yone, author of the novel "Irrawaddy Tango," was born in Mandalay, Burma.