At the open-air jade market, Chinese businessmen haggle with Burmese traders selling rough green slabs of the gemstone, freshly dug from mines in remote areas to the north. Deals have slowed. Prices are down in China, flattened by the slowing economy and a fierce anticorruption campaign.
On a recent morning, the mood was surly along the rows of wooden stalls where the Chinese inspect the jade for quality and color.
“It’s dirty and chaotic, and sometimes dangerous,” said Zhu Xuefei, a jade buyer from Guangdong Province in China. Myanmar, the name now used for Burma, was too poor to install the closed circuit television cameras that are ubiquitous in China to help prevent robberies, he complained.
Chinese traders have been coming to Mandalay since before the mid-19th century, when the city was created on the banks of the Irrawaddy River as the royal redoubt. Records show a Chinese temple from 1773. Some sailed down the river; others rode south from Yunnan Province in mule caravans ferrying silver and silk. The Chinese had a light touch.
Now the Chinese dominate the economy, their mansions lining the streets of an enclave called New Town, symbols of the wealth accrued in the underground drug, timber and mineral trades in the northern Shan and Wa States of Myanmar.
The city has become a sprawl of about one million people on a scorched, dusty plain. George Orwell, who lived here briefly in the 1920s, dismissed it as having just five features: pagodas, pariahs, pigs, priests and prostitutes. The old pagodas, many covered with gilded paint, still exist, though the most notable recent one has a pale jade exterior, a testament to the city’s new money.
The timber buildings of Orwell’s era either burned down or were demolished to make way for crude concrete buildings that now dominate the downtown area.
In the early hours, the sun lights up the red brick fortress walls of the palace, and the moat glistens with soft light. But soon the sun’s hot glare drums down on everything, and by midday the streets mostly empty out.
Much of the activity moves to the teahouses. They are open sided, with ceiling fans moving listlessly in the heat. Waiters carry large metal teapots, their flip-flops making a swishing sound on the concrete floors as they fill customers’ cups and plop down platters of curry.
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