As part of the colonial history theme I’ve been reading Barbara Crossette’s ‘Great Hill Stations of Asia’.

Like me, she has been charmed by Beth Ellis’s An English Girl’s First Impressions of Burmah… and was equally puzzled about Beth’s referring to Maymyo as Remyo.

One other interesting little snippet was that the lake at Maymyo was dug by Turkish prisoners of war during World War One – something that at first seems surreal, but actually has a bizarre logic to it.

The Mesopotamian campaign was run by the British colonial command in India, not from Whitehall, using in the main Indian troops. So of course, when they had a large number of prisoners their natural inclination ws to ship them off to a prison camp in India, rather than Egypt or the Sudan. And Burma was of course governed as part of British India …

What the Turks made of being shipped to upcountry Burma is anyone’s guess …

It wasn’t just the Mesopotamian Campaign. Much of Britains involvement in the Gulf was run from India in colonial times with the Trucial States – the precursor to today’s UAE – initially being governed from Delhi and using Indian rupees as currency, as did the early British settlements in Kenya – purely because it was geographically convenient.

One also sees the converse today, with the US using vraious of the Gulf States as staging posts for shipping troops to Afghanistan and with the Taliban opening an office in Qatar as a precursor to possible peace talks …