On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey through Occupied Myanmar

"Yes. Hammond was a young journalist working in Hong Kong before she moved to Myanmar, where she covered civil conflicts, corruption, and so on. She travelled very widely, and latched onto this original idea of exploring the country via a series of secretive railway lines that she calls ‘the shadow tracks.’ It’s a way of uncovering the country’s history of trauma and mismanagement. These shadow tracks are railway lines that Than Shwe’s military junta built using forced labour, under laws created by the British colonial system. He was dictator there from 1992 to 2011. So these railways were constructed with all the brutality and suffering that you can imagine, and they don’t really appear on maps. “It’s about the style, the sheer beauty and enjoyment of the words, the quality of the writing itself” Clare Hammond discovers the whole network for herself. Some lines are semi-abandoned. So this is, in a way, a classic epic journey, as she covers 3000-miles of journeys into quite remote areas, from the tropical south to the mountain towns on the border with China. It’s a striking travelogue, but also a gimlet-eyed look at the British colonial legacy. A lot of people might remember reading George Orwell’s Burmese Days on this subject, but there’s also home-grown cruelty. We thought it was an admirably energetic, investigative book with a great breadth of research. And, clearly, a significant contribution to writing about a country little known in the West."