Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia

Description

From their very beginnings, the civilizations of China and India have been walled off from each other, not only by the towering summits of the Himalayas, but also by the vast and impenetrable jungle, hostile tribes, and remote inland kingdoms that once stretched a thousand miles from Calcutta across Burma to the upper Yangtze River. In the next few years this last great frontier will likely vanish - forests cut down, dirt roads replaced by superhighways, insurgencies ended - leaving China and India exposed to each other as never before. This basic shift in geography is as profound as the opening of the Suez Canal. What will this change mean? Thant Myint-U is in a unique position to know. Over the past few years he has travelled extensively across this vast territory. In a region of long-forgotten kingdoms and modern-day wars, high-speed trains and gleaming new shopping malls have now come within striking distance of the last remaining forests and impoverished mountain communities. And he has pondered the new strategic centrality of Burma, the country of his ancestry, where Asia's two rising giant powers - China and India - appear to be vying for supremacy.

Thant Myint-U ((born 31 January 1966) is an historian and a past Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the author of two bestselling, critically acclaimed books, The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma and Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia. He was born in New York City to Burmese parents and is the grandson of former UN Secretary-General U Thant. He was educated at Harvard and the University of Cambridge. He has lectured extensively, including at Stanford, University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Cambridge, London University, and the Australian National University.