Search -
Where China Meets India: Burma and the Closing of the Great Asian Frontier
Where China Meets India Burma and the Closing of the Great Asian Frontier Author:Thant Myint-U From their very beginnings, China and India have been walled off from each other: by the towering summits of the Himalayas, by a vast and impenetrable jungle, by hostile tribes and remote inland kingdoms stretching a thousand miles from Calcutta across Burma to the upper Yangsi river. — In the next few years this last great frontier will vanish?t... more »he forests cut down, dirt roads replaced by superhighways, insurgencies crushed, leaving China and India exposed to each other as never before. This basic shift in geography?as sudden and profound as the opening of the Panama Canal?will lead to unprecedented connections among the three billion people of South Asia and the Far East.
What will this change mean?not just for commerce, but for history, for politics, for culture? Thant Myint-U is in a unique position to know. An American of Burmese descent, for years he has traveled regularly in the Asian no-man?s land that has Burma at its center. He has heard many of its hundreds of languages and dialects, encountered its mix of Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, and Muslims, and ruefully looked on as high-speed trains and gleaming shopping malls encroach on the last remaining forests and impoverished mountain communities. And he has pondered the new strategic centrality of Burma, where, with huge oil reserves newly found offshore, China and Asia will grapple for dominance.
Part travelogue, part history, part investigation, Where China Meets India takes us across the fast-changing Asian frontier, giving us a masterful account of the region's long and rich history and its sudden significance for the rest of the world.« less