The Road to Mandalay is not only one of Kiplings Best-known and most evocative Barrack Room Ballads; amazingly, he wrote it after spending only a couple of days in Burma. But he did have time to visit Moulmein, a port about 150 miles south-east of Rangoon at the crow flies, from where most of Burmas teak was exported. It was there, as he later confessed, that he fell deeply and irrevocably in love with a pretty Burmese girl, an encounter he immortalised in his ballad.
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' lazy at the sea, There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me; For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the Temple-bells they say: Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay! "
Article taken from the SEAC newspaper
