 I'm talking about, again, the coming of the Bermans and basically contentious claims perhaps a little bit, slightly different angle on claims about Mon cultural hegemony. So, what I'm saying is, as well as invoking the Pagani era, as what one of Lucy's May names is, the apiosis of past glory and the inspiration on which to build with modern nation. Lucy considered it's very important to discover, as Patrick told us, where the Bermans, how the Bermans players came to make it. to doedd ymlaenol yn y tîm ap y Burmyr. Mae'r ydych chi gynnig yn ei dd Apigol yn dealladig, yn y pethio i'r cyffredin ymlaenol i'r eitheminwg wasganu pa byr y burmyr yn ein gwerth yn y llyfr yw ymddyddol yn ymgyrch yn rheoli a farson, a oedd hynny'n meddech chi'n mynd gyrraedd a'n byw iddo i'n ffath o hynny, oer bod y pethau o ddwyaf i'r tywl a fofaf o'r lleig yr ysgol iconiol. Mae gweithio, yn ystod, y gall fan hynny, yn eu bod hi'n meddwl i'r enyf yn ddegadau, yn ystod, ydy'r cymdeithas yng nghylch yn wyfan yn ymgyrch ymgyrch, gyd-gredigol ymgyrch ymddangosol, yn y tydau'r ysgol, ac rwy'n meddwl i'r pryddwyneis ymgyrch, i'r ffordd yma, a'r rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r ysgol yma, i'r pryddwyneis ymgyrch, i'r Eidemol, yn ymgyrch ymgyrch ymgyrch ymgyrch yn 1937. ac yn ydych chi'n rhan o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r 5 oed, 1948, ac ond yw'r cyfle'r cyfan yn edrych o'r ffordd, fel y dyfodol. Llywodraethwn i'n mynd i'ch cael ei ddweud i'r rhan o'r cyflwytaeth yn eu cyffredinol sy'n sicrhau bod ysgolodau hynny'n ymddangos ar y ffordd. I'm good by the achievements of the past, and his lifelong colleague and friend, John Fernval, who was a very blatant socialist nationalist, was very political in some of what he said, but I've never come across anything particularly overtly political that Luceva wrote, but I do myself, in my heart, certainly in the 30s, meaning that Luce himself, for perhaps altruistic reasons, was also very much on the side of Burmese nationalism, without necessarily rying a political flag about it. So, however, Luce also began working, as we know, at the time when there was little attention was paid to Burmese history. Even after the foundation of the Burma Research Society, which I kindly parted, kindly point out, had written on, they were found in 1910, when British scholar officials and Burmese professional elites came together to share their ideas about the country's history and cultural heritage. That was the portal through which Luce began to develop his ideas, interacting with Burmese people in a scholarly society. However, he was an outsider, and as I told you about his personal life, I think you were perhaps gained that impression. He was noted for non-conformity, not only in his personal life, but also in his approach to scholarship. I think his inclination was contrary to statist versions of Burmese history, as Patrick Oganus mentioned, the chronicles. They were the annals of ancient Burmese kingship, and he was prepared to take risks in his own history writing by rejecting former dependence on the chronicles as sources, as reliable sources. He was happy to make assumptions based on what could often be limited epigraphic sources, particularly for the pre-Pagan period, when he advanced new theories about how the Bermans came to Burma. He was, in his own words, prepared to stick his neck out, which in his view meant rejecting the chronicles as unreliable, gerry-built structures. That was what Luce said. In his estimation, history, as Patrick Oganus said, as in the way the British concept, he followed that idea as a base. It was very much about facts, not myths and legends, and he describes these dynastic myths of old Burma as largely tissues of legend. It's chronology, wild, and even the origin of the Bermans is quite mistaken. Fairly bold, rash statements. He's differed markedly from accounts in the chronicles, obviously, and it's quite interesting to note that, notwithstanding, he and Peymontin actually translated the Glass Palace Chronicle in 1923. This approach, naturally not unexpectedly, led him to make uncorroborated assumptions that created intellectual and methodological problems. But that was notwithstanding, his ideas set the tone for a new dynamic engagement with Burma's past that did not rely only on the chronicles. He was one of the first historians to attempt to reconstruct the country's history from sources other than the chronicles. He did not subscribe to the fact that Burma's history proper, if you will, began with the colonial occupation, nor was his scholarship steeped in British imperial tradition as people have accused people like Arthur Fair, Edward Parker and Albert Fitch. Because colonial historians, as Patrick Oganus said, believed that there were continuities with Burma's ancient past, so that if you spoke the same language, you belonged to the same tribe or fixed identity. So Patrick and I obviously have some sort of telepathy because I too read Robin's Berlin, where did my tribe come from. However, by assigning a causal role to race, or as it's referred to today, ethnicity, these earlier colonial historians continued to influence the intellectual environment that Lewis was working in, right throughout the early decades, so you must keep that in mind, I think, when scientific and rational ideas of race, nation, national histories were predominating factors in colonial classification of various groups. Anyway, we have now got, I'll just go a little bit muddled here, so I'm just... So Lewis, although rather, we might actually think that Lewis is dismissal in largely of the chronicles, a little bit ironic, since he was prepared to stick his neck out and make things up a bit, if you like to put it in the knuckle, whereas the old chronicleers, or the monks that wrote them, predominantly wanted to valorise, or bigger, a king's reign. They wanted their monarch, the reigning monarch, to look as if he fought great battles and done great things. So we also sort of might like to see Lewis perhaps trying to do a similar thing on the other side of the coin. But anyway, Lewis viewed, nevertheless, he was a professional in that sense. He viewed writing history as a professional endeavour to which the standards, the rational standards of the day should be applied. And he believed that this could be achieved by collecting all available evidence that would enable him to write the history of Berlin, because I think that was how he did see it, or not he might not have written it himself, but he thought that that was what needed to be done from his earliest times. So in order to accomplish this task, he made many excursions throughout Burma over the course of more than half a century. When he was still working before independence, he would use holidays and leave time. But after, when he came back, he was doing it much more under the auspices of the Historical Research Commission. He studied the inscriptions and to record its ancient languages. And he was assisted on his field trips by Colonel Bar-Shin, and this man, from my understanding, did a lot of the translation and transliteration work. There's still a little bit of a misconception, unsure, uncertainty, I would say, as to what depth Lewis was pretty good at interpreting, but how his understanding of language and the ancient dialect may not have been perhaps all his own. I can't verify that. But he did say that it was very important that the most urgent and valuable and the least expensive way of writing Burma's history was to accomplish this task, and it was to record Burma's ancient languages, which are now on the point of dying out. So we've got another slide here, and here he is, with the members. I don't know that they're all Burma army, but they have a fairly dilapidated vehicle. I don't know how they got about, but it did seem to go all right, and here they helped him, I suppose. But what he did say, so although languages like Old Mon, Old Firmies and Pew were no longer spoken, many of the minorities, perhaps, had had their own language or dialect, and Burma-Shin undertook, as I said, many of the transcriptions and translations that they discovered on monuments or other effigies. And he also admitted, interestingly enough, that the personnel that he worked with, who assisted them, had never or hardly ever heard of the existence of what he called, Loose Code, small and important tribes whose languages we are at such a pains to record, and they had no idea that they were important, perhaps that's the view of the ordinary people who weren't field assistants, if you like, with Burma. So then we also know that when we come to migration, which Patrick has told us a lot about, he based a lot of his hand written notes, his work on Chinese sources, and I've got similar information here, where he believed that much of his evidence for the Burma migrations of the 9th century upon Chinese sources, but a lot of his work was using sources in translation. They were translated by his former teacher, Paul Peleau, of the École Française Exprimovion, and he was the one, I think, to whom Loose owed a lot of his ideas, because he paid tribute, and Loose is very generous in paying tribute, his former professor's famous article, Deus etineraire de Chine, where Peleau wrote that article. He traced the overland routes from China, from Tonking to India that were compiled, this is Peleau's work, by the Tang Court Minister, Shia Tang, so there's a kind of layering of how Loose achieved his ideas. He considered that Peleau had laid a firm foundation for future Chinese studies related to Burma by determining that prior to 1050, most written sources about Burma were Chinese, and from then on, they remained a priceless secondary source of uniformly high quality. Loose wrote that in a century of progress in Burma's history and archaeology in the Journal of Burma Research Society in 1948. So it's again quite a daring but definite way. Anyway, he used linguistic evidence together with the translation once again, exactly as Patrick has said, of the Chinese source Manchu, written by Fan Zhu, which again, Peleau used. So we do have a number of people, if you like, coming into this mix, not least of them, Peleau and Fan Zhu. Loose then described, or extrapolated from this, that from the 7th century onwards, several groups, this is how he's calling them, dwelt along the border from north-west China to south-west Burma, who'd been conquered into servitude by the Manchu, and they were known to Fan Zhu as the pew. These frontier peoples, whom, as Patrick has told us, were regarded as proto-Burmans, who escaped their captors the Manchu, and this is what looses things, whether you think he's made it up to his article, Faces of Pre-Pegan Burma. They escaped to the hot, malaria plains of central Burma, where Manchu armies, used to the cold plateau of Nunan, do us not follow them, except in the cold weather. So where the climate came into migration, it appears to be the case in Loose's view. Anyway, after over 20 years of study, in 1939, Loose published a seminal article, Burma Down to the Fall of Pegan. He wrote that joint, he was paying on tin, and they described the Burman migrations, and they were quite elegiac and glorified them as the supreme moment in the history of the Burmans when they descended on mass upon the plains of Calxay, is it Patrick Calxay? They produced evidence, the two of them, pointing to the region between my car and the River Selwyn as Burmas, as the Burmans principal line of entry, this is in this article, and they eventually inhabited the Calxay district, where Patrick has shown you on the map, of Upper Burma as their first home on the plains. So they did a quick shuttle across to that bit outside of Pegan. So it's a little bit difficult to understand if this is how we can verify this. I don't think we can. Anyway, he did suggest that the arrival of the Burmans in other places in Calxay, Mimbu, Pegan, and Townbion was completed, he thought it was over by the middle of the 9th century. However, his theories were not without criticism, because his own former pupil, Professor Tantun, criticised Lucis' reliance when using 12th and 13th century lythic inscriptions to explain how the Burmans had subsisted 13 for 300 years earlier during the Pegan period. Tantun maintained that if the Lucis claimed the Burmans had speedily spread out from the small fertile area around Calxay to create further settlements, it was impossible to know from the inscription how they managed to survive in the semi desert of the central plains. And he also dismissed Lucis' theories as conjectured and disputed his claims that Chinese sources move uniformly high quality. And I think that's probably a fair assertion, a fair criticism. And he also pointed out that often things written were not eyewitness accounts, but it doesn't undermine Lucis' work. But I do think you need a caveat here, because they've been copied many times, as you say, by monks and other people. So errors are bound in, and there were errors in translation. However, if we're on slide 17, Lewis considered that, anyway, whatever, how they'd got there, he thought that the Burman migrants gained great benefit from their escape to the Calxay plains, conjecturing that they had found room for individual growth and national expansion. I'm quite interested in the use of the word national in that context, but that might echo something else about, he's not political, but he used that word anyway. And he claimed that successive ethnic groups like the Mon, and before them pew, had influenced, that is fair to fair common, Burma's cultural heritage. But most controversially, he asserted that those remnants of monks who were residing in the Calxay district when the Burmans arrived had taught them letters and Buddhism. And he stated in Calxay, the first home of the Burmans on the plains, the victors, that is the Burmans, the free to the vanquished, that is the Mon's, as the Burmans learnt letters and Buddhism from Mon's. According to Lluwst, Burman is, of course, he's been talking about the ethnic Burmans, the ethnicity, all the ones who turned up the proto-Burmans who he named as soon as they got here, Burmans, arrived in Upper Burmans, had caused the Mon's living in the area to flee southward. And as he noted in his work, I mentioned earlier, Old Burma and early Burgan, that Mon's were clearly numerous in this northwest corner of the district and in doubtless at Calxay itself. His hypothesis was based on the evidence of a Mon, one evidence, of a Mon inscription in the area that had been identified by his former teacher Charles Otto Blagdon in epigraphica Bermelica. So implicit in Lluwst's statement is the idea that Mon culture and religion had acted as a powerful civilised in force upon Burma and conquerors in a similar way that perhaps military superior Romans had civilised the weaker and more cultured literate Greeks. So he's still having much more the underlying, the foundational idea of Lluwst the historian as very much still influenced by the Victorian background that he had been educated in as a historian of history. These claims however did prove to be somewhat contentious politically because among people living in Burma at the time, by the time he published his book that's towards the end of the 70s, not only because his ideas were based largely upon his own interpretive work, but also because they contradicted or refuted the evidence of the chronicles. There's still a much adherence even in Burma's mind and their understanding of their history that the chronicles are the basis and to be relied upon. That is a very concept that is certainly worth respecting, but they have to be seen for what they are. That's what I'm talking about. And they challenged the notion of Burman cultures and these particular people challenged the notion of Burman cultural supremacy a nation, an idea that was particularly prevalent among educated elites in the country before and after independence. And it came to a head in 1971 when he received a public rebuke in a series of letters from a correspondent in the Rangun times who disputed his story that the Burmans had descended upon the plains of Minbu and Coutre in the mid-19th century. And he accused Lluws of the wild imagination born of prejudice. So he accused him also of humiliating the Burmans by saying they learned Buddhism from the monks. So what we learn from this, what we can gather from this is that the ideas of how we label people's culture even aside from language when respect to their ethnicity is a very sensitive issue is what I'm saying. And so many years later Lluws continued with this line and he in 1959, as Patrick mentioned is all Coutre in the coming of the Burmans. He still wanted to pin down this idea by showing that Coutre was not it was Coutre and not Tagal that was the first home when the Burmans after they escaped. And he actually it's replete the article with his suppositions about Franchew's ninth 9th century account of 12th and 12th century inscriptions which we remember just dismissed as conjecture by Cantun. So according to Lluws Franchewn distinguished the various groups of proto-Burmans by the names of their chiefs but after these so-called tribal groups had migrated to Burma across the border into the border Lluws assumed immediately a fully formed ethnic group whom he named the Burmans. However, despite Lluws' categorisation of them as Burmans he gave them that label, he labored them it's unlikely that various tribal groups who fled would have identified themselves in this way as part of an ethnically distinct group with common features of language, customs and culture so I think that's quite a Lluws has stuck his neck out there definitely big time. In the absence of written records basically we simply do not know whether or not people recognise a common ethnicity in pre-colonial times and group themselves together under a single name I suspect not. Clearly over time migrants and their predecessors had to come to some accommodation with one another through intermarriage as they moved to new locations humans mixed with their genes and their customs so that every culture and every human population has in my view a Robin Berling he believes they have multiple ethnicities so once again we see that colonialism fostered an intellectual environment where classification according to ethnicity was a linguistic and cultural assumptions which authorised these ideas about its subjects and in the pre-pegan period it is more than likely that cultural and linguistic borrowings occurred frequently among as Patrick has mentioned loanwords and things like that but it doesn't make them ethnically cohesive among coexisting ethnicities so that any traits or influences cannot definitely be attributed to any one particular ethnic group now it's very difficult to read this but an interesting turn of events perhaps in loose as a historian and it shows perhaps a little bit more of loose the man than loose the historian because as we've seen from what I've said and perhaps Patrick as well from the 1930s he had a firm view of history in respect of their historiography and their political hegemony by urging future he actually wrote he urged future politicians to look to pegan as the model for cultural and religious innovation in the modern world that was how he felt and kept those ideas for a long time but the civil war and independence which followed independence and his own exile from Burma in 64 modified his views particularly when history writing became an important element in helping Burma's minorities to establish their indigenous identity and rights within the new union of Burma in 1947 the constitution of the union of Burma continued the colonial practice of dividing country on ethnic racial basis by maintaining the distinction between those who inhabited the peripheral regions or the uplands of Burma and the people of central Burma who are predominantly Burma or as I've been using the term Burma it is a fluid term but that is whom I mean and who are mostly Burma Buddhists and the constitution segregated the upland peoples by describing them as Tain Yintza meaning some close to the territory whereas those in the centre were Yangon Tsar or Mandalay Tsar so in order to claim their rights as had already been designated peripheral anyway to be considered of Tain Yintza peripheral ethnic groups had to prove that their ancestors were present in Burma prior to the British annexation of the territory in 1824 however as Patrick has quite rightly pointed out the paucity of written records and the absence of a clear and consistent oral history made this pretty much impossible for many minorities including those so-called small and important tribes whom Lluws had been keen to record their languages and there were one group in 1963 the rhaidja whom Lluws they from our Khan district Lluws encountered these people on his tours in our Khan, I don't know what particular occasion but he must have been well known enough to have drawn their attention to him and they understood the needs of written evidence so they could say that they could attest to their long-term presence in the country therefore they viewed Lluws' visit to Mongdor he went up to Mongdor in 1963 as a golden opportunity they actually write that in the text there that would help them improve their life and provide them with a means of legitimising their status so in 1963 the elders of the united rhaidja organisation of the mayor district presented Lluws with this formal address and they requested him to record their history embodying it in the history of Burma and since 1960 their homeland had actually been placed under the frontier district administration by Nae Winn and their racial status had been recognised by the government so they wanted it formalised to have their history so in their address they asked Lluws to help them record that as they say rhaidja had existed and inhabited the union of Burma it was interesting that they used the phrase union of Burma which it was at that time more than 1200 years and they believed that this act if Lluws could help them it would legitimate their right to self represent their own identity in relation to their past and present historical practice and reinforce their claims to ingenuity so they held Lluws a distinguished scholar a genuine philanthropist nationalist and all things and they expressed the hope that their recent recognition as part of the frontier administration would inaugurate a new era for them and alleviate their many sufferings eradicate insurgency and suppress smuggling all of which were very noble aims but rather damned by future events the rhaidja hoped that Lluws would act as their interlocutor integrating their autonomous history within his generic history which they believed he was writing of Burma in order to authorise their status as part of the union now there's no evidence that I have found that Lluws ever actually did at anything but I think it's still quite telling or interesting that Lluws was approached and that he was seen in that capacity so I think we can see that Lluws the man has a lot if I could say I don't mean to answer for but a lot perhaps to put more than perhaps Lluws the historian because he was seen by these people as a man of great sympathy and love for the people and they therefore approached him so just to conclude with a few remarks I say that Lluws the rhaidja's approach to Gordon Lluws confirms his involvement, his ongoing involvement with existing indigenous research network as well as with sources beyond the Burmese borders although how reliable you want to estimate these sources or his reliance on them himself maybe a matter for your conjecture his concern to trace the origins of the Burmans strongly suggests the existence of a basic continuity between the pre-colonial and colonial patterns of political dominance his lifelong study of Burma's old languages and epigraphy demonstrates I believe his willingness to engage with the technical problems of using indigenous sources and although he dismissed the chronicles which perhaps that's again a contentious thing he was still very interested in the work that he did with lithic inscriptions shows a leading edge in engaging his Pellegrinations around Burma use his reliance or his engaging with the indigenous sources which I think is absolutely the only vital way for people to move Burma's history forward today and rather than retreating for them complexity and relying on surrogates although I have to say I think in the matter of Fantu and things like that and Paul Pellegr I think Lluws did have some tendency towards that but he certainly wasn't in the same league as Arthur Fair the Victorian who relied completely on surrogates and so he did distance himself from the chogonistic perspective of historiographies that viewed Britain's conquest of Burma simply in light of three wars throughout the 19th century and he demonstrated that colonialism was created as much by events and interests in the non-European world as by the driving force of industrialisation and the national conflict in Europe itself Now, as I said Lluws by Tantun and others I think it was Metri or one of the Anthuens who accused him of making too ready to make assumptions even changing the fact to suit historians however this is no more really than any writers of history such as the chronicles have done and perhaps we all do although we try not to we are influenced by our background and where we come from and he embellished as well and Lluws was a modest man John O'Cullough's left had told me some time ago in an email that he had met Lluws and found him to be a man of unassuming modesty and that was John as a young student's impression Can I just finish and then you can ask a question? and he readily acknowledged that history writing involved taking risks and on occasion sticking one's neck out because it said rather modestly someone has to do it so as long historians are able to emulate Lluws's modesty in accepting that assumptions can be misplaced or just simply plain wrong then the whole process I think of writing history assumes the excitement of discovery which is Lluws in my view and perhaps your true gift as history so finally how might we reconcile Lluws the man and Lluws the scholar as his very pro-Burman views of history in the 30s developed a much more ecumenical approach after 1948 the ensuing civil war and his own exile from the country where he spent most of his adult life and those things were influential factors in his life and I think perhaps when we are talking of migrants we must remember that Lluws himself was a migrant and subject always he was a migrant to Burma if you stretch it and subject to the uncertainties inherent in this status and also the associated anxieties of belonging he too had to integrate and belong as he married into a Burmese family and his personal life experience influenced and modified his views about his adopted country but like all migrants traces of his ancestral genealogical relationships remained in his DNA because although he had little contact with his family after he went to Burma and he returned to Jersey the island from which his family heritage had originated and because Patrick finished his talk with what does migration mean does it transcend the physical location or as he told us is migration is complicated and I want to finish on a personal note if I may and I don't claim that this anecdote has any historical value but I believe that however that was more his time in Burma is probably more about loose the man or at least equally weighted because far as we might travel physically or migrate we never stray far from our origins in January 2016 whilst in Canterbury I was going through loose's extensive correspondence with letters and I found surprisingly very little of a person's nature there were no letters from parents or anyone else except lots quite a lot of correspondence with a sister Ethel who lived in America but there was one afternoon a short handwritten note caught my eye the date was the 14th December 1944 and there was a one word address on the top of the letter rangway W-R-A-N-G-W-A-Y and the writer was an M snow and the writer thanked loose for his sympathy regarding so obviously somebody close to her and said how much he whoever the visitor had enjoyed the evening with you and your letter gave him real joy at a very bleak time I presumed that the M snow was writing after the individual had died now that seems of nothing but I would doubt that anybody sitting where I was in the lightning camera would have known where rangway was I wouldn't argue that there might be other places in the world called rangway but evidence I found out later I spent the early few first years of my childhood in a hamlet called rangway underneath the black land hills near Wellington in some sense and there was an old lady who lived in a cottage at the hill called a miss snow she was a Sunday school teacher a funny old woman I didn't know I was only a toddler but I remember passing her cottage and I think that was whom loose visited and I made some enquiries and I found out that miss snow and her relatives had all come from Jersey and they were a Jersey family so I thought myself I discovered that later so that despite his migration, his estrangement from his family loose was a Jersey man and he never forgot his roots thank you