Yandabo Myanmar
Myanmar
Frequently Asked Questions
It beaches gently on the shore, on the bank of the Irrawaddy between Bagan and Mandalay. A gangway, a few steps cut into the sand, and you step straight into an open-air workshop the size of a village.
Because the village has lived on it for generations. River clay, taken as the flood recedes, is turned by women's hands into jars, water pots and cooking vessels that leave by the bargeload for the whole country.
By the paddle-and-anvil technique, passed from mother to daughter: one woman turns her lump of clay on a low disc while a neighbour, wooden paddle in one hand and pebble in the other, thins the walls with rhythmic beating.
The raw pieces dry in neat rows in the courtyards, then disappear under great mounds of straw that are set alight. Firing lasts hours, watched by eye and by smell; in the morning hundreds of deep russet pots are pulled from the ash.
The one that ended the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1826, ceding Assam and the coasts of Arakan and Tenasserim to the British. A text that redrew the map of Southeast Asia, signed a few steps from the kilns and the buffalo.
Yes, and it is probably the truest of souvenirs: a small brown pot, an animal-shaped money box or a water cup, shaped in front of you and sold directly to the potter's family.
Woven bamboo houses on stilts under the broad shade of tamarinds, zebu teams pulling carts of straw-packed pots, and the monastery and school that often open their doors.
Yes, out to the peanut and sesame fields surrounding the last houses, high-ground crops the flood spares.
Each keeps, pressed into its wall, the trace of the fingers that built it. Burmese buyers are said to recognise the hand of each workshop.
No, calls on the Irrawaddy vary with itineraries and sailing seasons. When Yandabo is on the programme, it leaves a lasting impression of industrious simplicity.
