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or even India greedily surveying the remains of its assets of oil, timber and rice. It benefited from the feeling that Nu’s botched land reforms had helped few but clients of the AFPFL leaders. The military gradually came to dominate the villages and to control the ministries and the police force. The first coup against the civilian government finally came on 26 September 1958. Nu returned to power briefly in the early 1960s but his grip was never firm. A second coup occurred in 1963 and Nu went into a long exile. Ne Win and his family were to hold power in Burma for much of the next forty years. The consequence was that a country once fabled for its natural wealth and promise isolated itself increasingly from the world. Burma fell further and further behind its Southeast Asian neighbours, suffering international sanctions and continuing local rebellions. Only the new wealth spilling into the country from a booming China in recent decades seems capable of ending its long stagnation.

The mid 1950s were a time of high tension across the whole of what had once been British Asia. The tenth anniversary of the climacteric of the Second World War in the region did not witness that era of peace and prosperity that many Asians had envisaged when they had still been under the yoke of Japanese occupation and colonial rule. For one thing, full-scale armed conflict had only temporarily ceased in Indo-China and the bloody denouement there spread waves of apprehension across the whole region. Indo-China had been at war every day since General Gracey’s ill-fated intervention had come to an end in the early months of 1946. At Dien Bien Phu, in April 1954, the French suffered an epochal defeat at the hands of Viet Minh forces supplied with artillery and modern weapons by the Chinese and Russians. The Western fight against communist advance seemed to be deeply compromised, at least on this front. An American officer, Colonel Edward Lansdale, made a series of momentous journeys there during the course of 1954 and 1955.52 On 1 June 1954 he landed in Saigon, which was on the point of becoming the capital of a vivisected South Vietnam under the peace accords signed between the French and the Viet Minh in Geneva. He was part of a network of deadly expertise linking anti-communist special operations forces across Southeast Asia. A specialist in sabotage and psychological warfare, Lansdale had been an adviser to the cabal of right-wing strongmen who ran the Philippines. At the beginning of the 1950s he had helped the authorities put down the so-called Huk rebellion, a peasant uprising which the US government feared would drag the Philippines into the communist camp. Lansdale drew heavily on the British experience of counter-insurgency in Malaya while he was working in the Philippines and Vietnam. United States senators made the British colony a port of call on fact-finding visits to Asia. After Adlai Stevenson, who had a close shave when his helicopter crash-landed, came vice-president Richard Nixon, on whom Templer impressed the need to wean Russia and China apart, and John and Robert Kennedy, who did not impress hardened American residents with their lack of sympathy for the British imperial cause.53 But the traffic went in both directions. Malayan officials had flown in to visit the villages where disarmed Huk rebels were settled, gathering information for their own ‘New Villages’ on the peninsula.54

Lansdale’s journey to Saigon signalled the beginning of the era of deep US involvement in Vietnam. The looming conflict was also marked in fiction by Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American, published in 1955.55 Greene, himself a former British agent, had been living in Saigon in 1952 when a series of bomb attacks rocked the French colonial city. The authorities blamed the communists, but Greene suspected a plot between right-wing Vietnamese militias and the CIA. He was probably right. A New York Times reporter just happened to be on the spot at the vital moment. Photographs of people maimed in the attack were speedily published under a headline