I had not fully appreciated the implications of the expression: 'white elephant', until my first trip to Myanmar (Burma), October 2013.
White elephants have traditionally been revered in Myanmar. It is believed just before the birth of the Buddha, his mother dreamt that a lilly-white elephant had entered her womb.
Pristine white marble elephants litter the pagodas all around Myanmar.
The kings of Siam and Burma kept white elephants as signs of wealth and power and even went to war once over who had the right to use the title 'lord of the white elephant'. The story goes that on the day of the final assault of the British on the last king of Burma, one of the palace white elephants was found dead.
In the last half century, successive military rulers in Myanmar have claimed the mantle of pre-colonial dynasties, re-invoking old icons including the white elephant.
In 2001, when a white elephant was found in Western Myanmar province, the government media claimed that white elephants only appeared in the reign of just rulers. In a grand ceremony it was named 'Royal Elephant Grace on Nation'. Our guidebook recommended a visit to the Hsin Hpyu Daw park, where three of these much prized creatures are on display. So on our very first day in Yangon, we headed out on an hour's drive from our hotel with much anticipation.
Having read up on the subject we were anticipating that the elephants would be in glamorous accommodation. The enclosure surrounded by well-cut lawn was indeed ostentatiously painted in red and gold.
The elephants, however, were chained into a quarter of the available space, on a concrete floor, madly traipsing the two to three meter ends of their tether. And but for the signage I would never have recognized them as white!
'White' elephants are in fact a horrible shade of pinky grey - the exact colour that my life and travel partner, a 'white' man, had turned at the sight of breakfast earlier, in our US $130-a-night hotel. We learnt later from our astute Mandalay guide, that 'Royal Elephant Grace' turned out to be not a wild Burmese animal but an Indian working beast that had gone AWOL. Its owner soon turned up and cost the Burmese government a great deal of money and embarrassment.
White elephants really are 'white elephant'!
