and vow to accomplish a picture that will please you
He is always quite sure that he can do what is wanted,
and that he can do it better than any o f his contemporaries.
And sometimes he will do it, and sometimes
he will not (for. the ardour cools) ; and nearly
always you will have to wait a long time, and send
him delicate reminders, before he will bring it to
completion.
Perhaps the best painter in Burma is Saya Chone
A P IC TU R E SHOW
of Mandalay. He has painted several pictures for me,
and upon all of them he has inscribed in gold the cryptic
symbol “ No, ,. ” I believe that he means it to refer
to the excellence of his work. But the last time I saw
my friend in Mandalay, he was gloomy and dejected.
His ardour did not equal mine for the production o f
a picture of the Let-dwin-Mingala, that beautiful festival
Of the Kings of Burma, which took place once a year,
when they went out in the spring-time with a pair of
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white oxen in harness of gold, to plough a furrow outside
the royal capital.
“ You are not yourself, my friend,” I said. “ Is it
not well with you p ”
“ It is ill with me,” he answered. “ Art does not
pay. I will become a trader in rice.”
And then he talked of the disinclination of people
to buy pictures and pay for them, of the decline in
Phongyi-Byans (the monk-burnings), at which of old
his pictures found a market.
“ Now, rice, sir,” he said, “ is a much more profitable
business; but the Let-dwin-Mingala is a good subject,
and I will paint it for your honour.”
Passing on by a neighbouring silversmith’s, where
dragons and elephants are shaping into form on the
bulging sides of bowls and betel-boxes, I enter the
Chinese quarter. Shoemakers are numerous here,
and the produce of their toil is exported a long way
from Prome. There is no creature on earth more
industrious than the Chinese cobbler, and you will see
him all over Burma, from dawn to midnight, in the
gloom of his shop, a stooping yellow figure with awl
and needle in hand, surrounded by a host of shoes.
There are two joss-houses in Prome, representing the
two sections of the Chinese community, those Long-
coats and Short-coats who live apart and do not love
each other. In one of these, a number of Chinese lads
are at school, painting alphabets with laborious care
and astonishing skill. No pen can compare for suppleness
with the Chinese brush. A grey monolith within
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