EDITOR'S PREFACE
WAR conditions and consequent war service are responsible for the interruption of this series of Provincial Geographies. Subsequent reforms in the political constitution of India necessitated further delay; but, whether the Government of Burma remains under the Governor-General of India or becomes answerable direct to the King-Emperor, the Province must necessarily remain a geographical and political, as it is a distinct ethnographical, unit — a Burmese nation.
For this, as for previous volumes of the same series, the author has been chosen because his long and intimate experience of the Province enables him to present in true perspective a thumb-nail sketch of the land and its people. In this respect there are two living authorities who stand in a class apart — Shwe Yoe (Sir George Scott), whose writings have brought to the West a humanitarian picture of the "Silken East," and the author of A Civil Servant in Burma, whose service of 33 years brought him into intimate touch with every phase of Burmese life and administration, from 1878, when the northern limit of British control was restricted to the Province of Pegu, through the third Burmese war of 1885, when King Thebaw's misrule of Upper Burma was abruptly terminated, and the subsequent years of pacification and economic development, till he retired as Lieutenant-Governor of the whole Province in 1910.
The Cambridge University Press is fortunate in finding Sir Herbert Thirkell White with the leisure to review from afar the land which he served with affection and recognized distinction.
November 22nd, 1922.
