Q&A: Author Clare Hammond reveals how railways made and broke Myanmar

BANGKOK — For three months in 2016, a British journalist working in Myanmar traveled across the Southeast Asian country on trains with a mission to find out where they led, who built them, and why.

Clare Hammond arrived in Myanmar during a period of hope amid a transition to civilian rule, as Aung San Suu Kyi was coming to power after her decades of struggle against military rule.

Hammond recounts her travels in “On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey through Occupied Myanmar,” published in June, which began after she came across a map showing a far more extensive railway network than she had anticipated.

The rails carried troops and supplies deep into Myanmar’s interior, first on behalf of the British and later the Myanmar military. Following these tracks, Hammond uses the railways as a lens to understand the recent troubled history of Myanmar, formerly Burma.

As Hammond confronts Myanmar’s successive rulers’ records of coerced labor, environmental degradation, and repression, she also grapples with the promise and limitations of Myanmar’s short period of democratization — which the Myanmar military brought to an end when it seized power in February 2021.

Now the country is mired in civil war after nonviolent protests against the takeover segued into a nationwide armed resistance.

The Associated Press asked Hammond to explore what her time traveling on Myanmar’s trains reveals about the country’s past, present and future.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.