Mapping Chinese Rangoon Quotes

“The local building materials of bamboo and thatch were deemed too flimsy and primitive, counterproductive toward creating an orderly society.”
― Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese

“The rituals practiced in Kuanyin Ting have been maintained unself-consciously, passed on from one generation to the next in the embodied act of worship without pursuit of doctrinal or ritual purity. They are simply an aspect of sino-Burmese life.”
― Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese

“However, in contemporary Rangoon, Guangdong Dadao is much shorter, six blocks instead of the original twelve, because commerce in Burma underwent a precipitous decline after 1962. Today the street is lined with businesses selling Chinese and foreign merchandise, but Asian products have replaced British luxury goods.”
― Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese

“Baba-Nyonya culture was emulated by the Chinese in Yangoon not only because it provided a way to maintain their shared Hokkien heritage but also because it represented modernity in British Burma.”
― Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese

“In principle, Han culture defines kinship by patrilineal descent, and a clan would include only those who share the same surname.”
― Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese

“In the precolonial Rangoon of 1795, China Wharf had already been established in an enclave west of the main town.”
― Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese

“In 1755, Alaungpaya, a Burmese king, conquered the town and renamed it Rangoon, meaning "the end of strife" in the Burmese language, to mark the cessation of warfare between the Burmans and the Mon.”
― Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese

“They (British colonizers) were frustrated with the high incidence of theft and placed blame on the Burmese, who were seen as incapable of comprehending the standard of prevention or protection.”
― Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese

“As a later conquest of the British Empire, Burma was ruled according to the precedents established in British India, and its capital, Rangoon, was laid out according to so-called scientific principles that had been formulated to solve the environmental and public health problems of nineteenth-century London.”
― Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese

“The making do is not the passive acceptance of the dominant power structure but the use of creative tactics to sustain life in the interstices.”
― Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese

“Although Rangoon was designed by the British as a grand commercial and administrative center to inspire awe, the Rangoon of today evokes little of that grandeur in its damp decay.”
― Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese

“By the 1940s, Indian firms controlled about 50 percent of Burma's import trade and operated large shops and industries throughout the country.”
― Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese

“Unfortunately, outside of Burma, the Sino-Burmese do not have another place to call home.”
― Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese

“Before 1852, Rangoon was a sleepy harbor settled by farmers and seasonable traders, known for the annual Buddhist festival centered on the Shwedagon Pagoda.”
― Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese

“Since the colonial era, the governments of China and Burma/Myanmar have failed to provide consistent and tangible support to the Sino-Bumese, leaving them to fend for themselves.”
― Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese

“Furthermore, place is a mode of thinking that engages with the messy multiplicity in any given encounter rather than a controlled thought experiment based on preselected factors.”
― Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese

“The ambition was neither to know the Sino-Burmese as a totalizable phenomenon nor to produce uncontestable knowledge. As Hannah Arendt has stated, this pursuit of understanding is an unending activity that attempts to activate the multiple meanings of things and these meanings are the unfolding of significance.”
― Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese