The trouser people

Andrew Marshall

Part travelogue, part history, part reportage, The Trouser People is an enormously appealing and vivid account of Sir George Scott, the unsung Victorian adventurer who hacked, bullied, and charmed his way through uncharted jungle to help establish British colonial rule in Burma. Born in Scotland in 1851, Scott was a die-hard imperialist with a fondness for gargantuan pith helmets and a bluffness of expression that bordered on the Pythonesque. But, as Andrew Marshall discovered, he was also a writer and photographer of rare sensibility. Scott spent a lifetime documenting the tribes who lived in Burma's vast wilderness like the Padaung "giraffe women" and the headhunting Wild Wa, who claimed, curiously, to be descended from tadpoles. His book The Burman, first published in 1882, is still in print today. Scott not only mapped the lawless frontiers of this "geographical nowhere" -- the...