A problem at the Bagan market

There’s lots of fascinating things to look at and buy at the Bagan market–until the beggars find you. Photos by David Lansing.

Alex made a mistake at the market in Bagan yesterday. When one of the young children that immediately started following us around handed him a small jar of thanaka, the yellow paste everyone here puts on their face, he took it. I don’t think he even knew what it was. He looked at it curiously, smiled at the kid, and then tried to hand it back.

The kid wouldn’t take it. As far as he was concerned, he’d made a sale.”Ta htaun kyat! Ta htaun kyat!” shouted the boy.

Alex asked our guide, Sai, what the boy was saying. “He want one dollar,” said Sai.

“Give him a buck,” I said, “just so he’ll leave us alone.” By now there were five or six other children, all under ten, clamoring around us, all pushing things at us: gum, bananas, bags of what looked like dried fish.

Alex tried to give the thanaka back to the boy. ”Ta htaun kyat!” he yelled. Alex started to reach for his money.

“If you give the boy a dollar, fifty children will follow you around the market,” said Sai.

In fact, the crowd of youngsters had now grown to more than a dozen.

“Look, I don’t want this,” Alex told the boy. “Take it.”

The boy refused. So Alex put the jar on the edge of a vendor’s table. “There it is,” he said. “I’m not taking it.” And then he walked off.

The boy grabbed his jar of thanaka. But that was not the end of it. Now the pack of children followed us wherever we went, all of them pushing things at us and asking for kyat. It got so you could not even stop at a stall to look at a Buddha or the baskets of odd spices because if you did, a dozen, two dozen kids would harass you. So we told Sai we wanted to leave and quickly we hustled out of the market.

The thing is, we all wanted to buy something—sandals, a longyi (the ubiquitous sarong-like cloth worn by both men and women), beaded bracelets—something. But because we started to feel like we’d been surrounded by a pack of feral dogs, in the end we bought nothing. And left in a hurry. A situation not good for anyone but particularly not good for the vendors at the market.

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3 comments

  1. Fred Harwood’s avatar

    Bagan – Begging?

  2. David’s avatar

    Exactly, Fred!

  3. Alex Kay’s avatar

    Thanks for writing about this and making me relive it in my mind… got a good chuckle out of it at least.

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