In early June 1950, prime minister of Burma, U Nu, began a course of meditation, and retreated into meditation centre and vowed not to emerge until he had attained a certain stage in vipassana meditation.’Until then', he told his ministers, 'do not send for me even if the whole country is enveloped in flames. If there are flames, you must put them out yourself’. When told of his practice Nu's closest foreign friend, Jawaharlal Nehru remarked: 'That seems to me as good a way of governing Burma as any.’

One of the main components of the state of the consciousness which Nu believed that he had attained that summer was 'freedom from fear'. But as the Korean War entered a critical phase and the threat of global nuclear conflict grew ever closer, this was no easy goal. By the middle of the year, Allied forces in Korea seemed on the verge of conquering the whole peninsula and a major war with China and the Soviet Union loomed. In Britain Attlee broadcast to the nation of further preparations for war in Korea and also against Russia, 'if another world war is to follow’. In Delhi, Nehru, urged the US to draw back, arguing that war solved nothing. In his alarm, he seemed to be conjuring up again the non-violent maxims of the late Mahatma Gandhi. Attacked by the Americans for appeasement of totalitarianism, Nehru was equally suspect in China and Russia for his suppression of Indian communists.

The period 1950 to 1953 was one of reconsolidation in Burma . The government's authority began to reassert itself, even if many of the failures which would eventually drive Burma to the margins of the new world order were also present: corruption, an arbitrary military and botched measures of economic development. One sign of the changing mood was the attempt of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) to compromise with the Rangoon government. After their striking successes of 1949, the red-flag communists of the CPB and their Karen allies had abandoned their policy of trying to take and hold the towns. They now became more 'Maoist' in their strategy, basing themselves in villages and eliminating landlords. They were never again to seize the initiative. The government may have been weak, and its army underpaid and undersupplied, but it had kept its hold over Rangoon , the sole remaining financial prize in the country. It had done so because foreign financial and military aid, particularly small arms, had reached it in large quantities. Even in 1948 and 1949 Burma had never collapsed into total anarchy. In most districts notables and important men still held sway. They were generally suspicious of the communists and hostile to the Karens and other minority group rebels. Provided the government directed some cash, some local offices and, best of all, arms to them, they were prepared to come back into Rangoon's fold.

Under the surface of the government's resurgence, however, the balance of power was shifting irrevocably towards the military, though Nu hardly noticed it as he flew around the world on missions of peace and sanctity in the early 1950s. The army had  appropriated more and more of the country's diminished wealth. It benefited from the feeling that Burma was a threatened country in the midst of an armed camp, with the Chinese, the rump of the British Empire or even India greedily surveying the remains of its assets of oil, timber and rice.

The first coup against the civilian government finally came on 26 September 1958. Nu returned to power briefly in the early 1960s but his grip was never firm. A second coup occurred in 1963 and Nu went into a long exile. Ne Win and his family were to hold power in Burma for much of the next forty years. The consequence was that a country once fabled for its natural wealth and promise isolated itself increasingly from the world. Burma fell further and further behind its Southeast Asian neighbors, suffering international sanctions and continuing local rebellions. Only the new wealth spilling into the country from a booming China in recent decades seems capable of ending its long stagnation.

In 1951 the wartime administrator of Singapore , Mamoru Shinozaki, returned to the island, or at least to its harbor, where, unable to land, he received guests on board a freighter. Later Shinozaki was to lead the way in confronting the past with a memoir, published in English in Singapore, of his wartime experiences: Syonan: My Story. It acknowledged the atrocities of the sook ching massacres, but also highlighted his role and his contribution to the welfare of Singapore 's people. These returns generated considerable anger in the Chinese press. But, with the encouragement of key figures such as Malcolm MacDonald, they persisted. In April 1952 the first senior Japanese to visit MacDonald arrived at Bukit Serene with a letter from the Japanese prime minister. The visitor was nervous. The cook at Bukit Serene wept - his parents and sister had been murdered by the Japanese in China - but, it was observed, he did his duty. By 1954 the flagship Japanese departmental store, Echigoya, where a pre-war generation of Asian clerks had bought their cheap office ducks and toys for their children, reopened, as did the Singapore Japanese Association, which had been such a prominent feature of the island's social scene before the war. The old Japanese expatriate community began to return as 'advisers', often exploiting their wartime connections. Some still saw Malaya as their home, and a sense of rootedness began to return with the refoundation of the Japanese School .

Several Allied soldiers, recounted how they had to dig deep into their reserves of Christian faith to find forgiveness for the brutality of their Japanese captors. But as early as ten years after the war, soldiers on both sides were beginning tentative meetings for the purposes of reconciliation and creating a true record of the terrible events they had witnessed. For their part, the Japanese were also haunted by what they had seen in Southeast Asia . The author of the Harp of Burma, a bestselling novel in post-war Japan , was a former soldier who drew on his wartime experiences to tell of a disillusioned man whose battered faith in the search for enlightenment is reinvigorated by the earnest folk Buddhism of Burma. His hero becomes a wanderer, a kind of forest monk, typical of the region, moving from village to village playing his Burmese harp and telling fables.

Other vivid fictional recreations of the Second World War sparked controversy. In 1954 the first English translation appeared of Pierre Boulle's novel Le Pont de la Riviere Kwai". The French author, himself a former prisoner of the Japanese, depicted a group of British POWs being forced to build a bridge on the Burma-Siam railway. The fictional senior British officer, Colonel Nicholson, after a protracted and painful battle with his Japanese jailer about officers' honor and dignity, becomes obsessed with the creation and perfection of the bridge, at the same time as British special forces are doing all they can to destroy it. At first sight it seemed an odd thing for a Frenchman to write a novel about the hidebound British military mentality, although his story undoubtedly served as a good illustration of the futility of war. But Boulle had worked on rubber plantations in Malaya before and after the war and had had ample opportunity to observe the waning British Empire at close hand. In 1957, just after Britain and France 's occupation of the Suez Canal , the controversy about the book was revived, with an American movie starring Gregory Peck…

By 1955, the tenth anniversary of the formal end of the Second World War, the mood was changing. This was a year when the rhetoric of the Bandung Conference - of development, non-alignment and peace - concealed both the onrush of aggressive nationalism and the slow expansion of the crescent's new capitalism. Yet it was also the year of memory, when people began to take stock of events in that terrible year a decade before: the year of the atom bomb, the fierce campaign of the 14th Army, the death of Subhas Chandra Bose and Aung San's revolt against the Japanese. A whole series of commemorative ceremonies were held. In Rangoon and Mandalay , people celebrated Independence Day, Aung San's birthday and Union Day with particular fervor that year. Ominously, people noted that the highlight of that year's Independence Day festivities was the 'participation of a larger number of armed forces personnel in the march past before the President of the Union '. As yet 'Army Day', the celebration of that momentous event in April 1945 when Aung San had led his Burma Defense Army into the jungle to fight the Japanese, had not assumed the significance in the calendar of Independence Day. As the Burmese army became increasingly autonomous and powerful, the meaning of this festival became a source of debate and controversy. Ceremonies to mark the tenth anniversary of the end of the war were more muted in India . But Subhas Chandra Bose's birthday saw celebrations across the subcontinent, particularly in Calcutta . The veterans of the Indian National Army, still uncertain of their status in independent India , drilled and marched with particular pride. The simplest ceremony of all was held on 6 August 1955 at 8 a.m. in the city of Hiroshima. At the exact moment the bomb had fallen ten years before, the mayor of the city, himself a survivor, released 500 doves into the air and inaugurated a peace centre.

A huge numbers of Thai, Burmese, Malayan and Burmese civilians however remained without named graves. Their bodies had simply been thrown into huge lime pits.

Many people's memories were very personal, almost picaresque. When he was in northern Burma the writer Norman Lewis met a cheerful Burmese former soldier who had served in the forces fighting alongside the Japanese. He took Lewis to a tree where, he said, Chinese soldiers had tried to hang him as a traitor following his capture. Laughing heartily he explained how the Chinese were too 'weak from semi-sickness and starvation' to hoist him off the ground. His proposed execution, according to Lewis, degenerated into 'a lurid Disney-like farce' with the Chinese attempting to pinion him while hoisting him into the air. Eventually he escaped, but the memory was not so easily defeated. It is unlikely that Lewis was the only person he look back to his hanging tree to marvel at the wound on the branch where the rope had rubbed it raw.Thus also, ten years on from the end of the war the Governor General of Australia however observed, an authoritarian power once again overshadowed Asia. He was referring, of course, to China .

If in 1955 people's memories of the Second World War were still raw, with much suppressed or forgotten, the present was in some ways a disappointment of those dreams of independence which had entranced them a decade before. As India struggled with the problems of statehood, Nehru was personally in a more optimistic mood in 1955· It was only with the resurgence of severe economic difficulties in the late 1950’s and the conflict with China in his last years that his outlook darkened. But in objective terms the problems that faced independent India remained vast. If famine did not reappear as frequently as it had under the Raj, the country's food problems seemed no nearer solution.

And many millions continued to live in the direst poverty while the first Hush of wealth from the new industrialization faded. Perhaps, indeed, Nehru's very adherence to a Soviet model of gargantuan 'socialist industry' had worsened the poverty of the countryside. The Punjab 's Sikhs and people in the south who did not speak Hindi, the new national language, vociferously demanded special status within the constitution. Refugees from East and West Pakistan had not been fully absorbed into India 's massive, ramshackle cities. On the frontiers, particularly in the northeast, militant groups such as the Nagas, who had been armed and radicalized by the war, continued to fight the central government in Delhi. India 's 'most dangerous decades' were looming.

The Bengali-speaking politicians of East Pakistan chafed under what they saw as the semi-colonial domination of their leaders in the western capital of Islamabad . Refugees continued to surge across the borders in both directions, Hindus to the west, Muslims to the east, creating new pools of privation in the poverty-stricken countryside and declining cities. Even on Pakistan's and India's most easterly frontier with Burma, conflicts between Muslim and Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim, separatists and centralizers continued to kill hundreds and terrorize remote villages.

Many of the acute problems that faced the new nations could be traced directly to the nature of British rule and the corroding, radicalizing effect of the Second World War. They represented the other face of freedom from the beaming crowds and proud processions on independence days. They were also testament to the continuing role of the great Western powers in Asia and the coming of age of the new leviathans, the USSR and China, which were determined to play their own Great Game for South and Southeast Asia. As Nehru leaned towards the USSR, shunned by the anti-communist USA, so the Soviet leadership flattered his wishes and the Soviet security services began to infiltrate the country. Communist China, for its part, fresh from its great success in bolstering Ho Chih Minh in Vietnam, began to play politics in Burma, Pakistan , and Indonesia, though it was impotent to affect the course of the war to the south in Malaya. The Cold War gave new life to old fantasies of imperial dominance.

The tenth anniversary of the climacteric of the Second World War in the region did not witness that era of peace and prosperity that many Asians had envisaged when they had still been under the yoke of Japanese occupation and colonial rule. For one thing, full-scale armed conflict had only temporarily ceased in Indo-China and the bloody denouement there spread waves of apprehension across the whole region. At DienBien Phu, in April 1954, the French suffered an epochal defeat at the hands of Viet Minh forces supplied with artillery and modern weapons by the Chinese and Russians. The Western fight against communist advance seemed to be deeply compromised, at least on this front. An American officer, Colonel Edward Lansdale, landed on 1 June 1954 in Saigon, which was on the point of becoming the capital of a vivisected South Vietnam under the peace accords signed between the French and the Viet Minh in Geneva .  Lansdale drew heavily on the British experience of counter-insurgency in Malaya while he was working in the Philippines and Vietnam .

After Adlai Stevenson, who had a close shave when his helicopter crash-landed, vice-president Richard Nixon flew to Malaya where Templer impressed the need to wean Russia and China apart, and John and Robert Kennedy, who did not impress hardened American residents with their lack of sympathy for the British imperial cause. But the traffic went in both directions. Malayan officials had flown in to visit the villages where disarmed Huk rebels were settled, gathering information for their own 'New Villages' on the peninsula.Lansdale's journey to Saigon signalled the beginning of the era of deep US involvement in Vietnam . The looming conflict was also marked in fiction by Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American, published in 1955.A New York Times reporter just happened to be on the spot at the vital moment. Photographs of people maimed in the attack were speedily published under a headline blaming Ho Chi Minh for the violence.

By 1955 Lansdale was certainly working hard to put in place a third force to take over from the French as a bulwark against the communists. In that year he helped organize a coup which placed the city of Saigon in the hands of the future dictator of South Vietnam , Ngo Din Diem. This final act of the unending war, the American struggle with North Vietnam , would run its bloody course to 1975. Meanwhile General Douglas Gracey, who had reinstalled the French in Saigon in 1945 and managed another post-colonial armed struggle between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, retired from his post as commander-in-chief of Pakistan's army.

Britain and the USA retained the largest economic and political stakes in the region. Both countries still counted the new states as important partners in trade. Even though India , Pakistan and Burma had erected high tariff barriers against foreign goods, the whole organization of the world economy continued to put them at a massive disadvantage which would persist until the early twenty-first century. Writing from Changi jail in 1959, James Puthucheary, once again a detainee, penned a classic analysis: Ownership and Control in the Malayan Economy. It argued that the British still dominated 'commanding heights and much of the valleys' of the Malayan economy, and that the British had removed much of the sting of this by bringing in Malay directors and Chinese investors. As is now acknowledged, 'crony capitalism' - the scourge of modern corporate Asia - cut its teeth in the British and Japanese periods. The imperial past still shaped borders. The exclusion of Singapore from the Malayan federation was to be briefly reversed in 1963, when, with North Borneo and Sarawak, it joined the Federation of Malaysia. Although this experiment was not predetermined to fail, the reasons for Singapore's departure in 1965 - the alarm of Malay elites that its volatile Chinese politics would upset the delicate balance of power on the peninsula was foreshadowed by events in 1946 and 1947. The political compromises of the transfer of power were to, unravel as ethnic tensions rose, and in 1969 Malaysia experienced race riots on a scale it had not seen since 1945. It would face the need for a second, deeper decolonization in which the state would affirm the centrality of the Malay language and culture and drive forward the ethnic distribution within the economy. In Singapore the new independent regime of the People's Action Party would also have to seek new ways to reconstruct Singaporean society and shift the course of national development.

Chin Peng who in December1949 helped to write a declaration of intent of the Malay Communist Party: the establishment of a People's Democratic Republic of Malaya, later conceded, this was perhaps a mistake: 'Our battle-cry should have been: Independence for Malaya and all Malayans who want independence.' (Naw, Aung San, pp. 191-2).

In 1998, fifty years after the outbreak of the Malayan revolution, Chin Peng began a series of journeys. At this point his countrymen had seen only four images of him: at the victory parade in January 1946 when Louis Mountbatten pinned the Burma Star on his jungle fatigues; a grainy photograph on the poster that offered a quarter of million dollars for him, dead or alive; then there was Chin Peng at Baling, looking like a young clerk on his day off in baggy trousers and a short-sleeved shirt; then nothing for thirty-four years until he appeared at the Haadyai peace talks of 1989, an elderly man now, a little overweight, in a smart business suit, but entirely composed in the full glare of the world's media. There, in fluent Malay, he had pledged allegiance to the King of Malaysia, and his deputy Abdullah C. D. urged Malaysians to unite in the cause of social justice. But in June 1998, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Emergency, Chin Peng appeared in London . This excited some comment in the British press, but was unreported in Malaysia , and the subject of only a short notice in the Singapore Straits Times. There he travelled to the Public Record Office at Kew; where, in a curious circumlocution of history, the insurgent entered the imperial archives surrounded by dozens of other visitors researching their family histories, Chin Peng began a paper trail through his own past. He took pencil notes from the newly opened files of Special Operations Executive; of missions of which he had been a part during the war; of the first agreements in the Malayan jungle between the Malayan Communist Party and South East Asia Command, signed by the traitor Lai Teck; and other names, other betrayals. It began a short odyssey of meetings and interviews with writers and scholars in London , Canberra and, eventually, even Singa pore, many of them adversaries, retired policemen and soldiers. Some years later, with the heavy editorial hand of a retired correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, his memories would be woven into a memoir entitled My Side of History.

Permission for Chin Peng to return home however, was refused – and seeking to fulfill his obligation to honor his parents' graves - was forced in 2004 to challenge the government of Malaysia in the Malaysian courts with breaking the Had-yai agreement. He has yet to have his day in court. As this controversy rumbled on, in 2005, a Malay writer and film-maker, Amir Muhammad, born after the Emergency had ended, shot a documentary that traced, through interviews and music, a voyage from Chin Peng's childhood home of Sitiawan and other parts of Perak to the veterans' villages in south Thailand. Chin Peng himself did not appear. The film, Lelaki Komunis Terakhir, 'The Last Communist', was released in the wake of the sixtieth anniversary of the ruling party, UMNO. Its old veterans warned that 'old wounds will bleed again', and the film was eventually banned in Malaysia .

In Burma it was a combination of unending internal conflict and foreign intervention which led to the rise and seemingly endless rule of the military in a country which had once been one of the brightest hopes for Asian prosperity. Burma had all but become one of the first 'failed states', as piously categorized by Western political scientists.

The Thailand Burma Border Consortium, the main aid agency caring for tens of thousands of refugees along the Thai-Burma frontier, estimates that last year alone the violence forced 82,000 people to leave their homes. Since 1996, more than 3,000 villages have been destroyed or abandoned in eastern Burma , and more than one million people displaced, according to its most recent report. Major uprooting and abuses have also occurred in other ethnic minority areas such as Shan State. Women are often assaulted for the pleasure of the troops. Or as Mark Farmaner of The Burma Campaign UK group earlier this year (2007) claimed "Every day, more women are raped, forced into slave labour, tortured and killed."

More recently there was trouble in the just opposite end of the ‘Asian Crescent’ (meaning former British Asia). Burnt-out buses, shattered glass, blaring curfew orders, jittery looking security forces, burning tires, trees felled across the highway and angry demonstrators in Nepal.