On the Shadow Tracks by Clare Hammond review a train to Myanmar’s dark heart

News Snapshot:

Clare Hammond began her career as a journalist covering the financial markets in Hong Kong, before moving to Myanmar. From 2014 to 2020, she worked freelance for various news outlets and as digital editor of Frontier, a Yangon-based magazine of investigative reporting. Her work covering the country’s many civil conflicts, and exposing corruption in the handling of its natural resources, obliged her to travel to parts of the country closed to tourists. She discovered a map of “shadow tracks”, railway lines that the military junta of Than Shwe (1992-2011) built using forced labour, under laws created by British colonials. Although...