There is a sad dynamic to the recent history of so many states created since the second World War that often escapes us in the West. The bastard children of colonialism, with all the show of democracy and none of the substance, many developing countries went from bad to worse in the first years of independence. Some, like Kenya or Tanzania, have struggled along with a chaotic form of democracy; others have quickly fallen under the thumb of military dictators or other despots.
Burma is an example of the latter. For most of its fifty years of so-called freedom, military generals have - literally - called the shots. Brief periods of democracy coincided with internal discord or fighting with separatist rebels or Communist insurgents. The army could claim to be the only group capable of bringing peace to a country of twenty-one major ethnic groups.
Ten years ago this month, the Burmese people had their Tienanmen Square, a mass, peaceful demonstration against the SLORC, the ruling military junta. The result was the same as in China. The army opened fire on the unarmed crowds, drove them into a nearby lake, and 5,000 people were killed.
Today, the democratic leader of that revolt, Aung San Suu Kyi, is a virtual prisoner within her own country. She remains a potent moral force in opposition to the despots, but the generals' hands remain firmly in control of the triggers and the purse-strings. In Under the Dragon: Travels in a Betrayed Land (HarperCollins, £16.99 in UK), Rory MacLean has written a moving, eloquent account of life in Burma today, seen through the eyes of its citizens and, in particular, its women. An accomplished travel writer with two books already to his name, MacLean weaves together fictional accounts with reportage in portraying the country he is visiting.
It's an effective though dangerous technique, which takes one into the story but can leave one wondering where fact stops and fiction begins. When MacLean is good, he is very good, empathising with the silent suffering of the child labourer or the girl prostitute in a way no hotel-bound travel writer could do. But in the book's weaker moments, the characters dissolve into crude caricatures of good women and mostly bad men.
Ten years earlier, MacLean had been travelling to Bangkok, but was deposited in Burma for a week by mistake. Haunted by the experience of visiting this forgotten land, he vowed to return. "To me Burma was a paradox, a land of selfless generosity and sinister greed stitched together by love and fear. Its people persevered while accepting life's impermanence, its rulers deified their former leader yet imprisoned his daughter."
The book is built around the efforts of MacLean and his wife Katrin to find a basket similar to one they uncovered in the British Museum. It had belonged to a 19th-century British colonist who had recorded the beliefs of a then vanishing era: will a Sunday-born man marry well a woman born on a Wednesday? To bring luck, should a house be built on male, female or neutral foundation posts?
Today, however, Burma has Baywatch and Pepsi, and plastic shopping bags have replaced finely woven baskets. The junta is pinning its hopes on Western tourism, having forcibly cleared the villagers who once lived near the most famous Buddhist temples at Pagan. As a sideline, there is always heroin dealing: Burma is alleged to be the world's biggest exporter of the drug.
The trail of the missing basket leads to many a false path before an end is reached. The story of Burma's struggle for democracy is likely to follow the same twisting route.
Paul Cullen is Development Correspondent of The Irish Times