The wheel of fortune at the Myitkyina Manau

Nicholas Farrelly - 06 Feb, 2008

At the recent Manau festival held in Myitkyina there was a huge space – of at least a few acres – devoted to gambling and sideshow alley games. There were hundreds of different gambling and gaming outlets.

In this game of “wheel of fortune” most bets were significantly less than a dollar. Some gamblers were, however, running through their stacks of 1000 kyat bills. Each of those bills is worth slightly less than a dollar.

I didn’t hang around long enough to see who ended up in front. I can, however, report that the house seemed to be doing particularly well.

About the Author
Nicholas Farrelly
Dr Nicholas Farrelly is the co-founder of New Mandala. A graduate of the Australian National University and the University of Oxford, over the past 20 years he has undertaken research in Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh, China and India. Nicholas is Head of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Tasmania and formerly the Associate Dean of the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University, where he also led the ANU Myanmar Research Centre from 2015 to 2017.
New Mandala is supported by the Australian National University (ANU), a world-leading centre of research and teaching on Southeast Asia that has hosted the site since its founding in 2006. New Mandala's editors make editorial decisions independently of the ANU, and the views expressed at New Mandala are solely those of contributors and do not represent the institutional position(s) of the ANU or any of its constituent parts.
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