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the city center, waving flags, banners, and placards. With no one to champion, many carried portraits of the 1940s nationalist supremo Aung San. From the northern suburbs, long columns of university and school students ambled down the leafy boulevards that led to the city center, and by noon the broad expanse around Bandoola Park was crammed with sarong-clad crowds of cheering people. Apartment balconies and rooftops across the old colonial downtown area filled with onlookers. Makeshift podiums were put up in front of City Hall, and one speaker after another pushed forward to denounce a government that had oppressed and impoverished them for more than a generation. The call was clear and echoed Ne Win’s: a return to multiparty government. Thousands moved toward the Shwedagon Pagoda about a mile away, where more fiery speeches were given. Hawkers sold cigarettes and drinks, and no one doubted that the country was at a watershed.
    The demonstrations were not confined to Rangoon. Across every major city in Burma that afternoon big crowds of ordinary people left work and gathered on the streets to voice their frustrations against Ne Win’s regime. Nothing like this had happened in decades.
    All day the military had stood around and watched. There had been no incident. The army had allowed the demonstrations to take place. But at 11:30 p.m., with thousands still milling around in front of City Hall, it decided to draw the line. Across downtown the electricity was turned off, and big mobile loudspeakers ordered the crowd to disperse. No one budged. Then, in the dark muggy night, Bren gun carriers and trucks heavy with combat-ready troops in olive-green fatigues and steel helmets wheeled out onto the main square, and the young crowd, refusing to be cowed, began singing the Burmese national anthem. The army opened fire. The firing continued until the next morning. Dozens were believed to have been killed and wounded that first night, but there was never any proper count.
    The response was not what the army had in mind. Rather than curtail the demonstrations, the bloodshed incited people further, and for the next five days the death toll rose as soldiers used lethal force to break up the mounting protests. On 10 August troops opened fire on a group of exhausted doctors and nurses in front of Rangoon General Hospital who ventured out to call for an end to the violence. Many of the dead around the city were high school students or young men from the poorer neighborhoods; they had shown themselves the bravest or most foolhardy in facing the German-manufactured G-7 rifles of the Burmese army. Some placed the number of dead and wounded well into the hundreds.
    Finally, on 13 August, as if the men in charge had themselves had enough of the bloodletting, the army called a halt to its actions and announced the resignation of General Sein Lwin. Everywhere the army was ordered to return to the barracks, and soldiers quietly and quickly crept out of Rangoon. A close civilian associate of the old dictator’s, an English-trained jurist, was appointed president, and he gave a hearty and conciliatory speech over the radio. But the public was not impressed. Instead a feeling of imminent victory filled the air.
    Over the next many days civil administration in Burma collapsed in practically every city and town in the country, as millions of people happily strolled out of their homes and did what they had not been able to do for so long: organize as they wished and speak their minds. It was no longer just the students or the workers, but people from every walk of life. Rangoon developed a carnival atmosphere. Trade unions developed overnight. And in a country where the press had been tightly controlled for a generation, dozens of newspapers and magazines, laboriously mimeographed, suddenly appeared in shops and on sidewalks. In Mandalay the army retreated behind the walls of the old palace as committees of students, workers, and Buddhist monks took