Inspired by Chicago journalist Studs Terkel's accounts of the hopes and dreams of ordinary Americans, Rangoon-based writer Mya Than Tint introduces us to 34 of Burma's fifty four million 'ordinary people', the a-nya-ta-ra. As he travelled through Burma on literary lecture tours in the late 1980s, he encountered porters, sailors, fortune-tellers, waitresses, artists and petty criminals 'on the road to Mandalay'. Their stories were published in Burma in Kalya magazine. Himself a prolific translator into Burmese of eastern and western classical works of literature, this is Mya Than Tint's first major work to have been translated into English-an inspiring read and itself now a classic.