Known and beloved in Mandalay for providing care to central Myanmar’s poorest for many years, Dr Soe Tint died while trapped in the rubble of his historic family hotel after a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck the city and its surroundings on March 28 of this year.
I first met him in Mandalay in August 1990. I had had a month to practise Burmese language before taking my job as second secretary at the British embassy. Zunetta Liddell, who had met him while living in Mandalay between 1988 and 1990 and pursuing a Ph.D in Buddhism, provided me with a letter of introduction. I rattled the chain on the gate at his family house on 30th Street opposite Setkyathiha Pagoda in the heart of historic Mandalay.
A slim, handsome man, neatly dressed in a taikpon and longyi, emerged from an old two-storey porticoed house. That was the start of a long friendship, in which Soe Tint invariably took care of any family member, friend, or colleague that I or others sent his way. The anthropology professor Ward Keeler remembers his first encounter even earlier, in 1987, when mutual friends told Soe Tint that Ward had lost his passport in the park by Mandalay Palace, and he dropped everything to try to help.
My own love of Mandalay grew from that month, largely spent on a bicycle exploring its hidden corners and evading military intelligence (MI). That love has been tested more recently by the last twenty years of rapid development and the now-ubiquitous motorcycles. Once Soe Tint had finished with the afternoon clinic, which he ran in the compound of his house at the time, chiefly serving workers in the local market, he would warm up the engine of his blue Volkswagen Beetle, bequeathed to him by his uncle Than Dok who had emigrated to Canada. Or he would top up his Second World War-era jeep, always thirsty for oil and water. Then, he would take me to admire the historic, meaningful edges of “the straight lines of Mandalay” (as Hsu Hnget’s book later memorialised them): places like Eaindawya Pagoda, Gaw Wein Jetty, Yankin Taung and Shwe Kyat Kya Pagoda. In the evenings, MI would drop by or call him to get a summary of my day’s activities.
A family’s proud legacy
Soe Tint’s grandfather on his mother’s side was Lim Kyi Say, who was born in Hainan, China, where his father Lim Mun Kit ran a hotel and restaurant business. In 1902, at the age of 23, he emigrated to British Burma and opened the Bee Kyin hotel, the first in the former royal capital of Mandalay, at the junction of 84th and 29th streets, once a cluster of hotels and restaurants known as Yon-daw-gyi in Wadan quarter. Over the years the hotel was rebuilt, particularly after the great fire of March 24, 1984 which burned down a fourth of the city.
Lim Kyi Say married a girl from Mandalay, Daw Yin, and the couple had five children, three of whom died young. The third child, Than Dok, studied medicine and went to London to specialise in ophthalmology and otorhinolaryngology. He married an Englishwoman and later moved to Canada. The fourth child, Hla Hla Myint, also known as Auntie Cherry, stayed behind to manage the Bee Kyin hotel. She married U Nge, a Shan man from Lashio, and they had three children: Kyin Kyin Myint, also known as Jennifer; Soe Myint; and Soe Tint.
Soe Tint was close to his uncle Dr Than Dok. Both he and his sister Kyin Kyin Myint followed in his footsteps to become doctors at the University of Medicine in Mandalay, built on land that had once belonged to his grandfather. Soe Tint and his uncle were cut from the same cloth. They were soft-spoken, kind men who dedicated their lives to caring for others, meditating, and teaching about Buddhism. Than Dok would write books of notes and bring them on visits from Canada to Mandalay to give to his nephew.
Life as a doctor
At university Soe Tint, who was known for effortless success in his studies, was in the same class as the Shan songwriter Dr Sai Kham Leik, who later formed the group The Wild Ones with Sai Htee Saing.
As a child of Mandalay’s elite, he did not much enjoy being sent to serve as a junior doctor at a remote outpost in Nagaland in the mid-1970s, which could only be reached on foot or by elephant and where only one person in the village spoke Burmese. Legend has it that the local chief tried to marry off his daughter to the handsome doctor, but he politely declined with a smile.
Dr Soe Tint returned to Mandalay where he worked for several years in Mandalay General Hospital in the late 1970s, including in anaesthetics. He worked as an assistant to Dr Myint Myint Khin, the chair of the Department of Medicine. In those days, Soe Tint was sociable, and regarded as a highly eligible bachelor. He was also a good golfer, regularly heading to Maymyo (Pyin Oo Lwin) to play with his friends. My first—and penultimate—game of golf was with him in Maymyo in 1990.
After being transferred to Myaungmya, Ayeyarwady Region as a doctor for the new Myanmar Jute Industries factory, Soe Tint resigned from government service and returned to Mandalay to take care of his parents and the Bee Kyin Hotel, and to run a small clinic in the compound of their house on 30th Street.
His brother, Soe Myint, had trained as an engineer and emigrated to the United States, as did many of Soe Tint’s contemporaries from Mandalay Medical School, particularly after the 1988 coup. They encouraged Soe Tint to do the same, but after living there in 1993-94 to study for the exams to qualify as a US doctor, he decided he would never be happy living amid America’s materialism and had to go back to his home.
Service and assistance
Upon his return, Soe Tint’s sister was already working across the Ayeyarwady River from Mandalay in Sagaing, at the Jivitadana Hospital. Soe Tint soon became one of the founding doctors of the Byammaso Social Assistance Association. His mother and her good friend, the writer Ludu Daw Amar, were among its leading patrons. The association was unable to register legally as an organisation until 1999, most likely owing in part to the military regime’s suspicion of the Ludu family and their alleged communist links.
Byammaso was the first “free funeral association” in Myanmar, predating a more widely known Yangon philanthropic organisation later set up by the actor Kyaw Thu in Yangon, which covers funeral service costs for bereaved people without the means to pay. The Byammaso association focused on keeping its beneficiaries alive, although it also supported their funerals.
The model for the charity was simple: the poorest of the patients who had arrived at Mandalay’s recently opened 300-bed hospital from around upper Myanmar would be referred to Dr Soe Tint and fellow Byammaso doctors Dr Ko Ko Lay and Dr Moe Myint. While committed to work for free themselves, the doctors would have to deliberate about what portion of the cost of these patients’ medicines and nursing care they could afford. All manner of patients came to them in need of help: teenagers who had lived with disfiguring growths for most of their lives, women with late-stage cancers, men who had fallen from toddy palm trees. The charity complemented the skills and the equipment at the state-run hospital, weighing attention to need alongside consideration of which treatments were likely to make the greatest difference. They had to manage doctors’ competing claims on behalf of their patients, as well as determine how best to apportion the funds available to them.
When this approach proved successful, largely thanks to Dr Soe Tint’s care and judgment, it expanded to Mandalay General Hospital. He would visit each day, meeting patients and specialists. He compiled lists of the patients and their photos (I used to tease him about patient confidentiality) to show donors how their money was being spent and the results it had achieved—most often, the discharge of the patient from the hospital after a successful treatment. The effectiveness of this simple model attracted funds both from well-off Mandalayans as well as from farther afield, including the diaspora.
Later, funds received from one of the donors went towards the construction of a clinic on 62nd Street between 33rd and 34th, where Dr Soe Tint would receive patients every morning. If I was in Mandalay and able to drop by, I would see them queue for hours, doubtless attracted not only by the free health care but the calm bedside manner of the handsome doctor my family by then called “Mandalay’s Dr Kildare.” (By strange coincidence Richard Chamberlain, the American actor who played Dr Kildare in the 1960s television drama, died the same weekend as Soe Tint).
However, Soe Tint was not comfortable that donations now had to be used to build and maintain buildings, rather than for patient care in the existing state-owned hospitals, and ultimately stepped back from Byammaso in 2013. He still continued to care for the sick and elderly.
Until the Covid-19 pandemic, he drove to Sagaing every Wednesday, volunteering as an anaesthetist under the guidance of octogenarian Dr Bo Ni in the Sitagu Aryudana Hospital. He was also involved in supporting numerous monasteries and meditation centres, including the Mandalay Goenka meditation centre and another in Wachet in the Sagaing Hills.
He was always to be found at celebrations of Mandalay families. His last Facebook post shows that he attended the 95th birthday of Saw Hnin Nyo on the morning of the quake. For years he had followed the eight precepts, and refrained from eating after noon. So he may have eaten his last meal there, or in his house, before going on his daily check of the Bee Kyin Hotel.
Byammaso, the Association which Soe Tint helped to establish, takes its name from the four cardinal virtues or sublime states of mind – Metta, loving-kindness; Karuna, compassion; Mudita, sympathetic joy; and Upekkha, equanimity. Dr Soe Tint demonstrated these every day, although his equanimity was tested by the 2021 military coup. He would also have been heartbroken to see the state of his beloved Mandalay today. But he would have experienced mudita to know that the hotel manager, his wife and child were rescued by the fire department from the collapsed hotel on March 30.
Dr Soe Tint’s sister Dr Kyin Kyin Myint passed away in May 2023 from cancer. Her three children all live in Mandalay. They arranged for his cremation in Mandalay on 31 March, supported by his many friends.
The author, Vicky Bowman, is a former UK Ambassador to Myanmar (2002-2006) and current Director of the Myanmar Centre for Responsible Business since 2013