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We are still here! Let us send you tips for travelling through Myanmar and stories from the road …
Our previous events included author Abir Mukherjee speaking about the heritage of British and Bengali detective fiction, Charlotte Carty on her grandfather’s march to Kohima in 1944 and K.S. Nair exploring the Bangladesh 1971 Liberation War in the context of the Cold War. What connects each talk is a desire to look closer and ask questions.
For our Speaker Series events in Yangon, we offer a certain number of free tickets to Myanmar youth. Let us know if you think you are eligible and would like to attend an event.
Contact us for more information and check below for upcoming events.
Join Sampan at The Travellers Club on Friday 17 October 2025 for an intimate evening: a champagne reception with Abir Mukherjee, followed by dinner and a talk from Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent.
In 2019, Antonia spent two months travelling by motorbike, boat and foot through Nagaland in India’s far northeast. Along the way, she met former headhunters, Baptist preachers, rebel commanders and conservationists, gaining a rare outsider’s insight into the Naga Hills. Pushing deeper still, she crossed into the remote Burmese Naga villages – places so hard to reach that, as one Naga told her, only “serious enemies or true friends” ever make it there. Her talk will share stories from this extraordinary journey.
Abir Mukherjee – award-winning author and headliner of Sampan’s Death on the Brahmaputra tour – grew up in Scotland, though his family hails from Kolkata, the vivid setting for his acclaimed Wyndham & Banerjee series. In his third novel, Death in the East, he leads us into Assam, nestled in the Brahmaputra valley at the foot of the Naga Hills …
Antonia writes for The Guardian, The Financial Times and Geographical, and has presented a number of documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. Her 2014 book A Short Ride in the Jungle, recounts her 2000-mile journey on a Honda Cub, riding over the mountains of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Her second book – Land of the Dawn-Lit Mountains (2017) – sees her once more set out on two wheels into the wilderness, meeting the shamans, lamas and opium farmers of Arunachal Pradesh. Antonia specialises in telling stories about threatened people, places and wildlife. There’s nothing she loves more than travelling alone in remote regions – talking to people, hearing their stories.
Abir’s books – while being a lot of fun – deftly explore the tensions at the heart of the British Empire. The latest in the series – The Burning Grounds – is published in autumn 2025. Abir has twice won the CWA Dagger for best Historical Novel, as well as the Wilbur Smith Award for Adventure Writing. In 2025, his thriller Hunted won Best Thriller at the British Book Awards and Best Novel at the Theakston Old Peculier Festival.Â
Abir accompanies Sampan’s Death on the Brahmaputra tour.
This will be an intimate evening with limited places. Please RSVP to ensure your place.
Dr Robert Lyman MBE FRHistS will talk about the war in the Far East 1941-1945 in the context of the fractured Japanese politics of the time. Rob will argue that the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong in December 1941 and the trauma which followed for the whole of East Asia was merely a continuance of the trauma the region had experienced since Japan’s accession to power in Korea in 1910, and the gradual building up of its empire in China in the decades which followed.
The gradual colonisation of the Far East was the result of dysfunction and failure, rather than by political design and coherent policies and political leadership. The talk will describe this dysfunction to understand how the war began, and illustrate how it also failed the Japanese in their prosecution of the war, bringing about Japan’s inevitable demise in WW2.
Rob is the author of A War of Empires, Japan, India, Britain and Burma 1941-45 (2021) and, with General Lord Dannatt Korea, War without End (2025). Rob leads Sampan’s WW2 tours The Forgotten War Tour and Beyond the Chindwin.
This event is restricted to members of the Hong Kong Club and their guests.
Writer and filmmaker Sam Dalrymple joins Sampan in Yangon to speak about his acclaimed new book, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern India. Sam will explore how Partition has shaped the histories — and borders — of South Asia, far beyond 1947.
The book weaves together the stories of five major partitions, from Aden to Burma, tracing the fault lines of empire and the enduring consequences of dislocation. Drawing on his research, travels and family history, Sam offers a fresh and deeply human perspective on one of the most defining forces in the region’s modern history.
Sam is a Delhi-raised Scottish historian and award-winning filmmaker. He graduated from Oxford University as a Persian and Sanskrit scholar. He has worked across South and Central Asia, including stints with Turquoise Mountain in Kabul, and with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Hunza and Lahore. In 2018, he co-founded Project Dastaan, a peace-building initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by the 1947 Partition of India. Sam’s writing has appeared in the New York Times and The Spectator, and he is a columnist for Architectural Digest.
An endurance trek through the Naga Hills, in the footsteps of the Naga soldiers of the Assam.
The Cold War, a fight for freedom and the birth of Bangladesh.
Trek from the plains of Dimapur up to Kohima in the hills. Stay overnight in Naga villages.
Rob Lyman explores the events and ramifications of WW2 in Kolkata, Kohima and the Naga Hills.
Tracing Bill Slim’s reconquest of Burma, we explore how WW2 led to where Myanmar is today.
