Data collection for Myanmar’s 2014 census will commence on Sunday, and for 12 days until April 10 enumerators will fan out across the country in an attempt to generate a total population count. In fact, the exercise is already complete in a small number of peripheral communities. For the bulk of the people, however, work on the national inventory is about to begin. Today I have a historical footnote relating to the last of the British censuses.

One question has puzzled me recently. Why did the final British census take place in 1931, rather than in 1941? After all, the Japanese did not enter the world war until the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. They did not target Burma until later that month, with the first bombs falling on Rangoon on December 23 and 25. The full occupation did not take place until 1942. What was it, then, that prevented the British from carrying out their decennial census?

I asked Derek Tonkin at Network Myanmar about this, and he pointed me to two complementary answers. One appears in a note to a table on page 42 of Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma by Mary P Callahan, published in 2003: “data from the 1941 census was lost in World War II”. The other appears on page 24 of Burmese Economic Life by J Russell Andrus, issued 10 days after Burmese independence on January 14, 1948: “Unfortunately the 1941 Census Officer remained in Burma during the evacuation of 1942, and with him remained almost all data except for two pages.” So the 1941 British census did take place, but just about everything in it disappeared under the Japanese occupation. Nevertheless, one important statistic did survive. This was the overall population count of 16,823,798, up 15 percent from 14,647,756 in 1931.

Andrus also notes that British census takers never did make it to every corner of Burma. This is from page 23 of his book: “even in 1941 the Census covered but 233,492 of Burma’s 261,610 square miles, the remainder being wild, inaccessible areas in the northeast and north, believed to have a very sparse population”. A little more than 10 percent of the territory thus evaded full documentation throughout the colonial period.

Finally, it’s perhaps unfair to cite judgments that have not stood the test of time – I certainly have some on my record. For what it’s worth, though, here is an assessment Andrus reaches (on page 22) at the very moment of independence: “Burma, with the exception of some hill areas, is fortunate in having a fairly homogenous population, without the communal problems which afflict some neighboring countries. This is partially due to the geographic barriers provided by the surrounding mountains and partially to the fact that the Burmans appear largely to have ‘liquidated’ a large proportion of the races previously inhabiting Burma, and to have absorbed most of the remainder.”