In a photograph taken in 1953, Sutan Sjahrir arrives off an airplane in Rangoon and is greeted warmly on the tarmac by Burmese socialist leaders U Ba Swe and U Kyaw Nyein, as well as his close friend Ali Algadri, the Arab-Indonesian chargé d’affairs. Sjahrir had, for several months, served as Indonesia’s first Prime Minister, negotiated the country’s independence at the United Nations, and put in place its first constitutional guarantees; but he had been sidelined from power by Sukarno, a political rival since the 1930s. U Ba Swe and U Kyaw Nyein, meanwhile, were powerful ministers in the new Burmese government. Along with Ram Manohar Lohia and Asoka Mehta, who had broken away from the Indian National Congress to start their own socialist party, they had together planned a conference dedicated to the cause of Asian socialism. With 200 delegates arriving from as far away as London and Tokyo, they sought to use the Asian Socialist Conference to promote socialism as the path out of the mounting international rivalry between “capitalist democracy” and “totalitarian Communism.”

In the 1950s, Burma was an intellectual hotbed for Afro-Asian socialism and anti-colonial solidarity. Rangoon was, then, one of Southeast Asia’s most cosmopolitan cities, a hub on transcontinental air routes. It hosted visits from the Moscow and San Francisco Ballet, Chinese intellectuals, Philippine artists, Japanese performance troupes, and Yugoslav musicians. It was also the first country in post-colonial Asia or Africa to be ruled by a nominally Socialist Party.