The founding father of independent Burma, who led his country to the threshold of freedom from British rule and was assassinated at thirty-two, six months before independence arrived — a student radical who built the Burmese army, made a wartime bargain with Japan and then turned against it, negotiated independence with London, and tried at Panglong to bind Burma's frontier leaders — Shan, Kachin, and Chin — into a future union that other groups, including many Karen, stood outside, leaving behind both the nation and the army that would later rule it as a dictatorship, and a counterfactual that still haunts Myanmar.
Aung San negotiated Burma's freedom from the British Empire, then never saw it. On the morning of 19 July 1947, gunmen sent by a political rival burst into a cabinet meeting in Rangoon and killed him and several colleagues with submachine-gun fire. He was thirty-two. Burma became independent six months later, in January 1948, without the man who had made it possible. He is revered today as the architect of the nation and the founder of its army — the same army that would one day rule the country as a brutal dictatorship. What he would have done with the freedom he won is the great unanswerable question of modern Burmese history.