Heading to Burma tomorrow. The Kuala Lumpur low-budget terminal is rather in the middle of nowhere, so leaving at 1:00 AM for a 6:55 AM flight—c’est le vie. Have booked into a place in Yangon, successfully acquired shiny new money, and am getting excited.

This is a picture of J.V Lane.

I was walking through Malacca’s Customs Museums when I saw the photos, one of which I’ve uploaded above.

They were of young men in formal Customs attire, staring with great seriousness into the camera: they were all Malays, it seemed, except for one. The photo above is dated 1958, and perhaps it shows.

He was a white man with sunglasses, and he wore the popular shorts and knee-socks of the time, that emphasized his bird-like and skinny legs. He stares into the camera with a half-cocked smile: in fact, he has the same odd, mildly awkward expression on in all five of the photographs. His name, as I found out, was J.V. Lane.

J.V. Lane has largely been lost to history, or at least he might have been in a latter era.

Today, there is the Internet. I was able to identify him within 10 minutes: he comes up in a book a bit too-cleverly named “Asian Customs.”

His name, in fact, was James Vincent Lane, and he had been sent to Malacca in an attempt to teach Malays how to run an efficient British customs system, after Malaysia attained independence in 1957.

Vincent helped to set up a customs schools for Malays, and describes the attractive landscaping of the campus, and how he “resisted the temptation to ask for a tennis court.” (But there was badminton).

Vincent also helped set up an exhibit on the “black arts” of smugglers for the students, remnants of which may make up the modern-day, public Customs Museum in Malacca. I would like to imagine J.V. Lane busily curating the displays of naughty bits and illicit Islamic items in his off-time.

He kept a diary, which I want to get my hands upon. This passage is all I could find on the man online, but I imagine more exists in dusty records somewhere in Malaysia or in London.

I would like to find out if he is alive or not, and where he ended up. Did he go back to England? Did he live out his days in Malaysia, or elsewhere in Asia? Has he continued to wear knee-socks and sunglasses, and will I run into a very old man somewhere in Myanmar wearing such an outfit, and immediately be able to say “Hey, I wrote about you on the Internet!”?

He interests me because he illustrates the strange power of the Internet: that I could Google this person, largely lost to the past, and find out about him is quite meaningful—at least, that’s how I see it.