"Falser than the Roman's conception of Britain..."

"No doubt Burma was regarded as a place of banishment, a dismal rice-swamp (or, as was once said, a howling paddy-plain), where the sun never shone. I remember, while still in London, the commiseration expressed with one of our seniors whose deportation to this dreary land was announced. All this was fiction, falser than the Roman's conception of Britain. I found Burma a bright and pleasant land, green and forest-clad, with a climate healthier on the whole than the average climate of Indian plains; its people singularly human, cheerful, and sympathetic."

Sir Herbert Thirkell White, A Civil Servant in Burma, 1913