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Oxford embraced a daughter whose silence had "sounded louder than the jabber of politics and clang of military power" as Aung San Suu Kyi received an honorary degree at the university on Wednesday.
Twenty-four years after leaving its spires and bridges for isolation in Rangoon, the Burmese pro-democracy leader returned the city that was, for almost as many years, her home.
Her homecoming, she told academics, dignitaries and students in the city's Sheldonian Theatre, brought "many strands" of her life together – "the years I spent as a student at St Hugh's, the years spent at Park Town as wife and mother, and the years spent under house arrest when the University of Oxford stood up and spoke up for me."
She said: "During the most difficult years, I was upheld by memories of Oxford: those were among the most important inner resources that helped me to cope with the all the challenges I had to face."
Her speech, at the end of a two-hour-long ceremony, rich in pomp, to receive the honorary doctorate in civil law awarded while she was detained in 1993, brought the audience to its feet to deliver a two-minute standing ovation.
Aung San Suu Kyi – who studied politics, philosophy and economics at St Hugh's and later lived in Park Town, north Oxford, with her husband, the academic Michael Aris, and their two sons, Alexander, now 39, and Kim, now 34 – left for Burma to care for her dying mother in 1988, where she was drawn into the maelstrom of a popular uprising. Spending 15 of the next 22 years under house arrest, she refused to leave, even as her husband was dying of cancer in 1999.
Clad in the scarlet robes and black velvet hat of the Oxford honorands, a trademark yellow rose peeping out from under the hat's brim, she was given the rare privilege of addressing the "parliament of dons" gathered. She recalled summer days reading on the lawn of St Hugh's, and daydreaming in the college library.
"Today has been a very moving day, for the past is always there. It never goes away. But you can select what is best from the past to help you go forward to the future," she said.
At a private party with friends and her son Kim at St Hugh's on Tuesday evening, she had felt like the "carefree" and "happy" young student she was, she said. "I felt I was back again in my young student days. I didn't feel any different from then. But I am different, because I have faced difficult experiences. And I found Oxford is big enough and broad enough to contain my new experiences as well."
The road ahead was not going to be easy, she said. "But Oxford, I know, expects the best of its own, and today, because it has recognised me as its very own, I am strengthened to go forward and give of my very best in meeting the new challenges that lie ahead."
She was one of eight honorands, including Baroness Manningham-Butler, former head of MI5, and the thriller writer John le Carré – whose books, the Burmese opposition leader revealed, had sustained her during periods of house arrest.
The honorands paraded through the city's streets, which were lined with hundreds of wellwishers, to be greeted by a trumpet fanfare at the Sheldonian Theatre for the ceremony, which was conducted almost entirely in Latin.
Aung San Suu Kyi's "oration" was read in Latin by the Public Orator, Professor Richard Jenkyns, translated into English in the printed order of ceremony.
The university declared, he said, that "your silence has sounded louder than the jabber of politics and the clang of military power; out of deep darkness your little lamp has shone across the planet; your stillness has moved the world.
"Sitting in this theatre, we are conscious that we are also spectators of a drama played in the theatre of the nations, one whose ending is as yet unsure."
Of necessity, her return was a public event, he said, but no one in Oxford would forget she was also "coming back to a city full of memories".
"Here you studied and formed friendships, here you knew the delights of youth, here as a wife and mother you lived a quiet domestic life, until your love of country and passion for the cause of freedom summoned you back; but you were forced to leave behind a beloved husband and children, so that your return to your native land was made into a kind of exile. For many years you bore the burden of isolation, displaying patience and endurance to a degree not easily imagined.
"We hail you with joy as you appear in Oxford once more; as for yourself, we do not know what mixture of emotions you fell, and it would be impertinent to intrude on them."
On Thursday, she will address both houses of parliament at Westminster Hall.
