The Amazing Story of Prisoner 00235 and His Escape from Burma continued ...

So, imprisoned for nothing, Htein Lin continues to be the artist he is. Word gets around. Another prisoner working in the office manages to get him some enamel paint. When that was gone, Lin used the color dyes used for staining the doormats made in the prison, or color powder left over from a Hindu festival.

Lacking tools, he would often just use his bare hands to apply any medium, though he also found toothpaste and medicine bottle lids, toothbrushes, and cigarette lighters helpful.He realized the long white cotton prison outfits would be useful, and he would buy them from prisoners being released for 10 cigarettes. His family brought him a tarpaulin to sleep on, and he used that to paint on, gradually tearing off strip after strip.

What survives of what he created from all this is amazing. Some paintings provide a striking account of life inside the prison: prisoners shackled, lining up for food, waiting on death row. Some are of mega-themes like the eclipse and the millenium.

Lin hid his paintings in his bedroll until he could smuggle them out with friends or family, often bribing the guards. Not everything survives, because, for example, one warder took the money, opened the paintings, assumed they were elaborate escape maps, and burnt them all.

Not to mention that, after a government purge led to a review of thousands of cases, when he finally got out of prison in November 2004 (for his escape is not from prison, but from danger later), his wife (whom he later divorced) turned out to have sold all the paintings he had done on paper to a scrap paper merchant for recycling!

Still, the work done on the prison uniforms survives, and was to be Lin's key to freedom. But how is still an amazing story ... check in tomorrow.

The Amazing Story of Prisoner 00235 and His Escape From Burma

There is so much horror in the world: Darfur, Iraq, decapitations on video in Germany, the anniversary of 9/11, drug deaths, so much, so much. Maybe that's why I'm also glad occasionally to hear of the flowering of life somewhere, too.

Though I grant you, this one is amazing. I mean, have you ever been reading some novel or other and you hit one fantastic plot twist too many? I've even thrown the book across the room, muttering, or shouting, "Oh, come ooooonnnnn!!"

To be more accurate, I used to do that. Until I'd lived long enough to see that, no matter how amazing the plot turns the novellists come up with, they can't approach real life for weird wonderfulness.

Take the true story of Prisoner 00235 in Burma. Locked up for 6 and a half years in a Burmese military prison.

His crime? None. Just the fact that his name showed up on a list other people thought they might contact.

Born in 1966 in a small village in the north of Burma, Lin knew he wanted to be an artist. But there were no art schools to attend, so he went to University in Rangoon to study law. In the "democracy spring" 0f 1988, in which Aung San Su Kyi emerged as leader, Lin, like many other students, was expelled.

But the internal squabbling in the pro-democracy movement convinced Lin he wanted nothing further to do with politics. He dedicated himself to his art from that point on with his first exhibition in Rangoon in 1996.

Unknown to Lin, in 1998 a letter between two former student colleagues was intercepted, in which they had a list of people to check in with to see if they wanted to be involved.

Simply because his name was on that list, Lin was arrested and, sentenced to seven years, spent the next seven months on death row.

He was still an artist. Many families brought food to their loved ones, and Lin would beg for the plastic bags and the paper labels when they were done eating, and began tracing designs with his fingernails. It was the start of his amazing escape. More tomorrow ...