body reached Rangoon's Mingaladon Airport on 1 December 1974. Neither an honour guard nor any official government representatives were present to receive the casket. It was driven to the Kyaikkasan racetrack grounds past "increasing numbers of people" who had "lined the road 'in silent reverence and, one felt, abject humiliation'". There, it lay in state until 5 December. According to Thant Myint-U, U Thant's grandson who was eight years old at the time, a large number of members of the public came to pay their respects. Others put the figure in the thousands or in the tens of thousands. Controversy over Ne Win's role The way that the body had been received by the government had led to significant unhappiness among the Burmese public and was a major cause of the events that followed. A commonly cited reason that Ne Win's government refused to provide a state funeral to U Thant is that he held a grudge against for being a close ally of U Nu. Some historians specifically point towards an incident in 1969 in which U Nu denounced the Ne Win regime at the United Nations in front of the press as further evidence for this. Thant Myint-U stated that the press conference was arranged entirely by U Nu and without permission from U Thant who was on a mission in Africa at the time. It was the first time that a call for the overthrow of a UN member state government had been made inside the UN. U Thant was aghast and told U Nu that his action was inappropriate. Ne Win was furious and convinced that U Thant had been plotting with U Nu. The general told his men to consider U Thant an "enemy of the state." U Thant flew to Rangoon to explain but Ne Win refused to see him. The rancor was such that U Thant, still officially the country's top diplomat, had difficulty renewing his passport. Thant Myint-U reports that Ne Win even sacked his deputy education minister for suggesting to the cabinet that the day of the funeral be made a holiday. Robert Taylor, however, posits that Ne Win's ire at U Thant had lessened over time, and that he had no role in the funeral arrangements. First coffin snatch The government had planned to bury U Thant in the Kyandaw Cemetery on 5 December. The relative insignificance of the burial