Burmese opposition leader returns to the city where she raised a family to receive honorary doctorate from her alma mater 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

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