The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma

by Thant Myint-U

  There were also some early attempts to address Burmese sensitivities, to win hearts and minds, but these were often inadequate or wrongly conceived. Within days of Thibaw’s departure, his white elephant, symbol of the country’s sovereignty, appropriately gave up the ghost. Though a proper cremation with court Brahmins was permitted, the dead animal was then unceremoniously dragged, in full view of a shocked public, out of the palace gates. For the Burmese the elephant had been something extraordinary, bordering on the divine, and was treated with extreme respect and care. Dragging the king’s own corpse along the street would probably not have provoked any greater ill feeling.

  By Christmas initial luck and good cheer had turned to worry bordering on panic. Within the defunct Court of Ava the British faced growing resentment and outright hostility, while in the countryside roving bands of armed men more directly challenged the new order. Thibaw’s army had scurried away, many carrying their swords and rifles. Parts of the valley had long been plagued by gangs of bandits, and these now seemed to find common cause with the ex-soldiers returning to their home villages and hamlets. British patrols were ambushed and attacked by a largely invisible army with no apparent leadership. Again, as in Iraq much later, the questions were asked: Were they remnants of the old regime? Extremists of some sort? Or criminals taking advantage of the change in government? No one had any idea.

  There were a few officials of the old government willing to help the British, but only in the most cursory manner. Many gathered their belongings and left Mandalay altogether. Harry Prendergast’s political officers had hoped to work with Thibaw’s most senior minister, the Kinwun. But he had chosen, perhaps in part out of a guilty conscience, to accompany the former king part of the way to his exile in India. The next most senior minister was the lord of Taingdar. He was known as a committed Anglophobe, and the British eventually found reason to arrest him and pack him off to India as well. For a few weeks the royal officers who were left were reorganized and placed under the overall supervision of a British civilian, Sir Charles Bernard. But the orders they sent up and down the Irrawaddy to the king’s governors and garrison commanders seemed to have little effect as a full-fledged insurgency began to take shape.

  Left to deal with the growing mess was the not particularly imaginative Irishman Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, the earl of Dufferin and baron of Clandeboye, the owner of large estates in the north of County Down and more recently the viceroy of India. Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Dufferin had a long and distinguished record of imperial and diplomatic service. He was governor-general of Canada and ambassador, first to Russia and then to the Ottoman Empire. He was a Whig but also an aristocrat and landowner.15 After his predecessor Lord Ripon’s exciting and controversial tenure, the queen told Dufferin not to be too independent in his thinking, and Dufferin was happy to comply.

  And Dufferin, despite any misgivings he may have had (and despite the more articulate misgivings of his senior officials), had acquiesced to Churchill’s strong lead and not stood in the way of a war with Burma. But now that Churchill had moved on to bigger things, it was Lord Dufferin who was left responsible for determining Burma’s postwar future.

  No more the Royal Umbrella.

  No more the Royal Palace,

  And the Royal City, no more

  This is indeed an Age of Nothingness

  It would be better if we were dead

  —The abbot of Zibani Monastery16

  For the people of Mandalay the days and weeks after the king’s departure would remain etched in their minds forever. Fifty years later, on the eve of the Second World War, the nationalist leader Thakin Kodaw Hmaing remembered how as a child he had witnessed the British soldiers escorting Thibaw and his family through the dusty streets of the city. For the ten thousand Buddhist monks who lived in and around the capital, occupation by a non-Buddhist power was almost impossible to comprehend. Mandalay was the center of religious life in Burma, and the king acted as patron to dozens of monasteries and monastic colleges around the city and in nearby towns. All of a sudden their patron was gone, and an entire system of higher education and religious training collapsed almost overnight.

  For the officials of the Court of Ava, their hopes of a light occupation and the installation of a new prince were quickly fading. When it became clear that the British had no intention of leaving and were instead inclined to abolish the monarchy altogether, many of Thibaw’s senior officials, led by the Kinwun, banded together and made a formal request to the viceroy: establish a constitutional monarchy or relieve us entirely of our remaining responsibilities. They wanted full authority, under the guidance of a British political officer and with a figurehead prince. This, they said, could work, and order could be quickly reestablished. But they couldn’t be expected to function as things were, with no say over the administration of the capital and only limited authority in the countryside. They were neither here nor there. They wanted a decision.

  Outside Mandalay the nobility and the gentry class, which had governed the countryside for centuries, responded in different ways. Some chose submission. They included senior military officers, like the colonel of the Yandana Theinga cavalry, a man of much influence in the north, who sided with the conquerors and was appointed in charge of his township.

  Others, like the lord of Yamethin, were less willing to give in. He had been an officer in the household guards and had been posted as a garrison commander in the Shan uplands. He now led his Kindah regiment down from the hills and into the forests around Yamethin to harass British positions. His distant relative the sawbwa, or prince, of Wuntho in the far north also decided to resist, gathering around him the chiefs of Katha and Kyatpyin for the coming fight. Just to the south of Mandalay, the chief of Mekkaya, head of one of the oldest aristocratic lineages in the country, organized his men against the occupiers, ambushing the young men from Tyneside and South Wales as they ambled through the tall elephant grass and across fields of cotton and paddy. Other rebels included notorious bandits of long standing, like Hla-U in the lower Chindwin Valley and Yan Nyun in the badlands of the middle Irrawaddy. Now wearing a patriotic guise, they enjoyed a new lease on their popularity and made common cause with their erstwhile royalist foes.17

  *

  Lord Dufferin arrived in Burma on 3 February aboard the SS Clive, accompanied by his wife, Lady Harriot Dufferin, various aides and advisers, dozens of personal servants, and a very large numbers of horses, cows, calves, chickens, sheep, and quails. After his retirement he would be created a marquess by a grateful queen (he was now an earl) and was asked to take an Indian place name to include in his title. He thought that to be the marquess of Dufferin and Delhi or Dufferin and Lucknow would excite Indian sensibilities and was best avoided. He thought about Quebec instead, having served in Canada as governor-general, but Victoria disapproved. After first dismissing most Burmese names as sounding like “something out of the Mikado,” he settled on the name of the court he had just vanquished, Ava. Now he was to visit the Court of Ava for the first time.18

  At Mandalay, in the sticky afternoon heat, the viceroy sat on Thibaw’s throne, dressed in a scarlet tunic and with the white plumed helmet of empire. The now-sobered officials of the old Burmese government remained standing throughout his address, a demonstration of considerable disrespect in a country where kneeling before superiors was customary. The subsequent discussions were not particularly useful for either side. The Kinwun and the others had lost any real hope for the future, and Dufferin saw the Burmese as tiresome and hardly worth engaging any longer.

  He spoke to the British military officers and heard in disappointing detail of the growing insurgency and how the ex-royal agencies were unwilling or unable to be of much use. Dufferin later wrote that “a puppet king of the Burmese type would prove a very expensive, troublesome and contumacious fiction.” British troops were going to have to pacify the country in a violent campaign in any case. If the old hierarchies could not help now, they
were not worth saving for the future. Lady Dufferin had an apparently successful afternoon with the women of the palace, but for Lord Dufferin any second thoughts he might have on outright annexation pure and simple were now gone. The monarchy would be abolished. And the Court of Ava would become history.

  This is the ballad of Boh Da Thone,

  Erst a Pretender to Theebaw’s throne …

  And the Peacock Banner his henchmen bore

  Was stiff with bullion, but stiffer with gore.

  He shot at the strong and he slashed at the weak

  From the Salween scrub to the Chindwin teak:

  He crucified noble, he sacrificed mean,

  He filled old ladies with kerosene:

  While over the water the papers cried,

  “The patriot fights for his countryside!”

  —Rudyard Kipling, Barrack-Room Ballads

  There would now be no turning back, only a big push to do whatever it took to gain control over the Burmese countryside. Sir Charles Haukes Todd Crosthwaite, a fifty-something Irish civil servant from Donnybrook, was appointed chief commissioner of all Burma, and he was determined to crush all opposition and introduce into the old royal domains an all-new administrative machine. By the end of 1886 a total of forty thousand British and Indian troops had poured into the country, three times more than was necessary for the actual invasion and more than had been deployed in either the Crimean War or in the occupation of Egypt just a few years before. The British knew they were fighting a popular guerrilla uprising and were determined to use all means to bring it to an end.19

  The commanders on the ground also realized that no concentration of troops, on its own, would change things, certainly not overnight. Instead the function of the troops was, in the words of one brigadier general, “to produce an effect upon the imagination and moral sense of the people, to make them feel that the inevitable had overtaken them.” In other words, to make clear to the Burmese that they had no choice but to accept defeat and occupation. This was no easy task. The same officer lamented that “the in-born conceit, light-heartedness, and impulsiveness of the Burmese rendered them impervious to salutary impressions of that kind” and that “neither their religion nor their temperament permit them to suspect their inferiority.”

  The insurgency reached a fever pitch in the searing heat of April and May 1886. During the evening of 15 April (the first day of the Burmese new year), twenty or so armed men loyal to the teenage prince of Myinzaing, a renegade half brother of Thibaw’s, scaled the walls of the palace, managing to set fire to several buildings and killing two Scottish physicians before being killed themselves. The next day every single British military post up and down the Irrawaddy Valley was attacked by rebel armies, sometimes in excess of two thousand men. If there had been any doubt before, it was clear now that opposition to the new colonial regime was being organized on a national scale.

  But any opposition, however well organized, would have been hard pressed to stand up against what was to come. It started with a huge military deployment throughout the Irrawaddy Valley and continued with the large-scale and forced relocation of people. Crosthwaite was determined to cut off the rebels from the bases of support. Colonial magistrates were granted wide-ranging powers to move suspected rebel sympathizers, and dozens of villages were simply burned to the ground. Summary executions, sometimes by the half dozen or more, became routine, as did the public flogging of captured guerrillas. In at least one case a suspected resistance leader was tortured in public. And the occasional beheadings of prisoners were put to a stop only through the personal intervention of Lord Dufferin himself.

  There was brutality on both sides, as embattled Burmese guerrilla fighters used any tactic they could to keep their hold over the villages, and as the British counterinsurgency campaign was more than willing to match terror with terror. A widespread famine, caused in large part by the war, then hit much of the country in late 1886. Starved, worn down, and eager for relief, more and more people resigned themselves to life under the occupation.20

  *

  In parts of the upper Irrawaddy Valley, pockets of resistance would carry on for years. One of the longest holdouts was the guerrilla leader Bo Cho, a onetime provincial clerk who managed to evade British capture until 1896. This was in the badlands around the extinct volcano at Popa, and local legends credit him with killing over eighty of the enemy in the early years of the occupation. When he was finally caught, he was taken back to his home village, where all his friends and family were summoned by the British officer in charge to come and witness his execution. As he walked to the gallows, he told his nephew, “[W]e Burmese are finished and it would be better to be dead than be their slaves.” And with that he and his two sons were hanged, one of hundreds of hangings ushering in Burma’s modern age.

  For the old aristocracy their world had come crashing down much faster. Intensely conservative, they had been trained to look to the past for examples and to see their lives and their vocations as part of a seamless heritage going back to the very introduction of Buddhism and monarchy well over a thousand years before. Their noble status had rested in part on their residence within the walled city. But by the end of 1886 the city had been turned into a military cantonment, renamed Fort Dufferin, and the hundreds of teak houses, meticulously set according to rank and lineage, were demolished to make way for parade grounds and a new prison. Their status had also rested on the genealogical records stored in the palace archives, but these and almost all the other papers of the Court of Ava had gone up in flames as drunken British soldiers set fire to the king’s library soon after Thibaw’s surrender. It was not until Lord Curzon visited as viceroy in 1901 that the wanton destruction of the old buildings was ended and what was left of the Mandalay palace was preserved.

  A generation of young aristocrats were among those killed in the fighting of the late 1880s. Many others retired to the smaller towns and villages around the onetime capital. Into the 1920s there were still weddings and more often funerals at which the old members of Thibaw’s court would gather. The Kinwun died in 1908 a broken man. Some survived much longer, and it was not until the summer of 1963, the same week that the Beatles went on their first tour, that the prince of Pyinmana, Thibaw’s half brother and the boy Lord Dufferin had considered as a possible king, died at the age of ninety-three. By then a very new Burma had been born.

  Notes – 1: THE FALL OF THE KINGDOM

  1. Henry Yule, A Narrative of the Mission to the Court of Ava in 1855 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1968), 139.

  2. A. T. Q. Stewart, The Pagoda War: Lord Dufferin and the Fall of the Kingdom of Ava, 1885–6 (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 76–79.

  3. H. Maxim, My Life (London: Methuen & Co., 1915).

  4. Archibald Colquhoun, English Policy in the Far East: Being The Times Special Correspondence (London: Field & Tuer, The Leadenhall Press, 1885), and Burma and the Burmans: Or, “The Best Unopened Market in the World” (London: Field & Tuer, The Leadenhall Press, 1885).

  5. On Churchill and Burma, see Htin Aung, Lord Randolph Churchill and the Dancing Peacock: British Conquest of Burma 1885 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1990).

  6. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York: Verso, 2001).

  7. For a fictionalized version of the story, drawn in part from interviews in the early twentieth century, see F. Tennyson Jesse, The Lacquer Lady (London: W. Heinemann, 1929). See also Htin Aung, Lord Randolph Churchill, chapter 12.

  8. Htin Aung, Lord Randolph Churchill, 171–72.

  9. On the war, I have drawn largely on Stewart, The Pagoda War; see also Tin, The Royal Administration of Burma, trans. L. E. Bagshawe (Bangkok: Ava Publishing House, 2001), 276; Tin, Konbaungzet Maha Yazawindaw-gyi (repr., Rangoon, 1968), 707–27; as well as my own The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  10. Maung Maung Tin, Kinwun Mingyi Thamaing (Rangoon: Burma Research Society Text Series No. 38
, n.d. [1930s?]), 123–39; I am grateful to L. E. Bagshawe for bringing this to my attention and providing me a copy.

  11. Stewart, The Pagoda War, 94–95.

  12. Ibid., 96.

  13. Ibid., 97.

  14. Secretary for Upper Burma to the Chief Commissioner to the Secretary to Government of India, Home Department, 19 October 1886, quoted in History of the Third Burmese War (1885, 1886, 1887), Period One (Calcutta, 1887).

  15. Stewart, The Pagoda War, 21–22.

  16. Quoted in Ni Ni Myint, Burma’s Struggle Against British Imperialism, 1885–1895 (Rangoon: Universities Press, 1983), 42.

  17. Ibid., 33–68.

  18. Stewart, The Pagoda War, 132–39.

  19. Charles Crosthwaite, The Pacification of Burma (London: E. Arnold, 1912).

  20. On the impact of the resistance and pacification on Burmese society, see Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma, chapter 8.

  * “The Court of Ava” was how the government of Burma had long been referred to, a reference to its old capital of Ava, near Mandalay.

  * Kinwun is the best remembered of his many titles and styles and refers to a military office he held. He was also known as the lord of Legaing and his personal name was U Kaung; “U” is an honorific in Burmese, roughly equivalent to “Mister” and traditionally denoting a gentleman of some rank.

  TWO

  DEBATING BURMA

  ELAINE: “Peterman ran off to Burma.”

  SEINFELD: “Isn’t it Myanmar now?”