The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma

by Thant Myint-U

  Having forced the Irrawaddy Delta for a second time to submission, Bayinnaung then headed north in a vast armada. His teak warships were crafted into the shapes of animals—horses, crocodiles, and elephants— and the king himself rode in a gilded barge shaped like a Brahminy duck, the symbol of the vanquished Pegu monarchy. The north of Burma was unprepared for the violence to come. Ava quickly gave way. And over the next four years Bayinnaung fought and defeated one by one the highland principalities, stretching from Manipur in the west (in what is now India), across to Chiangmai (in what is now Thailand) and the Lao states of the middle Mekong River.

  This was a never-ending war. Month after month, year after year, Bayinnaung and his men did what they loved best, returning prisoners and loot to their new home at Pegu, the tattooed and turbaned Burmese chiefs on their ponies and elephants fighting shoulder to shoulder with their Iberian harquebusiers and musketeers, in their conquistador-style helmets. They were vicious, though perhaps no more than was the norm in those times. Against the resilient principality of Mogaung, Bayinnaung campaigned several times from 1562 to 1576. When the prince of Mogaung, heir to a long lineage, was finally defeated, he was placed for a week in chains at the gates of Pegu before being sold, together with his chiefs, in the slave markets of eastern Bengal.

  Bayinnaung’s was a winning team. And after a while the tide turned, and resistance ended. Tribute poured in. No one wanted to fight Bayinnaung anymore. The king of Chiangmai, one of the most formidable of the upland states, sent elephants, horses, and silks. He also sent the lacquerware for which his city was famous, and to this day the Burmese word for lacquer, yun, is the same as the word for the people of Chiangmai.

  But this man of such relentless drive and ambition would not be satisfied with just the Irrawaddy Valley and the surrounding hills. He looked east and saw the richest and most cultured city in the region, Ayutthaya, the capital of Siam. Bayinnaung first demanded the tribute of a white elephant, and when this was denied, he prepared his invasion. The outcome was never in real doubt, as the aggressor army tramped across the plains of the Chao Phraya Valley, then laid siege to the capital itself.

  The Siamese surrendered to prevent complete destruction, and the Burmese took not one but four white elephants, together with the king of Siam himself and several princes as hostages. A princess was presented to Bayinnaung as a new concubine. The entire Tenasserim coastline was permanently annexed, and a garrison of three thousand was left to ensure good behavior. Thousands of ordinary people were deported together with court entertainers, dancers, actors, and actresses. The king returned to Pegu in triumph, caparisoned elephants before him. He would soon make his capital a spectacle to rival Pagan, with golden palaces and gilded gates, each named for one of twenty subordinate kingdoms, a multiethnic city with peoples from across the country and beyond. He had established the most far-flung Burmese empire ever.

  *

  For the Burmese today the chronicles of Bayinnaung’s victories read like tales of Roman conquest to schoolboys in the West. Except that the Burmese army still sees itself, in a way, as fighting the same enemies and in the same places, subjugating the Shan hills or crushing Mon resistance in the south, their soldiers slugging their way through the same thick jungle, preparing to torch a town or press-gang villagers. The past closer, more comparable, a way to justify present action. His statues are there because the ordeal of welding a nation together by force is not just history. It’s as if the Italian Army were today guarding Hadrian’s Wall, defending Syria against the Persians, and quelling German resistance the brutality seemingly inevitable.

  Bayinnaung died in 1581 at age sixty-six, leaving behind nearly one hundred children. He had dominated a region that encompassed nearly all of today’s Burma, Thailand, and Laos. His life, according to one historian, was “the greatest explosion of human energy ever seen in Burma.” And he died planning an expedition to the west, to the one neighboring kingdom that never accepted his sovereignty, the kingdom of Arakan.

  THE CITY OF THE MONKEY-DGG

  Arakan is today a state within Burma, largely cut off from the rest of the country, the only land route being a couple of treacherous and barely paved mountain roads. Decrepit buses make the twenty-hour journey from Prome on the Irrawaddy River through thick jungle to Sandoway at Arakan’s southern end. Akyab, the state capital, is sleepy and rundown, even by contemporary Burmese standards, with electricity only a few hours a day (and sometimes not at all) and no real outward signs of any kind of progress or vitality. With its ramshackle restaurants and open-air markets, it has the look of a large village, and the few Western tourists seem like the first outside visitors ever to a remote and isolated corner of a remote and isolated country.

  But even the most casual observer would probably realize that this conclusion—that Arakan has always been removed from the world— was a wrong one, as Arakan is set right on the Bay of Bengal, with the bright blue waters of the Indian Ocean pressing gently up its picture-perfect beaches. For centuries it prospered on international trade and readily took in people and ideas from across the Asian continent and beyond, a flourishing civilization with the most cosmopolitan court in modern Burmese history. Arakan’s isolation is a very new thing. And its lost cosmopolitanism is a part of Burma’s present-day poverty.

  Arakan is essentially a long and narrow slice of coastline, shut off from the Irrawaddy Valley by a long chain of mountains, some with peaks three thousand feet high, about eight hundred miles from north to south and about sixty miles from the hills to the sea. It’s a luxuriant, wet landscape, everywhere clumps of mango, guava, and citrus trees, and several rivers winding across the rich alluvial plains. In the short dry season, thirsty elephants come down from the jungles to enjoy the salty waters of the mangrove swamps. The long summers are drenched in endless rain.

  In ancient times, Arakan was very much an extension of northern India.11 The Chandra dynasty that ruled over the principalities of Vesali and Dhanyawaddy claimed descent from the Hindu god Shiva while also patronizing the Mahayana schools of Tibet and Bengal. But in medieval times there was a reorientation eastward; the area fell under Pagan’s dominance, and the Arakanese people began to speak a dialect of Burmese, something that continues to this day. With Burmese influence came ties to Ceylon and the gradual prominence of Theravada Buddhism.

  As Pagan’s authority waned, Arakan quickly emerged from the shadows and became independent once again, engaging in the petty wars of the time. When in 1404 the kingdom of Ava invaded Arakan, the then king, Naramithla, fled west to the Bengali royal city of Gaur. He lived there for many years, absorbing the polished world of eastern Islam, before going home and retaking his throne. It was to be a fateful exile.

  Here the history of Arakan intersects with the history of India and especially with Bengal. Two hundred years before, the first Islamic armies—bands of Turkish and Afghan cavalry—had galloped their way across the rich Ganges plain. They were led by Muhammad Bakhtiyar, and they were merciless as they overran the towns and Buddhist universities of Bihar and sacked the holy city of Benares. When they reached Nudiya in Bengal, they disguised themselves as horse traders and sneaked their way inside the city walls. Once safely in, they cut down the unsuspecting garrison and then fought their way to the king himself, who was about to sit down to dinner. The king took flight, managing to escape through a back door but then disappearing forever into the jungles of the eastern delta. This was the beginning of Islamic Turkish-Afghan rule in Bengal, and it continued for over five hundred years.

  Naramithla, the fateful Arakanese king, had thus fled to Bengal when the Turkish-Afghan sultanate in Bengal was already two centuries old. In 1430, after nearly three decades in exile, he returned at the head of a formidable force, largely made up of Afghan adventurers, who swiftly overcame local opposition. This was the start of a new golden age for this country—a period of power and prosperity—and the creation of a remarkably hybrid Buddhist-Islamic court, fusing traditions from Persia
and India as well as the Buddhist worlds to the east. He abandoned his old capital and established a new one, which he called Mrauk-U, or the Monkey-Egg (no one knows why). His astrologers had warned him that although all the omens for Mrauk-U were good, he himself would die if he moved there. But he was willing to tempt fate. The capital was moved with lavish ceremony in 1433. The king died the following year.

  Mrauk-U grew to be an international center of over 160,000 people. Its inhabitants were a mix of Arakanese, Bengalis, Afghans, Burmese, Dutch, Portuguese, Abyssinians, Persians, even Japanese Christians from Nagasaki escaping the persecution of the dictator Hideyoshi Toyotomi. Some of these Japanese Christians were ronin, masterless samurai, and they formed a special bodyguard to the Arakanese king. This cosmopolitan court became great patrons of Bengali as well as Arakanese literature. Courtiers like Daulat Qazi, author of the first Bengali romance, composed distinguished and original works in verse, while others like Alaol, considered the greatest of seventeenth-century Bengali poets, also translated works from Persian and Hindi. Several of the kings took Islamic as well as Pali titles, patronizing Buddhist monasteries and erecting Buddhist pagodas while also appearing in Persian-inspired dress and the conical hats of Isfahan and Mughal Delhi, and minting coins with the kalima, Islamic declaration of faith.

  The city was set inland, and a massive defense system of earthen ramparts, moats, and citadels supplemented the ring of hills and rivers nearby. The Portuguese Jesuit Father A. Farinha, S.J., called the city, with its numerous intersecting rivers, “a second Venice,”12 and other writers of the time compared Mrauk-U with Amsterdam and London. The ruins of this city, abandoned when the British annexed Arakan in 1826, are still there, the smoke of village fires rising from where there once stood the genteel homes of soldiers, scholars, and merchants from across Eurasia.

  *

  For a hundred years or so Arakan existed in a sort of tributary relationship with the much more powerful Bengal sultanate next door. But then the Bengal sultanate landed on hard times, and the Arakanese began to spread their wings. They built up a strong navy with hundreds of ships. They occupied the island of Ramu and in 1578 took the big port city of Chittagong, today in Bangladesh. Teaming up with newly arrived Portuguese pirates and mercenaries, they soon captured most of eastern Bengal. The Arakanese then also pushed eastward, temporarily holding Pegu and deporting from there three thousand people, including members of the royal family.13 Arakan was soon at the height of its powers, and for a brief moment its dominion extended across more than a thousand miles of prime beachfront property from Dacca to Martaban.

  Scientists today say that human sexual attraction may be based, at least in part, on the influence of pheromones, a personal cocktail of chemicals that signals suitability (or not) to a potential mate. This was apparently old knowledge to the kings of Arakan. According to the Portuguese merchant and travel writer Duarte Barbosa, who visited in 1610, twelve of the most attractive young women from every part of the realm were sent to the palace on a regular basis, not in the first instance to meet the king but to stand, fully dressed in the heat, on a “terrace in the sun.” They would then take off their clothes, and the “damp cloth” they had been wearing (with their names scribbled on them) would be sent for His Majesty to sniff. Only those who passed this scent test would be invited into the royal apartments. The rest would be proffered to lesser lords.14

  Over the years Mrauk-U grew rich from loot and the settling of captives into the fertile river valleys nearby. It also grew rich from trade, including trade in slaves. The slave trade was an important part of business in the Bay of Bengal. And this was the seventeenth century, when not only were tens of thousands of Africans from Gambia, Angola, and elsewhere being trafficked to the plantations of the West Indies and Virginia, but Barbary pirates were raiding the coasts of Western Europe, Ireland, and even Iceland (in 1627) in search of captives for the king of Morocco and the markets of Constantinople. Portuguese and other freebooters were happy to help fill the slave markets and, together with the Arakanese king’s men, ravaged the coasts of Bengal, capturing tens of thousands of people a year. Places once thickly peopled became deserted, “the desolate lair of tigers and other wild beasts.”15 But for Mrauk-U this only meant more riches and an ever more splendid city.

  The Dutch were also eager to gain a piece of the action.16 By the early 1600s Portuguese energy was dissipating, and in its place new Europeans were working hard to make their presence felt. The Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company, was founded in 1602, when the Netherlands States-General granted it exclusive rights to carry out commerce in the East. A regional headquarters was set up at Batavia (now Jakarta), and other outposts were soon scattered across Asia, in Japan, Persia, Bengal, Ceylon, Siam, and China as well as in Burma and the Spice Islands. The Dutch began to dominate the immensely lucrative trade back to Europe in nutmeg and mace. By the middle 1600s, the Dutch East India Company, or VOC, had become the single richest company the world had ever seen, with 150 merchant chant ships, 40 warships, 50,000 employees, a sizable private army, and a handsome dividend to its shareholders of no less than 40 percent a year. In Arakan the Dutch interest was primarily in slaves, and schemes were drawn up to transport tens of thousands of Arakanese-captured slaves to populate new Dutch colonies in the East Indies.17 But too many died, of disease and abuse, before ever reaching the shores of Java.

  There was also a Dutch trade with Pegu and other Burmese ports, and the new commerce brought new luxuries and new trends. In the early 1700s well-to-do Burmese had even acquired an exotic taste for North American beaver hats, all the way from the St. Lawrence Valley, which fetched extravagant prices, and one imagines the fashionably correct at Pegu and Ava, and perhaps Mrauk-U as well, setting off their multicolored silks with the black broad-brimmed hats of a Rembrandt or a Vermeer.18

  FROM THE RIO TEJO

  Around the time of the first Elizabethan settlements in Virginia, Filipe de Brito e Nicote escaped poverty in Lisbon and sought to make himself a Burmese king. He had come east as a teenage cabin boy on the lofty three-masted sailing ships of the day, working his way down the coast of Angola, around the Cape of Good Hope, to Goa and finally to the calm waters of the Bay of Bengal. By the time he reached Arakan, many years later, he was already an experienced fighter, and he was recruited as a musketeer in the local army. Before long he was an officer and led royal Arakanese troops in battle. The Portuguese were well experienced at making money from Goa and Malacca. But now some sought even greater power. Ceylon had just been taken over, and this whetted the appetite of many men like de Brito for the treasures that would come with actual dominion over an Asian land. In 1599, Portuguese and Spanish mercenaries nearly succeeded in taking over Cambodia. It was now de Brito’s turn to see how well he could play his hand.19

  His business plan was a simple one: The Estado da India did not possess a single customshouse or fortress on the long eastern coast of the Bay of Bengal, with the sole and important exception of Malacca. A port in southern Burma was well placed to be Malacca’s northern counterpart, and from a Burma-based fleet, the Portuguese would be able to control all the trade from Bengal to Malaya as well as the inland trade of Burma itself. Bayinnaung was dead, and his heirs, though princes of considerable strength, could be handled. Much of the country had fallen apart yet again, with Bayinnaung’s successors, now based at Ava, only holding part of the Irrawaddy Valley.

  This was also when Arakan was in full flight and in temporary possession of nearly the entire Burmese coastline. De Brito’s nominal master, the king of Arakan, had granted him the port of Syriam, very close to modern Rangoon. De Brito quickly went to work, building up the settlement as best he could, encouraging men from all around the region to settle there under his protection. He had with him his lieutenant, Salvador Ribeyro. They constructed a wall and a moat and recruited an impressive militia around a steel core of hardened Iberian fighters. They included many men of mixed European and Asia
n descent as well as Burmese, Africans, and Malabaris from South India. The Burmese called him Nga Zinga, meaning, in the patois of the Indian Ocean, “The Good Man.”

  His next step was to circumvent the Arakanese entirely and appeal directly to the viceroy at Goa, Dom Aires de Saldanha, for money and men, and the viceroy, seeing a good proposition, gave de Brito what he wanted. With resources pouring in, Syriam became a power in its own right, though in theory it was still under the sovereignty of Arakan. Most of de Brito’s riches came from forcing ships to use only his Syriam as a port and from looting and pillaging the towns of the Burmese interior. He even pillaged pagodas, melting down the bronze bells of many Buddhist establishments to make cannons for his army.

  De Brito also sought alliances and married his son, Simon, to one of the daughters of the prince of Martaban. He took as his own wife Doña Luisa de Saldaña, a niece of the viceroy himself, born to a Javanese mother, “neither tall nor slender” but “with that dash of beauty which is so dangerous in women.”20 It was now the early years of the seventeenth century. Portuguese power in the East was waning, but things seemed to be going very well for the onetime cabin boy from Lisbon. De Brito lived extravagantly and took on the airs of an Oriental monarch.

  In addition to his Portuguese captains, de Brito had as his good friend a Burmese nobleman named Natshinnaung, remembered as a champion polo player and an accomplished poet and scholar. In 1593 this nobleman had been present at a battle in which the Burmese crown prince was killed on elephant back by the crown prince of Siam. He was fifteen at the time and was handed the task of riding to Pegu and informing the widow of the dead prince of her husband’s fate. She was Raza Datu Kalayani, many years older and a famous beauty. He fell in love with her, and she eventually fell in love with him. From that day on, Natshinnaung dreamed of becoming king and making Kalayani his queen.21 In Filipe de Brito he found a kindred spirit.