The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma

by Thant Myint-U

  For Thibaw, the lord of Yaw wrote a collection of essays, including his now-famous Rajadhammasangaha, or “Treatise on Righteous Government.” Deriving his ideas from classical Burmese and Pali sources, the minister argued for limits to royal authority and for the king to rule, through his cabinet, in the interest of all his subjects. It was an essay on constitutional monarchy and Yaw emerged as perhaps the most radical of the government’s thinkers. The treatise was also to be the very last of this scholar-administrator’s nearly two dozen books; he would not long survive the events to come.

  LOVE, MARRIAGE, AND THE PRINCE OF YANAUNG

  All the while, as the reformers energetically pressed ahead in the outer pavilions, within the dark and thickly carpeted inner apartments of the palace, very different patterns of influence and power were taking shape. Thibaw was after all a coalition candidate, of the Kinwun and his scholar-officials, on the one side, and the Middle Palace queen, her daughter, and their cohorts, on the other. In the final weeks of 1878 and in early 1879 both the Household Division and the royal suite were purged, and many high-level posts were handed out to childhood playmates and hangers-on of Thibaw. The most important of these was Maung Toke, the lord of Yanaung, who was an old companion of Thibaw’s from school. He now saw his quiet and malleable friend’s rise to the throne as a heaven-sent opportunity for personal aggrandizement.23

  Yanaung came from an old military family, and his father was still a senior army officer. Yanaung himself was appointed colonel of the Tavoy Guards; more scandalously, he talked Thibaw into raising him to the status of prince, or mintha, even though he was not of royal blood. He would soon make his newfound influence known, using the king’s name and extending his tentacles all around the stuffy little halls of the inner palace. He had read his history books, and his favorite hero was the sixteenth-century king Bayinnaung, also a man of nonroyal blood, who first became the king’s chief lieutenant and then took the throne himself. Quite the ladies’ man, Yanaung enjoyed only one modernization. He had many wives and more concubines and was said to have installed an electric buzzer system through which he could call one to his bed without the knowledge of the others. The sound of the buzzer would be heard, but only the chosen wife or concubine would know exactly who had been summoned. Yanaung liked to believe this lessened jealousies.

  Yanaung found a useful ally in the lord of Taingdar, a man later reviled in the British press. An army man and from a family that had long held office in the Arakanese occupation, he was forceful and quick-witted and was determined not to lose power to the group around the Kinwun. Ironically (or perhaps to cover his bases), he had married his daughter to one of the leading Sorbonne-educated reformers.

  The first clash between the two sides came early on. A decade before, the Siamese king Mongkut had died and been succeeded by his eldest son, Chulalongkorn. The new king, destined to revolutionize Siamese government and society, was then only fifteen years old, and the chief minister acted as regent for several years. Like Thibaw, Chulalongkorn had a partly Western education, from Dr. Marks in Thibaw’s case and in Chulalongkorn’s from different European tutors, including most famously Anna Leonowens, of The King and I fame. The regent, seeing his opportunity to push through wide-ranging changes, had Chulalongkorn travel abroad for some time, to have him out of the way but also to open his eyes so he would see for himself how desperate was the need for modernization. The young king went to Singapore, Java, and India and later visited Europe twice.

  The Kinwun may have had this example in mind when he proposed that Thibaw too take a trip around the world. Thibaw was at first enthusiastic, and in early 1879 a detailed plan was presented to the young king to visit London. Arrangements were made, and a list of accompanying courtiers and retainers was drawn up.24

  But Yanaung and Supayalat were no fools and understood that with the king away, they would fall easy prey to the ministers in power. They worked to change Thibaw’s mind, telling him that this all was a ploy to undermine the king’s position and that once in London, he would be abandoned there, “like a dog left on a sandbank,” unable to get home and without anyone to help. Thibaw was scared and agreed to cancel the journey. The ministers were dismayed. Yanaung and Supayalat decided they were on a roll.

  Up until this point dozens of princes and princesses, half brothers and sisters of Thibaw’s, as well as children of the assassinated Kanaung Prince, languished in a fetid prison north of the main palace complex. Only the prince of Nyaunggyan had escaped. Disguised as an ordinary laborer, he had sneaked into the British Residency and then, with British help, traveled on an armed steamship to Rangoon. He was now in Calcutta, waiting for his chance. But the others were in the hands of the new regime. The Kinwun and the reformists were happy to keep them under lock and key, remembering the rebellion of 1866 and how troublesome the royals could be. But Yanaung and Supayalat wanted to go a step further. What if another escaped? Better to be safe than sorry.

  On 13 February several top officials, including a number of ministers, were dismissed and imprisoned under Yanaung’s direction. Among those arrested was the lord of Yaw, the distinguished scholar and master who had written the treatise for Thibaw on constitutional government. Beginning the next day, Valentine’s Day 1879, the executions began. The North and South Tavoy Guards, under Yanaung’s command, herded the royals, many weakened from poor food and some in rags, in batches out of the royal city and to a dusty field about half a mile toward the Irrawaddy. There they were strangled or trampled by elephants (the accounts differ), and all together, over the next several days, no fewer than thirty-one of Mindon’s forty-eight sons and nine of his sixty-two daughters were killed. Others who opposed Supayalat and Yanaung, officials and rivals in the army, also met the same fate. At the end of it all, the so-called fourteen-department government was ended. Yanaung and Supayalat would be free to do and spend as they pleased.

  Only now, months after the death of his father, did Thibaw formally mount the throne. He was consecrated king, with Supayalat by his side, in a ceremony modeled on that of his great-great-grandfather Bodawpaya. The pundits of the court also drew deep into their archives and gathered ideas from even older ceremonies, in particular the consecration of King Thalun in 1629 and King Dasaraja of Arakan in 1123. With this reaffirmation of tradition, the reformist movement was dead.

  *

  The British were shocked and appalled by the goings-on in Mandalay, and the British press in Rangoon, Calcutta, and even London reported gruesome accounts of massacres and demanded what we would today call a humanitarian intervention. Thibaw was depicted as a bloodsoaked ogre, and there was talk of war. Additional troops were placed along the frontier near Prome, and preparations were made to place the escaped prince of Nyaunggyan on the Konbaung throne. If this had happened, Burma would have been turned into a protectorate of British India’s, the Burmese monarchy would have been retained, and the entire history of Burma in the twentieth century would have been different. But it didn’t happen.

  Just a few weeks before, Zulu impis had overwhelmed and annihilated an entire battalion of the South Wales Borderers at the battle of Isandhlwana, a disastrous start to what would be Lord Chelmsford’s four-month South African campaign against King Cetshwayo. The same winter forty thousand British and Indian troops marched into the Afghan kingdom of Sher Ali and occupied much of that country with little problem until September, when the British Resident in Kabul, Sir Louis Cavagnari, and his staff were massacred by a huge mob. A new expeditionary force had to trudge back over the high mountain passes only to be bogged down for months fighting an unwinnable war against resolute Afghan tribesmen. Invading Burma because Thibaw had killed some of his relatives no longer seemed like a good idea.

  *

  Supayalat loved clowns and comedians. Dance troupes and traveling theater groups would perform for her in the Western Court, and the clever and go-getting among them would declare, “[T]here is only room for one drum in the orchestra.”25 This was what she like
d to hear. For unlike every other king in Burmese history (and unlike most princes, noblemen, and chiefs), her husband, Thibaw, had decided to have only one wife. This was a sharp departure from precedence, unthinkable really, not simply because a king was meant to have many wives, but because many, if not all, of these marriages represented a connection with a tributary prince, chief, or high official, whose daughters or sisters were taken into the palace. The king was meant to be at the apex of a broad network of kinsmen, loyal by marriage as well as by blood. But Thibaw had only Supayalat and his mother-in-law.

  No one was happy with the situation, including Yanaung, and he encouraged his old school friend to do the royal thing and take on more wives and concubines. Thibaw equivocated, and Yanaung decided to take matters into his own hands, and introduced the king to Mi Hkin-gyi. She was the daughter of the lord of Kanni (a minister in the government), the niece of the lord of Pagan (a privy councillor), and the granddaughter of the lord of Kampat (a former foreign minister under Mindon). Thibaw would become related to at least one important family. And she was tall and young and beautiful.

  Thibaw fell in love with her, but he was afraid of Supayalat. For a while the young girl was secretly brought into the palace in the short white jacket and silk paso of a page boy and hidden in the king’s servant quarters. Then Supayalat became pregnant and was confined for several weeks in her own apartments, and the relationship became more open. Eventually—after the birth of a daughter—Thibaw summoned the courage to tell Supayalat the truth and about his intention of installing Mi Hkin-gyi as a queen. Supayalat became hysterical with anger. The quarrel between the two even made the overseas gossip columns, the Calcutta Statesman in November 1881 alleging that Supayalat had demanded a divorce and that Thibaw was considering retiring to the quiet of the monastery. In the end Thibaw either did not stand up for Mi Hkin-gyi or tried and failed. Within a few months she was detained and then executed, some say drowned in the Irrawaddy. Thibaw never looked at another woman again.

  Yanaung was next. No one liked his influence over the king, not the Kinwun, who saw him as a reactionary thug, and not Supayalat, not after what had just happened. Around that time heavy teak boxes in which ordinary townspeople could deposit petitions had been placed around the royal city. Hundreds of petitions were received, and among these were dozens complaining about Yanaung, listing and detailing a number of offenses, including capital offenses, like using the king’s peacock seal. Egged on by others, Thibaw tossed his friend into jail but then, being a naturally kind man as well as a man of weak disposition, began questioning his decision. Supayalat, though, was more action-oriented and had Yanaung executed on 17 March, together with other members of his gang. A few days later, in a bid to underline her new power, a number of grandees who had challenged her, including Mi Hkin-gyi’s uncles and grandfathers, were sacked and imprisoned.

  GHOSTS OF DUPLEIX

  Government in the last few years of independent Burma was an uncomfortable partnership, with Supayalat reigning supreme in the inner palace and the Kinwun leading a mixed group of reformists and conservatives in the affairs of state. In some areas, efforts to modernize continued, but these were increasingly hampered by a growing financial and administrative crisis. From 1883 onward there was a huge fall in Mandalay’s tax collection in large part because of mounting disorder in the countryside. For nearly thirty years now the Court of Ava had worked to strengthen central control, to systematize its relationship with the towns and villages that made up most of the country, and to rein in the power of the hereditary service chiefs and myothugyis. But the net result in many parts of the Irrawaddy Valley was to undermine the position of the old gentry class while not being able to replace their authority with anything new.

  Bandits and dacoits filled the vacuum, and in areas very close to Mandalay law and order began to break down completely. Even the best efforts of the most elite regiments could not stop the collapse in royal authority. Famine threatened after two consecutive years of bad harvests, and all this, combined with the pull of peaceful and increasingly prosperous Lower Burma, led tens of thousands of families to cross the frontier into British territory in search of new beginnings.

  Mandalay’s reach in the Shan hills also withered away. There had long been signs of unrest, ever since Mindon’s attempts to collect new taxes and British machinations to make secret contact with the local princes. Thibaw’s decision not to take additional wives meant that he had not married any of the daughters or sisters of the tributary Shan rulers, as had always been done. This was seen as an insult, and the sawbwa of Mongnai, among others, refused to attend Thibaw’s first durbar. Soon revenues from the Shan principalities, never great, fell to nothing, and from Mongnai rebellion spread eastward across the highlands. For six years thousands of Mandalay’s best troops would be sent to put down the revolt, dying in the malarial forests, trying in vain to resurrect a long-dead empire. Meanwhile the British, having routed the Zulus and washed their hands of Afghanistan, were waiting in the wings.

  *

  Burma’s very last opportunity to secure an independent future came and went in 1882. The government of William Gladstone had recently appointed the marquess of Ripon as viceroy of India, and Ripon was a man keen on repairing relations with Mandalay and seeking a just accord between the two countries. A convert to Catholicism, he was a man of liberal instinct who used his four years in office to include more Indians in the administration of the country. He had visited Rangoon the year before and told the mainly Scottish chamber of commerce that he was uninterested in war for profits and instead would seek to negotiate a new trade arrangement with Thibaw’s court. A few months later Mandalay dispatched the lord of Kyaukmyaung to meet with the viceroy at the hill station of Simla, and in the cool, pine-scented air the Burmese envoy presented a long list of demands. This was not a good tactic by the Burmese, but Ripon was generous and understood the importance to the Court of Ava of a direct relationship with the British crown. He suggested two separate treaties, one a commercial treaty between Calcutta and Mandalay and another a treaty of friendship between Thibaw and Queen Victoria. There would also be agreements on the British Residency, the importation of arms, and the status of Burmese refugees. Accounts of what we today call human rights abuses were very much in the public eye, and Ripon also wanted a clause prohibiting further political executions, but Kyaukmyaung refused, saying this would amount to interference in the country’s internal affairs.26

  Finally, in August, the two sides agreed, and the envoy returned with the two treaties in hand, ready for signature. This was the very first opportunity the Burmese had for a relationship with London since Alaungpaya’s missive to King George more than a hundred years before. It was what they had always sought. But Thibaw’s government apparently thought it could do even better and did not realize how far Ripon had managed to shift official policy. Months passed, and there was no word. Then at Christmas a Burmese embassy arrived with two slightly amended treaties, one that included a clause on the extradition of Burmese refugees. Ripon refused. Mandalay’s chance for survival was gone.

  What followed was invasion, occupation, and the collapse of centuries of tradition. Burma without a king would be a Burma entirely different from anything before, a break with the ideas and institutions that had underpinned society in the Irrawaddy Valley since before medieval times. The new Burma, British Burma, would be adrift, suddenly pushed into the modern world without an anchor to the past, rummaging around for new inspirations, sustained by a more sour nationalist sentiment, and finally finding voice in the extremist years of the 1930s.

  Notes – 7: MANDALAY

  1. Aung Myint, Ancient Myanmar Cities in Aerial Photos (Rangoon: Ministry of Culture, 1999).

  2. Thaung Blackmore, “The Founding of the City of Mandalay by King Mindon,” Journal of Oriental Studies 5 (1959–60), 82–97.

  3. Oliver Pollak, “A Mid-Victorian Coverup: The Case of the ‘Combustible Commodore’ and the Second Anglo-Burmese
War,” Albion X (1978), 171–83.

  4. Henry Burney, “On the Population of the Burman Empire,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 31 (1941), 155.

  5. Ibid., 97–98.

  6. On Mindon and his reign, see Williams Barretto, King Mindon (Rangoon: New Light of Burma Press, 1935); Kyan, “King Mindon’s Councillors,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 44 (1961), 43–60; Myo Myint, “The Politics of Survival in Burma: Diplomacy and Statecraft in the Reign of King Mindon 1853–1878,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1987; Oliver B. Pollak, Empires in Collision: Anglo-Burmese Relations in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979); Thaung, “Burmese Kingship in Theory and Practice Under the Reign of King Mindon,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 42 (1959), 171–84.

  7. On Mindon’s reforms, see Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma, chapters 5 and 6.

  8. Langham Carter, “The Burmese Army,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 27 (1937), 254–76.

  9. Yule, Narrative to the Mission to the Court of Ava, xxxvii.

  10. Ibid., 111.

  11. Ibid., 107.

  12. James Lee, “Food Supply and Population Growth in Southwest China, 1250– 1850,” Journal of Asian Studies 41:4 (1982), 729.