The Piano Tuner

by Daniel Mason

  A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE SHAN PEOPLES, WITH SPECIAL ATTENTION TO THE POLITICAL SITUATION OF THE REVOLT IN THE SHAN STATES

  Submitted by Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll,

  Mae Lwin, Southern Shan States

  (From the War Office: Please be advised that the content of this report is subject to change. It is recommended that all concerned parties closely follow amendments to these reports, available upon request from the War Office.)

  I. General History of the Shan

  If one were to ask a Burman about the geography of his land, perhaps he would first answer with a description of the nga-hlyin, the four giants who live beneath the earth. Sadly, official memoranda afford no space for such complexities. Yet it is impossible to understand the history of the Shan without considering briefly the physiognomy of their home. The area currently referred to as “the Shan States” consists of a large plateau that floats to the east above the dusty central valley of the Irrawaddy River. It is a vast and green Elysian plain, which extends north to the border of Yunnan and east to Siam. Through this plateau cut powerful rivers, twisting south like tails of the Himalayan dragon. The largest of these is the Salween River. The importance of this geography to history (and thus to the current political situation) lies in the affinity of the Shan to other races of the plateau, as well as their isolation from the lowland Burmans. Here, a sometimes confusing terminology merits explanation: I use “Burman” to refer to an ethnic group, while I use “Burmese” to describe the kingdom and government of Burma, as well as the language. Although these words are often used interchangeably, here I have chosen to stress this distinction: not all Burmese kings were Burman; all Burmese kings had non-Burman subjects, including, among many others, the Kachin, the Karen, and the Shan, each of whom once had their own kingdoms within the present borders of “Burma.” Today, although these tribes are racked by internal divisions, they still resent the rule of others. As will become clear from the remainder of this report, the Shan revolt against British rule finds its beginnings in an incipient revolt against a Burman king.

  The Shan, who refer to themselves as the Tai or Thai, share a common historical heritage with their eastern neighbors, the Siamese, the Lao, and the Yunnanese. The Shan believe their ancestral home was in southern China. Although some scholars question this, there is ample evidence that by the late twelfth century, at the time of the Mongol invasions, the Tai-Thai people had established a number of kingdoms. These included the fabled Yunnanese kingdom of Xipsongbanna, whose name means “kingdom of ten thousand rice fields,” the ancient Siamese capital at Sukhothai, and—more importantly for the subject of this briefing—two kingdoms within the present borders of Burma: the kingdom of Tai Mao in the north, and the kingdom of Ava in the vicinity of present-day Mandalay. The power of these kingdoms was substantial indeed; the Shan ruled much of Burma for over three centuries, from the fall of the great Burman capital of Pagan (whose vast wind-worn temples still sit in lonely vigil on the banks of the Irrawaddy River) at the turn of the thirteenth century, until 1555, when the Burman state of Pegu eclipsed the Shan empire at Ava, beginning three centuries of rule that grew into the recent kingdom of Burma.

  Following the fall of the Shan kingdom of Ava in 1555 and the destruction of the Tai Mao kingdom by Chinese invaders in 1604, the Shan splintered into small principalities, like shards of a once beautiful porcelain vase. This fragmentation continues to mark the Shan States to this day. Despite this general disunity, however, the Shan were occasionally able to mobilize against their common Burman enemy, notably in a popular Shan revolt in Hanthawaddy in 1564 or, more recently, in a rebellion following the execution of a popular leader in the northern Shan city of Hsenwi. While these events may seem of distant memory, their importance cannot be underestimated, for at times of war, these legends spread out over the plateau like flames through a drought-stricken land, rising on the smoke of campfire tales, whispered on the lips of elders to circles of wide-eyed children.

  The result of this fragmentation was the development of unique political structures that are important to consider because they play a great role in our current situation. Shan principalities (of which there were forty-one by the 1870s) were the highest order of political organization in a highly hierarchical system of local rule. Such principalities, termed muang by the Shan, were ruled by a sawbwa (Burmese transliteration, which I will adopt in the remainder of this report). Immediately below the sawbwa were other divisions, from districts to groups of villages to individual hamlets, each ultimately subservient to the rule of the sawbwa. This fragmentation of rule resulted in frequent internecine wars on the Shan Plateau and a failure to unite to throw off the yoke of Burman rule. Here the analogy of the shattered vase grows useful: just as fragments of porcelain cannot hold water, the fragments of governments could do little to control a growing anarchy. As a result, much of the Shan countryside is plagued by bands of dacoits (a Hindustani word meaning bandits), a great challenge to the administration of this region, although distinct from the organized resistance known as the Limbin Confederacy, which is the subject of the remainder of this report.

  II. The Limbin Confederacy, Twet Nga Lu, and the Current Situation

  In 1880, an organized Shan movement against Burmese rule emerged, which still persists today. (Note that at this time, England only controlled Lower Burma. Upper Burma and Mandalay were still ruled by the Burmese king.) In that year, the sawbwas of the states of Mongnai, Lawksawk, Mongpawn, and Mongnawng refused to appear before the Burmese king Thibaw in an annual act of New Year’s obeisance. A column sent by Thibaw failed to capture the upstart sawbwas. Then, in 1882, this defiance became violent. In that year, the sawbwa of Kengtung attacked and killed the Burmese resident in Kengtung. Inspired by the boldness of the Kengtung sawbwa, the sawbwa of Mongnai and his allies broke into open revolt. In November 1883, they attacked the Burmese garrison at Mongnai, killing four hundred. But their success was short-lived. The Burmese counterattacked, forcing the rebellious Shan chiefs to flee to Kengtung, across the Salween River, whose steep defiles and dense jungles gave them shelter against further incursions.

  Although the rebellion was directed against the Burmese government, the goal of the resistance was not Shan independence, a fact of history that is frequently misunderstood. Indeed, the Shan sawbwas recognized that without a strong central power, the Shan States would always be plagued by war. Their chief goal was the overthrow of Thibaw, and the crowning of a suzerain who would repeal the thathameda tax, a land tax they deemed unjust. Thus, as their candidate they selected a Burman known as the Limbin Prince, a disenfranchised member of the house of Alaungpaya, the ruling dynasty. This rebellion became known as the Limbin Confederacy. In December 1885, the Limbin Prince arrived in Kengtung. Although the movement carries his name, evidence suggests he is only a figurehead, with the true power wielded by the Shan sawbwas.

  Meanwhile, as the Limbin Prince followed the lonely trails into the highlands, war had broken out once again between Upper Burma and Britain: the third and final Anglo-Burmese war. The defeat of the Burmese at Mandalay by our forces was completed two weeks before the Limbin Prince arrived in Kengtung, but because of the vast and difficult terrain separating Kengtung from Mandalay, the news failed to reach the Confederacy until after he arrived. While we had hoped that the Limbin Confederacy would drop its resistance and submit to our rule, instead it switched its original aims and declared war on the British Crown in the name of Shan independence.

  It is said that nature abhors a vacuum and this can also be said of politics. Indeed, the retreat of the Limbin Confederacy to Kengtung in 1883 had left vacant thrones in many of the powerful Shan muang, thrones which were rapidly filled by local warlords. Notable among these usurpers was a warrior named Twet Nga Lu, who became the de facto ruler of Mongnai. A native of Kengtawng (not to be confused with Kengtung—at times one wonders if the Shan have named their cities to confuse the English tongue), a substate of Mongnai, Twet Nga Lu was a defrocke
d monk turned local brigand whose violence was notorious throughout the region, earning him the nickname “the Bandit Chief.” Before the sawbwa of Mongnai had retreated to Kengtung, Twet Nga Lu had led several attacks on Mongnai. These were for the most part unsuccessful, and Twet Nga Lu changed his tactics from the battlefield to the bed, at last gaining power by marrying the widow of the sawbwa’s brother. When the sawbwa fled to Kengtung, Twet Nga Lu, with the support of Burmese officials, seized Mongnai completely.

  Twet Nga Lu, along with the other de facto usurpers, ruled until earlier this year, 1886, when Limbin forces launched an offensive and reclaimed much of their land. Twet Nga Lu fled back to his native town, from which he continues a campaign of violence, leaving swaths of burned villages in the wake of his armies. The feud between him and the Mongnai sawbwa represents one of the greatest challenges to the establishment of peace. While the sawbwa commands the respect of his subjects, Twet Nga Lu is renowned not only for his ferocity but for his reputation as a master of tattoos and charms; his flesh is said to be embedded with hundreds of amulets which lend him invincibility, and for which he is feared and revered. (A short note: Such charms are an important aspect of both Burman and Shan culture. They can be anything from small gems to shells to sculptures of the Buddha, and are placed under the skin through a shallow incision. A particularly shocking variant is found mainly among fishermen: the implantation of stones and bells beneath the skin of male genitalia, a practice whose purpose and function continues to elude inquiries of this author.)

  At the time of this report, the Limbin Confederacy continues to grow in power, and Twet Nga Lu remains at large, with evidence of his reign of terror visible in the embers of burned towns and slaughtered villagers. All efforts at negotiation have proved futile. From my command at the fort at Mae Lwin, I have been unable to make contact with the Limbin Confederacy, and my attempts to contact Twet Nga Lu have also failed. To date, there have been few confirmed British sightings of the warlord, and questions have even been raised as to whether the man truly exists, or whether he is just a legend, grown out of the summation of terror from hundreds of unassociated dacoit attacks. Nevertheless, a ransom has been issued for the Bandit Chief, dead or alive, one of many continuing efforts to bring peace to the Shan Plateau.

  Edgar read the full report without stopping. There were some other short notes by Carroll, and they were all similar, filled with digressions into ethnography and natural history. On the first page of one, a survey of trade routes, the Doctor had scrawled at the top of the page, “Please include to educate the piano tuner as to the geography of the land.” Inside there were two appendices, one on the accessibility of certain mountain trails to the passage of artillery, the second a compendium of edible plants, “in case a party is lost without food,” with sketches of flower dissections and the name of each plant in five different tribal languages.

  The contrast of the Doctor’s reports with the other official military notes he’d read was striking, and Edgar wondered if perhaps this was the source of some of the military’s enmity. He knew most of the officers were landed gentry, educated at the finest schools. So he could imagine their resentment of a man such as the Doctor, who came from a more modest background, but who seemed vastly more cultured. Perhaps this too is why I like him already, he thought. When Edgar had finished school, he had left home to live and work with a piano tuner in the City, an eccentric old man who believed that a good piano tuner must have knowledge not only of his instrument but of “Physics, Philosophy, and Poetics,” so that Edgar, although he never attended university, reached his twentieth birthday with more education than many who had.

  There were other similarities as well, he thought. In many ways our professions are alike, rare in that they transcend class distinction—everyone becomes ill, and concert grands as well as gin-palace uprights get out of tune. Edgar wondered what this meant for the Doctor, for he had learned early that being needed was not the same as being accepted. Although he was a frequent visitor to upper-class homes where the owners of expensive pianos often engaged him in talk about music, he never felt welcome. And this distinct sense of estrangement extended in the other direction as well, as he often felt awkwardly refined in the presence of the carpenters or metalsmiths or porters whom he frequently contacted for his work. He remembered telling Katherine about this feeling of not belonging soon after they were married, one morning while they walked beside the Thames. She had only laughed, and kissed him, her cheeks reddened by the cold, her lips warm and moist. He remembered this almost as well as he remembered what she had said, Believe what you may about where you belong, all I care is that you are mine. As for other acquaintances, he found friendship in common interest, of the kind that now, steaming toward Rangoon, he felt toward the Doctor.

  It is unfortunate that the Doctor has not written about the piano itself, he thought, for it is the hero of this entire endeavor, its absence an obvious omission in the narrative thus far. He was amused by this thought: Carroll made the army read his natural histories—it would only be fair if they were forced to learn about the piano as well. In the midst of his creative rapture and growing sense of united mission with the Doctor, he rose, took out an inkwell, pen, and paper, lit a new candle for the first one had burned low, and began to write.

  Gentlemen,

  I write to you from on board our steamer bound for Rangoon. It is now the fourteenth day of our journey, and I have been very much entertained by the view afforded by our route, and by the most informative briefings provided to me by your office. It has come to my attention, however, that little has been written about the very purpose of our endeavor, namely, the piano. Thus, for the purpose of History as well as the general education of those in the War Office, I feel it necessary to record this story myself. Please share it with anyone you wish. Should you care for any further information, gentlemen, I would be more than happy to provide it.

  The History of the Erard Piano

  The history of the Erard piano could naturally be told with two beginnings, that of the history of the piano, and that of the history of Sebastien Erard. But the former is long and involved—fascinating naturally, but too much a challenge for my pen, for I am a tuner with a love of history, not a historian with a love of tuning. Suffice it to say that following its invention by Cristofori in the early eighteenth century, the piano underwent great modifications, and the Erard, the subject of this letter, is indebted, as all modern pianos are, to this tremendous tradition.

  Sebastien Erard was from Strasbourg, a German, but he went to Paris in 1768 when he was sixteen and apprenticed himself to a harpsichord maker. The boy—to put it simply—was a prodigy, and soon he quit his apprenticeship and opened his own shop. The other Parisian craftsmen felt so threatened by the boy’s gift that they launched a campaign to have him close his shop after he designed a clavecin mécanique, a harpsichord with multiple registers, with quill and cowhide plectra, all operated by an ingenious pedal mechanism that had never been thought of before. But despite the boycott, the design was so impressive that the Duchess of Villeroi gave the young Erard her sponsorship. Erard started making pianofortes, and the duchess’s noble friends started buying them. This time he aroused the ire of importers who resented the competition with their imported English pianos. They tried to raid his house, only to be blocked by none other than soldiers of Louis XVI; Erard was so renowned that the king gave him full license to trade.

  The sponsorship of the king notwithstanding, Erard eventually looked abroad, and in the mid-1780s he traveled to London, where he set up another shop on Great Marlborough Street. He was there on July 14, 1789, when the Bastille was stormed, and when, three years later, the purges of the Reign of Terror shook France. This history I am certain you know well. Thousands of the bourgeoisie fled the country or were condemned to die by the guillotine. But one fact few people know: those who fled or were executed left thousands of works of art, including musical instruments. Whatever can be said about French taste
, it is worth noting perhaps that even in the throes of revolution, when scholars and musicians were losing their heads, someone decided that music must be protected. A Temporary Commission of Arts was set up and Antonio Bartolomeo Bruni, a mediocre violinist at the Comédie Italienne, was named Director of the Inventory. For fourteen months he collected the instruments of the condemned. In all, over three hundred were gathered, and each carries its own tragic tale. Antoine Lavoisier, the great chemist, lost his life and his French-made Zimmerman grand to the Terror. Countless other pianos still played today have similar pedigrees. Of these, sixty-four were pianofortes, and of the French makes, the majority seized were Erards, twelve in number. Whether this was evidence of the taste of Bruni or of the victims, this dark distinction perhaps most permanently established Erard’s reputation as the finest of piano makers. It is significant that neither Sebastien nor his brother Jean Baptiste, who remained in Paris, was ever brought before the Terror, despite their sponsorship by the throne. Of the twelve pianofortes, the whereabouts of eleven are known, and I have tuned all that now reside in England.

  Sebastien Erard is dead now, of course, but his manufacturing shop is still in London. The remainder of his story is one of technical beauty, and if you cannot understand the mechanics of what I describe, you must at least appreciate them, as I appreciate the function of your cannons without understanding the chemical nature of the gases which make them fire. His innovations revolutionized piano construction. The double-escapement repetition action, the mécanisme à étrier, attaching hammers singly to the rail instead of in groups of six as in the Broadwood pianos, the agraffe, and the harmonic bar—all these are Erard’s innovations. Napoleon played on an Erard; Erard sent a grand to Haydn as a gift; Beethoven played one for seven years.