The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (30 page)

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.

13
. On the Panthay rebellion I have drawn mainly on David Atwill, “Blinkered Visions: Islamic Identity, Hui Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856–1873,”
Journal of Asian Studies
62:4 (2003); see also C. Pat Giersch, “A Motley Throng, Social Change on Southwest China’s Early Modern Frontier, 1700–1880,”
Journal of Asian Studies
60:1 (2001).

14
. Spence,
The Search for Modern China
, chapter 8.

15
. On this trip and Anglo-Burmese relations during this period more generally, see Htin Aung,
The Stricken Peacock: Anglo-Burmese Relations
, 1752–1948 (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1965); Htin Aung, “First Burmese Mission to the Court of St. James: Kinwun Mingyi’s Diaries 1872–1874,”
Journal of the Burma Research Society
(December 1974). I have not, unfortunately, been able to consult the more recent translation by L. E. Bagshawe,
Kinwun Mingyi’s London Diary: The First
Mission of a Burmese Minister in Britain
, 1872 (Bangkok: Oxford Press, 2006).

16
. Htin Aung, “First Burmese Mission,” 4–13.

17
. Ibid., 76–77.

18
. Tin,
The Royal Administration of Burma
, 251.

19
. Paul Bennett, “The Conference Under the Tamarind Tree: Burmese Politics and the Ascension of King Thibaw, 1878–1882,” in Bennett,
Conference Under the Tamarind Tree
. 

20
. John Ebenezer Marks,
Forty Years in Burma
(London: Hutchinson and Co., 1917), chapters 15 and 18.

21
. On the Thibaw government and the reforms, see Myint-U,
The Making of Modern
Burma
, chapter 7.

22
. Po Hlaing, the lord of Yaw, “Rajadhammasangaha,”
SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research
2:2 (2004).

23
. On Yanaung, see Tin,
The Royal Administration of Burma
, 250–76.

24
. Ibid., 271.

25
. Ibid.

26
. Htin Aung,
Lord Randolph Churchill
, 65–73.

EIGHT

TRANSITIONS

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British soldiers, merchants, and officials create a colonial Burmese society (and a story of my family during this time)