The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma

by Thant Myint-U

  Soon there would be more trade, more contact, as ever more urbane Burmese kingdoms profited rather than let themselves be constrained by the valley’s geography. When envoys from the Roman east, perhaps Alexandria, journeyed across the Irrawaddy en route to China in A.D. 97, they were treading well-worn paths.8 Later, when sailors were able to venture across the high seas, a different route, through the Straits of Malacca, would be the preferred way to the East. But for a brief moment Burma was on the highway of the world. And it was this already sophisticated and well-connected Burma that would reach decisively westward, to India, for inspiration.

  THE MIDDLE WAY

  In the time of Zhang Qian, India was ruled by the Mauryans. Two hundred years before, Alexander the Great had seen his dreams of conquering the world shattered by the mutiny of his Macedonians near the banks of the Indus River. Though Alexander soon left India permanently, his incursion into India’s northwest profoundly shook existing political arrangements and allowed the prince Chandragupta Maurya to seize the throne at Magadha, then the most powerful of Indian kingdoms. Chandragupta went on to defeat Alexander’s general Seleucus Nicator, and in the peace treaty that followed, the Macedonians ceded most of the occupied territory in return for five hundred elephants. A new Mauryan Empire came into being, ruling the entire north of the subcontinent. Its capital at Pataliputra (in modern Bihar) was one of the great cities of the world, if not the greatest, dazzling even Nicator’s envoy Megasthenes, a man who had been to Babylon.

  Emboldened, the Mauryans became avid imperialists, and their domain soon stretched from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal. Chandragupta’s grandson the emperor Asoka had been a distinguished soldier in the spirit of his ancestor, leading campaigns of conquest with armies said to number in the hundreds of thousands of infantry and tens of thousands of cavalry. Then, out of the blue, in the sixteenth year of his reign, he had a change of heart. The emperor had just defeated the three Kalinga kingdoms along the steamy eastern coast, and the death and suffering he witnessed firsthand traumatized him and led him to permanently renounce war. Asoka would now take up the teachings of the Buddha. It was to be a conversion as historic as Constantine’s and would transform Asia forever.9

  Buddhism was then already a couple of centuries old. Its founder, Gautama Siddhartha, had been born heir to a minor chieftainship in the Himalayan foothills but had given up princely power and pleasures to reflect on the nature of human existence. Buddhists believe that he attained enlightenment and went on to teach what he had learned, preaching his first sermon at Sarnath and traveling around the great cities of North India until his death (from a meal of tainted pork) at age eighty in 484 B.C. Today his teachings are part of many different philosophies and schools of practice, with the Mahayana schools of Tibet, China, and Japan forming a branch distinct from the more conservative Theravada schools of Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand. At the core of both are his ideas on people’s dissatisfaction with their lives, the origins of this dissatisfaction, and a way out of this dissatisfaction, in part through the living of an ethical and balanced life and a perspective that accepts change as integral to all things.10

  In the third century B.C. Buddhism was only one of many contending religious schools, but the emperor Asoka’s conversion was pivotal in making it the dominant faith across India and much of Asia beyond. Asoka formulated an idea of a righteous government and public policy, one that eschewed violence in all forms, including against animals, and that called for the humane and just treatment of everyone, no matter what class or caste, both inside and outside the empire. It was the first “Buddhist government” and would become the declared model for the later kings of Southeast Asia. He sent missionaries to Ceylon, Persia, and farther west, paving the way for the conversion of Afghanistan and the towns of the Silk Road. The eastern Greeks, themselves descendants of Alexander’s men, would be among the most fervent of the new followers, transforming their kingdoms in Bactria and northwestern India into centers of Buddhist art and scholarship and producing the very first images of the Buddha, based on models of Apollo. Even today the Burmese word for college, tekkatho, is from Taxila, a long-ago center of Indo-Greek Buddhist learning just to the east of the Khyber Pass.

  Burmese tradition says that two Burmese merchants named Tapussa and Ballika, natives of the area around Rangoon, were traveling in North India when they by chance met the Buddha soon after his enlightenment. They offered him rice cakes and honey and asked him for a token of their visit. He gave them eight hairs from his head, and on their return these eight hairs were enshrined deep within what became the Shwedagon Pagoda, the country’s holiest shrine, and the hairs have remained there ever since. The great pagoda is today over three hundred feet high, on a hilltop that dominates the modern city of Rangoon, swathed in sixty tons of gold leaf, and surrounded by a marbled platform and sixty-four lesser pagodas and numerous shrines. But this present form is a relatively recent thing, dating back five centuries or so; beneath its exterior lie stranger and older shapes, ancient structures that might reveal its origins and earliest purposes. Entrances to four tunnels, never explored, sit tantalizingly on the pagoda platform, and though legends tell of underground rivers and miraculously guarded passageways, no one really knows what may lie inside the Shwedagon’s base.

  The Burmese legends are not impossible, and there may have been long-ago travels that introduced Buddhism very early to the Irrawaddy Valley. But it seems that Burmese Buddhism was more the product of later times and later contacts, by sea rather than land, not with the homeland of the religion in the Ganges plain of North India, but with South India, some eight or nine hundred years after the Buddha’s death.

  South India is a place that has always been tied to remote places. The Bible mentions that King Solomon’s ships were sent there for gold, silver, peacocks, and ivory. After navigators had begun to master the intricacies of the monsoon winds, trade between India and the Mediterranean worlds grew by leaps and bounds, as ships, steering clear of the pirate-infested coastlines, were able to sail directly across the Arabian Sea. In the long-buried seaports of the Coromandel coast, archaeologists have found treasure troves of amphora containers, once filled with fine Italian wine, and hoards of Roman coins.11

  Roman and Hellenistic traditions mixed with influences from across the Indian subcontinent in these river towns and seaports along the southeastern coast. They became important centers of international commerce as well as renowned centers of art and learning. Not only did Buddhism flourish in this cosmopolitan hub, but some of the greatest works of Buddhist learning and philosophical debate took place in the study halls and libraries of the area’s abundant monasteries, debates that resonated across Asia for centuries to come. The great philosopher Nagarjuna, arguably the most important Buddhist thinker after the Gautama Buddha himself, wrote and studied here in the third century, and it was in the universities of the region that the historic divide between Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism first took form.

  It was part of Burma’s good fortune to have established close relations with such a dynamic place, its merchants and learned men going back and forth across the Bay of Bengal, absorbing Buddhist as well as Hindu art and ideas, and replanting them within the context of its already long-established civilization in the Irrawaddy Valley. One imagines the increasingly sophisticated and prosperous Irrawaddy city-states hearing of happenings in the West and wanting to know more, bringing back texts and artwork, perhaps enjoying a glass of Italian wine, and adopting and adapting what they saw as the best of India and, via India, the known world.

  By the middle centuries of the first millennium, this was true in much of Southeast Asia, in Java, Cambodia, Sumatra, and Siam as well as Burma. Kings took on Indian titles and names, and art and architecture bore the clear stamp of Indian inspirations. Colonial scholars tended toward the idea of Indian colonization and of Indian tradesmen braving the dark waters of the bay, building up little settlements and finally bringing light and civilization to hith
erto barbarous lands. But it seems that the traffic was most likely two ways and that Burma was already enmeshed in a network of trade and contacts, even in antiquity, and that foreign ideas were imported rather than imposed.

  This period of close contact with South India was when sea routes across the Bay of Bengal must have been routine.12 In the second century A.D. the Greek mathematician Claudius Ptolemy wrote his Geographica, describing not only the port cities of India but also the lands of gold and silver (Chryse and Argyre) beyond the Ganges. Some of the most accomplished mariners of the ancient world were not Indians or Chinese, or Arabs or Greeks, but Malays, men (and perhaps women) of present-day Malaysia and Indonesia who sailed far to the west, colonized the island of Madagascar, and even explored the African coast, a thousand years before Vasco da Gama. The Roman historian Pliny in the first century A.D. mentions ships arriving in Africa from the eastern seas carrying cinnamon and other spices. Even today the main language of Madagascar is Malagasy, closely related to the languages of Java and Borneo, the westernmost outpost of a sailing world that took these ancient explorers and traders west to Africa and east to the farthest Polynesian islands.

  By the fourth century many in the Irrawaddy Valley had converted to South India’s Buddhism, the single most important development in Burma’s long history. Of the many city-states flourishing at the time, the most important was at Prome, along the middle part of the Irrawaddy. Here was a city of enormous size, more than two miles across, with massive circular walls of green glazed bricks and stupas similar to those of southern India, prototypes for the great pagodas to come. Prome’s rulers named themselves Vikram and Varman in imitation of Indian dynasties, and a visiting Chinese traveler remarked on the Buddhist devotion of the people:

  It is their custom to love life and hate killing … They know how to make astronomical calculations. They are Buddhists and have hundreds of monasteries, with brick of glass embellished with gold and silver vermillion, gay colours and red kino … at seven years of age, the people cut their hair and enter a monastery; if at the age of twenty they have not grasped the doctrine, they return to the lay state … They do not wear silk because, they say, it comes from silkworms and involves injury to life.13

  The exploits of their kings are still remembered in legend, and to the very fall of the kingdom in 1885 there would be court ponnas, experts in ceremony and the arcane sciences of royal life, who traced their descent unbroken to the earliest ritualists of Prome. It was a remarkably long-lasting civilization, from the early centuries B.C. to the ninth century A.D., when a new power descended from the north, bringing in its wake a new people, swift horsemen from the foothills of the Himalayas, the Myanma.14

  LORDS OF THE SOUTH

  Take the road east from Mandalay and very soon you will find yourself (nervously if on a Burmese bus) circling up two thousand feet onto the edge of the Shan plateau. The air will quickly cool, and the climate will be altogether different; the dust and the palm trees of the plains surrendering to grassy hills and forests of oak, magnolias, and pine. Go farther, perhaps for a half day, across the fearsome gorge of the Salween River, and the hills will become mountains, now eight thousand feet high, and any suggestion of the tropics will give way to thoughts of warm blankets and evenings by the fire. To the north, past fields of tea and opium and rice, will be the beginnings of the Himalayas and then the unimaginably vast and near-empty borderlands that separate China and Tibet. And just ahead will be the mountain country of Yunnan, today a part of the People’s Republic. Press on for two more days (if the Chinese border guards allow you), and you will finally arrive at the tourist town of Dali, a magnet for backpackers, with charming cobblestone streets, laid-back ways, and the partly fulfilled sense of being off the beaten track. This whole area, from Mandalay through western Yunnan, is today home to many different peoples, mainly Shans (who speak a language very similar to Thai), on the Burma side, and Chinese, on the China side. But it was once very different, and a little over a thousand years ago Yunnan was the center of its own multiethnic empire.

  Sometime in the early part of the eighth century A.D., around the same time that Islamic armies were completing their conquest of Spain, six principalities nestled around the limestone hills of Lake Dali, today’s backpackers’ mecca, were brought together for the first time into a single and unified kingdom. Both the new kingdom and its ruler were known as Nanzhao, meaning in Chinese “the Lord of the South.”15 And from the very start the kingdom was aggressive and expansionist, pushing hard in every direction, overpowering and organizing the related tribal peoples of the Tibetan borderlands, marching south into the rain forests along the Salween River and then east toward China. Success bred confidence and ambition, and over the next hundred years this kingdom, now an empire, enjoyed at times a strong friendship with the Chinese. Nanzhao’s envoys were welcomed with lavish ceremony and an honor guard of war elephants and warriors in full armor at the Tang dynasty court at Changan, and the Tang in turn dispatched their own emissaries to Dali bearing luxurious and outlandish gifts.

  But at other times Nanzhao allied itself with China’s archenemy Tibet, then a big power in Central Asia. When in 755 a rebellion in China led by the Turkish-Sogdian governor An Lushan touched off a massive civil war, killing millions and throwing the country into chaos, Nanzhao and Tibet joined sides, sacking Chinese cities and even briefly capturing the imperial capital itself.

  In the late eighth and early ninth centuries the Nanzhao empire was in full flight. It was a highly militaristic state, with all strong adult males conscripted into the imperial cavalry and those less capable mobilized as foot soldiers. At the top was the “Lord of the South” himself, dressed in tiger skin, “red and black with stripes deep and luminous, made from the finest tigers in the highest and remotest mountains,” and able to look back on a century of unbridled conquest.16

  The empire was from start to finish a multiethnic domain. But many of its people, particularly in western Yunnan, as well as the ruling class itself, spoke a language similar or ancestral to modern Burmese. The Chinese called them Wuman, “black southern barbarians,” after their dark complexions. In the ninth century a gifted Chinese scholar-bureaucrat named Fan Chuo compiled a book (Manshu: Book of the Southern Barbarians) about Nanzhao, including a colorful ethnography of its component tribes. Many were simple folk, goatherds and shepherds, in the process of drifting southward, over the rugged mountains and into the blistering plains of central Burma.

  Of a tribe known as the Loxing Man (“Man” meaning a type of barbarian), this learned study says: “They are not warlike by habit but are naturally friendly and submissive … Their men folk and women folk are plentiful all over the mountain wilds. And they have no princes or chiefs … They wear no clothes, but only take the bark of trees to conceal their bodies.” Others included the Bu Man in the forests to the east of the upper Irrawaddy: “They are brave, fierce, nimble and active … they breed horses, white or piebald, and trained the wild mulberry to make the finest bows.” Another, the Wangzhu Man, lived in the snowy ridges closest to Tibet, the home of the sand-ox with horns four feet long. Of these distant Burmese forebears, the book observes that “their women only like milk and cream. They are fat and white and fond of gadding about.” The Mo Man seemed even more carefree: “Every family has a flock of sheep. Throughout their lives they never wash their hands or faces. Men and women all wear sheep-skins. Their custom is to like drinking liquor, and singing and dancing … ”

  It was these people who were marshaled into the Nanzhao war machine, trained to be fighters, and died in not inconsiderable numbers on far-flung battlefields, against Tibet and China and even farther afield. They also battled aliens closer to home. In 801, when Nanzhao was allied with China against Tibet, a combined Nanzhao-Chinese army defeated a polyglot Tibetan force, commanded by Tibetan generals but made up largely of captives from the far west. And in this way thousands of men from Samarkand and Arabs from the Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad, men from t
he court of Harūn ar-Rashīd and A Thousand and One Nights, were taken prisoner on a high Burmese mountain valley together with twenty thousand suits of armor.17

  By this time much of the Irrawaddy Valley was also under Nanzhao authority as the warlike peoples of the north pressed down. The ancient city-states one by one surrendered or were overrun by the powerful mounted archers coming down from the north. In 832, Nanzhao destroyed the city of Halin, close to old Tagaung, returning again in 835 to carry off many captives. According to the Manshu, “They took prisoner over three thousand of their people. They banished them to servitude tude at Chetung and told them to fend for themselves. At present their children and grandchildren are still there, subsisting on fish, insects, etc. Such is the end of their people.”18

  Their cavalry are said to have swept down all the way to the Bay of Bengal despite stiff resistance. It’s difficult to imagine these men of the Yunnan plateau, perhaps in the captured chain mail armor of Baghdad, on their tough little ponies, with a scent of the windswept Central Asian grasslands, riding all the way to the palm-fringed beaches along the Andaman Sea. But these were different times, when unlettered nomads and the descendants of unlettered nomads were fighting their way into all kinds of unlikely places, like the Goths and Vandals in Sicily and North Africa.

  By the tenth century the Nanzhao empire had slowly faded from history. By this time Buddhism, primarily the Mahayana and Tantric variety from Bengal, had become the dominant religion at Dali, and the Nanzhao court became keen patrons of the new faith. Perhaps this had sapped their warlike vigor. Or perhaps two centuries of campaigning had drained the Yunnan heartland of the men and wherewithal to continue its policies of expansion. In 902 the entire Nanzhao ruling family was killed in an internal power struggle, and around the same time contacts with China became less frequent. But intercourse with Burma may have deepened, both culturally and politically. The old elite, who spoke the Burmese-related language of Yi, was replaced, and the new elite established a more modest kingdom, simply known as the Dali kingdom, which survived for three more centuries.*