The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma

by Thant Myint-U

  But some of the old martial spirit must have remained, and as in all former empires, there would have been those who felt cheated from a life of invasion and plunder. They were still first-rate horsemen. And the Irrawaddy Valley, weakened from a century of invasion and subjugation, could hardly resist those tempted by the warmer weather and rich paddy fields. The tribes in the west—whose womenfolk had been enjoying their milk and cream or who wore sheepskins, and had never washed, looking forward only to drinking, singing, and dancing—these tribes under their mang (chiefs) began filtering south, perhaps following the course of the great river, and finally occupying the fertile rice lands near present-day Mandalay. They called themselves the Myanma, or the strong horsemen.*

  THE TRAMPER OF ENEMIES

  In 849, seventeen years after the Nanzhao’s cavalry had last swept through the towns of the Irrawaddy Valley, Pagan† was founded as a fortified settlement along a bend in the Irrawaddy River.19 The new settlement may have been designed to help the Nanzhao pacify the surrounding countryside. It was certainly a strategic spot, close to the confluence of the Irrawaddy and its main tributary, the Chindwin, and just to the west of a richly irrigated rice plain. Perhaps there was a long tradition of ironsmithing and a vibrant weapons industry.20 Within two hundred years Pagan had become the center of a great Buddhist kingdom, and its ruins today are one of the most magnificent sites in all Southeast Asia. Its core area was this flat arid expanse (once called tattadesa—the “parched land”), but its imperial writ would one day cover much of present-day Burma, from Tibet to the Straits of Malacca.

  The Burmese chronicles say that after the Nanzhao invasions a new dynasty arose, founded by a semimythical warrior-king named Pyusawhti. An expert archer, he came to Pagan and defeated, in the manner of St. George, a great bird, a great boar, a great tiger, and a flying squirrel, freeing the local folk from their terror. Some accounts say that he was born of the union of a prince of the sun and from the egg of a dragon; others that he was a scion of the Sakiyan lineage of Tagaung, that he lived to the age of 110 years, and that he was a giant of a man, five cubits tall.

  It seems very likely that whatever his measurements and human or superhuman ancestry, he was connected in some still slightly mysterious way with the old and fallen house of Nanzhao. The ruling class of Nanzhao had a peculiar naming system, in which the last name of the father became the first name of the son. And this was the naming system

  of Pyusawhti and his descendants for seven generations. Somehow, two hundred years of the Nanzhao Empire had washed up on the banks of the Irrawaddy and would find a new life, fused with an existing and ancient culture, to produce one of the most impressive little kingdoms of the medieval world. From this fusion would result the Burmese people and the foundations of modern Burmese culture.

  *

  For two hundred years or so this new kingdom at Pagan slowly gained ground. Then in the eleventh century came a great burst of human energy in the form of Aniruddha, who seized the throne as a teenager in 1044 after killing his cousin in single combat, “his mother’s milk still wet upon his lips.” His name means “the ungovernable, the self-willed,” and he would make Pagan the center of a new all-Burma Empire.21

  The chronicles remember him campaigning in every direction, aided by his four captains. To Prome, enclosed by massive walls and with a proud and ancient court, Aniruddha rode with a “great company of elephants and horse,” annexing the city-state and taking away its fabled Buddha relics. He also led his men to the old Nanzhao heartland and then built a line of fortified towns at the foothills of the Shan plateau to guard against any fresh incursions. It was an energetic reign, much still lost in legend, but after thirty-three years this king had done what no one had done before. He unified the Irrawaddy Valley under a single sovereign and created a kingdom that matched fairly closely the borders of today’s Burma.

  He did this not simply because of a love of conquest. Shipping across the warm waters of the Indian Ocean was becoming commonplace as sailors slowly mastered the monsoon currents and as economic expansion in both the East and West made long-distance trade ever more profitable. From Ceylon and South India to the South China Sea the most direct route took ships first to the Tenasserim coast and then through the Straits of Malacca. For Aniruddha and his court, capturing these seaports and profiting from global business must have been an attractive proposition. He took Thaton, a principality along the coast, and then fought his way all the way down to the Malay Peninsula. His votive tablets have been found there, near the breezy shoreline, not far from the island of Phuket and a thousand miles away from Pagan.

  The society over which he presided espoused eclectic religious beliefs, with the worship of spirits and naga dragons happily coexisting with Buddhism and Hinduism and even currents of Islam. The Theravada Buddhism of Ceylon and South India competed with the ever more fashionable Mahayana and Tantric beliefs and practices of neighboring Bengal and Tibet, including Tantric practices that would shock and disgust the more prudish Burmese Buddhists of later generations. Aniruddha himself, like many in medieval times, was a man of passionate religious fervor, building temples and pagodas at Pagan and elsewhere. He was also the patron of the indigenous nat, or spirit cults of Burma, organizing their worship around a single national system.

  By the twelfth century—the time of Saladin and the crusader kings—Pagan was at the height of its glory and extent. Buildings of sublime beauty soon rose up along the banks of the Irrawaddy. It was a society of great creativity and energy, absorbing and transforming art and ideas from across the Indian subcontinent. Its kings and nobility wrote in Sanskrit and Pali as well as different native languages, experimenting with various Indian alphabets. The Burmese language itself was reduced to writing (with an alphabet from South India), and new books of Burmese grammar were enthusiastically compiled. Ideas and institutions of government, many inherited from Prome, others perhaps from Nanzhao or imported fresh from India, were brought together to become a tradition that lasted into the nineteenth century.

  Pagan’s growing wealth and power did not escape notice overseas. In 1106 an embassy was sent to the haughty Chinese imperial court at Kaifeng. The dynastic history of the Sung records that the emperor first ordered that the embassy be treated with the same rank and ceremony as the Colas of South India. But the Grand Council observed that the Colas were subordinate to the Sri Vijaya kingdom of Sumatra, whereas Pagan was now a big and independent kingdom. In earlier times imperial decrees to the Burmese court were written on “thick-backed paper and enclosed in box and wrapper.” Now, the Grand Council recommended the same ritual should be followed toward Pagan as toward the king of Annam and the caliph of Baghdad. All appointments and decrees should be written on “white-backed, gold-flowered, damask paper, and stored in a partly gold-gilt tube with key, and forwarded in a brocade silk double wrapper as sealing envelope.” The emperor consented to this wise advice.22

  Aniruddha was followed by a line of able kings. Together they erected thousands of temples and hundreds of monasteries, libraries, and colleges and repaired and constructed the dams and weirs that made middle Burma a great producer of rice. The chronicles even say that one of the Pagan kings, Aniruddha’s grandson Alaungsithu, sailed around the world, to Sumatra, Bengal, and Ceylon, climbing Mount Meru at the center of the earth and then traveling to the Zambutha-byebin, the fabulous rose apple tree that grows at the World’s End.23

  The period of Pagan’s greatness in the eleventh and twelfth centuries coincided with a time of unrest and upheaval throughout much of Asia, when Buddhism was in retreat nearly everywhere. In India, Mahmud of Ghazni and his Turkish and Afghan cavalry were sweeping across the Ganges plain, sacking the holy city of Benares in 1033. To the north, in China, the Sung dynasty was overseeing a gradual decline in popular support for Buddhism and the parallel rise of neo-Confucian ideas. To the south, the Colas, worshipers of the Hindu god Shiva, were extending their reach into Ceylon and Sumatra. And in Bihar, the Buddh
a’s birthplace and very center of Buddhist learning, the ancient universities of Nalanda and Vikramasila, once home to thousands of scholars and tens of thousands of students from around Asia, were falling into decline, waiting to be overrun by the energetic Islamic armies to the west. Scholars from these universities traveled to Tibet for refuge, and others may have traveled to Pagan. The people of Pagan, as fervent practitioners of Buddhism and increasingly of Theravada Buddhism, saw themselves more and more as the defenders of a threatened faith and an island of conservative tradition in a hostile and changing world.

  Once Burma had been part of a far-flung and dynamic conversation, a component of the Buddhist world that linked Afghanistan and the dusty oasis towns of the Silk Road with Cambodia, Java, and Sumatra, with scholar-officials in every Chinese province, and with students and teachers across India. Now the conversation was shrinking. Burma’s Buddhism would become even more impassioned. Not part of Christendom, the Islamic world, or the cultural worlds of Hindu India and Confucian China, Burma, proud and resolutely Theravada, would be left largely to talk to itself.

  *

  Visitors to Pagan today will have a good intimation of the onetime prosperity and splendor of this medieval Buddhist kingdom. There remain a multitude of temples and pagodas, thousands by some accounts, some in ruins but many in good repair, piles of elegant masonry stretched over miles of sandy windswept plain, the reddish pink earth bordered by scrublands and the dark blue of the Irrawaddy, here over a mile across, and then the denuded mountains in the distance. But it is difficult to really imagine what Pagan was like at its height as only the religious structures remain, the rest gone or buried by earthquakes, fires, and long years of natural decay. Except for parts of a wall and the royal library, there is nothing left of the royal residences and government buildings or the streets and shops and ordinary homes of eight centuries ago. Here and there are patches of cultivated land, growing sesame, cucumbers, and groundnuts, where once were grand plazas and crowded markets, and bamboo and thatch huts, where there stood magnificent teak palaces.

  The Mongol hordes in the thirteenth century brought terror and destruction to enormous swaths of Europe and Asia, and Burma was no exception. Pagan was already by then in decline, but the Mongol invasions hastened the demise of the kingdom.24 Early in the century the warlord Genghis Khan had united the Mongol tribes in the grasslands south of Siberia, and over the next several decades he and his successors drove deep into the Islamic world, conquering Persia and Russia and China and halting, only by choice, on the very borders of Western Europe. Burma was in a way an extension of the Mongol campaign to encircle the Chinese. When Genghis’s grandson Kublai Khan was a lieutenant of his elder brother Mangu, he led an invasion that put an end to the still-independent kingdom of Dali and brought Mongol arms right up to the borders of Burma. Twenty years later Kublai became emperor of all China and continued his southwesterly conquests, first demanding tribute from Pagan and then sending his infamous cavalry under the Turkish general Nasruddin of Bukhara.25

  In 1271 under instructions from Kublai Khan, the new military governors of Yunnan sent envoys to the Burmese demanding tribute. Bad diplomacy was followed by rash actions and then by war. The Venetian traveler Marco Polo, the first European ever to mention Burma, was then a privy councillor on the emperor’s staff and heard stories about what happened. According to him, the Burmese king’s forces, said to number sixty thousand, included two thousand great elephants, “on each of which was set a tower of timber, well framed and strong, and carrying from twelve to sixteen well-armed fighting men.” Against this, Nasruddin, “a most valiant and able soldier,” had twelve thousand cavalry. They met in the hills close to the present China border, and in the early stages of the battle, the Turkish and Mongol horsemen “took such fright at the sight of the elephants that they would not be got to face the foe, but always swerved and turned back,” while the Burmese pressed on. But Nasruddin was a cool soldier and didn’t panic. Instead he ordered his Mongols to dismount and, from the cover of the nearby tree line, aim their bows directly at the advancing elephants, throwing the animals into such pain that they fled. The Mongols remounted and cut down the Burmese.

  Nasruddin then descended into the valley of the Irrawaddy, destroying a number of stockaded positions against fierce Burmese resistance and then overrunning the ancient town of Tagaung itself, the home of the country’s first kings and known in Chinese chronicles as the “nest and hole” of the Burmese. For years more there was fighting between the two sides, the Mongols eager to teach the Burmese a lesson, the Burmese battling for their own survival, a war punctuated by attempts at negotiation, including a celebrated mission in 1284 by the minister Disapramok to the court of Kublai Khan. It couldn’t have been easy for the Mongols, unwashed men on horseback used to the open steppe, to face fighting elephants and a withering climate. A final invasion was headed by a grandson of the emperor himself and moved into the heartland of the kingdom. The country was soon in disorder, the king having fled in panic to Prome and there killed by his own son. Little warring principalities and rival princes emerged in place of Pagan’s once-imperial writ. Burma was never integrated into the Mongol imperial administration but was nevertheless, for a few years, under the distant authority of Peking and Xanadu, and for the first and only time under the same yoke as Kiev, Moscow, and Baghdad.

  In the centuries to come, no longer a capital, Pagan dwindled to a village, though always an important village, and into the 1800s the intricate local aristocracy enjoyed a symbolic importance well beyond any remaining political or economic clout. Its hereditary rulers carried the title of mintha, or prince, and in the nearby town of Nyaung-U the local chief claimed direct descent from Manuha, the enslaved king of Thaton, whom legend says Aniruddha brought to Pagan after a campaign of conquest in the south.

  For many Burmese this history of the remote past, from the legendary rulers of Tagaung to the fall of Pagan, offers up a sense of deep-rooted tradition and of a long-lasting association among Burma, the Burmese, and the Buddhist religion. No matter that civilization in the Irrawaddy Valley long predated Buddhism or that Buddhism in its present form is a fairly new thing or that the Burmese language itself spread only with alien conquests from the north. There is a feeling of continuity and of a national and pristine past that was interrupted only with the British occupation. When the people of Mandalay mourned the exile of Thibaw, they felt they were mourning the loss of an institution that they believed stretched back across thousands of years.

  But there were always other peoples, with other pasts and other traditions, as well as the slow approach of India from the west and China from the east. And in the modern world to come—with guns and gunpowder, mercenaries from as far afield as Lisbon and Nagasaki, and an emerging globalized economy that promised the adventurous untold riches—renewed Burmese attempts at empire would not go unopposed.

  Notes – 3: FOUNDATIONS

  1. Pe Maung Tin, The Glass Palace Chronicle of the Burmese Kings, G. H. Luce, trans. (Rangoon: Rangoon University Press, 1960).

  2. Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey (London: Flamingo, 1999), 118–20.

  3. Bob Hudson, “A Pyu Homeland in the Samon Valley: A New Theory of the Origins of Myanmar’s Early Urban System,” Proceedings of the Myanmar Historical Commission Golden Jubilee International Conference, January 2005; Bob Hudson, “Thoughts on Some Chronological Markers of Myanmar Archaeology in the Preurban Period,” Journal of the Yangon University Archaeology Department, Rangoon. On Bronze Age Southeast Asia, see Charles Higham, The Bronze Age of Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  4. Fan Chuo, Manshu: Book of the Southern Barbarians, trans. Gordon Luce. Cornell Data Paper Number 44, Southeast Asia Program, Department of Far Eastern Studies, Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y., December 1961), 90–91.

  5. Bo Wen et al., “Analyses of Genetic Structure of Tibeto-Burman Populations Reveals Sex-Biased Admixture in Southern Tibeto
Burmans,” American Journal of Human Genetics 74:856–65 (2004).

  6. Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 119–20; Nicola di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 197–98.

  7. Bin Yang, “Horses, Silver, and Cowries: Yunnan in Global Perspective,” Journal of World History 15:3 (September 2004).

  8. G. H. Luce, “The Tan (A.D. 97–132) and the Ngai-lao,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 14:2, 100–103.

  9. Romila Thapar, Early India: From Origins to A.D. 1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 174–84.

  10. On the history of Buddhism, see epecially Richard H. Robinson and Willard L. Johnson, The Buddhist Religion: A Historical Introduction (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1997).

  11. Janice Stargardt, The Ancient Pyu of Burma, vol. 1, Early Pyu Cities in a Man-Made Landscape (Cambridge: PACSEA, Cambridge, in association with the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1990), chapter 7. See also Burton Stein, A History of India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 100–104, 127–28.

  12. Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003), 150–51, 174.

  13. From the Old Tang History quoted in Luce, “The Ancient Pyu,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 27:3 (1937).

  14. G. H. Luce, Phases of Pre-Pagan Burma: Languages and History, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Stargardt, The Ancient Pyu of Burma, vol. 1.