The prince of Gui was deeply apologetic. He insisted that he had nothing to do with what was going on in his name. Blame fell first on the Burmese king. Pindalay was a weak ruler, the son of a concubine rather than a queen and thus enjoying less than normal legitimacy. He had all along been manipulated by an increasingly powerful noble class, and this nobility now turned against him, making him the scapegoat for the troubles and replacing him with his younger brother the prince of Prome. It was the hereditary officer corps in the army that had first agitated for his removal. They had seen the devastation in the countryside firsthand. Many had families in the irrigated lands to the south of Ava, and when food became scarce in these lands as a result of the invading Chinese, they had appealed for their king’s help. Instead Pindalay had allowed his favorites and concubines to sell rice to the hungry at exorbitant prices. The army men then appealed to the royal ministers, who were quick to replace Pindalay with his half brother Prome.
Prome was a stronger monarch, and he soon turned his attention to the increasingly nervous prince of Gui. He suspected the refugee emperor of conspiring with the Chinese bands all around them and summoned the prince’s followers, all seven hundred of them, to the Tupayon Pagoda at Sagaing. Prome said he wanted them to take an oath of allegiance. They refused until the lord, or sawbwa, of Mongsi, whom they trusted, agreed to be there as well. But it was a trick. At the pagoda the lord of Mongsi was taken away. And royal troops moved in to encircle the Chinese. The Chinese reached for their swords and then were shot down by the king’s musketeers. Those who survived the shooting were beheaded. The prince of Gui became even more nervous.
In 1662, four years after the prince had first entered Burma, the great Chinese general and viceroy Wu Sangui marched into the kingdom at the head of an enormous imperial force, twenty thousand strong, coming straight down the mountains and halting only a few miles from Ava, and demanding the surrender of the Ming prince. Wu Sangui was then fifty years old. He had been a senior Ming commander but had switched sides and had opened the gates of the Great Wall of China to the Manchu armies of the north. In 1673 he would switch sides again and rebel against the new Qing dynasty. But for now he was on the side of the Manchus and had taken as his wife the sister of the new Manchu emperor.
It was said that Prome wanted to fight but that his ministers told him to get rid of their troublesome guest once and for all. And so the prince of Gui and his family were handed over as prisoners. The prince was now thirty-eight. His son was fourteen. They were taken to Kunming in Yunnan and strangled to death in the marketplace with a bowstring. Another son apparently died in Burma and is buried at Bhamo near the Chinese border. His wife and daughters were taken to Peking. During their days in Burma the whole family had converted to Roman Catholicism, under the influence of a Jesuit priest at Ava, and had taken the Christian names of the fallen Byzantine house: The prince of Gui’s son had become Constantine, his mother, the empress, was named Anne, and the other princesses were named Helen and Mary.
The upheavals weakened the now nearly two-centuries-old dynasty. But the kingdom stayed together, absorbing the blows of the Chinese incursions without breakup or revolt. This was in large part due to the reforms that had taken place. Like all societies in Southeast Asia at the time, the key to economic power was not so much land as people; there was always a dearth of people. Wars were waged to capture people as well as loot, and government was about the proper management of the king’s men. All this was improved and systematized.30 And the image of empire, of Bayinnaung’s exploits, and of more distant memories of Pagan and Prome remained. When the dynasty finally fell, the new royal clan would accept the old traditions, turning only later toward radical reform when confronted with disaster at the hands of an entirely new foe, the English East India Company.
Notes – 4: PIRATES AND PRINCES ALONG THE BAY OF BENGAL
1. Caesar Frederick of Venice, Account of Venice, trans. Master Thomas Hickock, reproduced in SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research 2:2 (Autumn 2004).
2. For perspectives on Bayinnaung, see Sunait Chutinaranond, “King Bayinnaung as Historical Hero in Thai Perspective,” Comparative Studies on Literature and History of Thailand and Myanmar (Bangkok: Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University, 1997); Kyaw Win, “King Bayinnaung as a Historical Hero in Myanmar Perspective,” ibid., 1–7.
3. Than Tun, “History of Burma, a.d. 1300–1400,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 42:2 (1959), 135–91; Than Hla Thaw, “History of Burma, a.d. 1400–1500,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 42:2 (1959), 135–51.
4. On the early modern trading world in the Bay of Bengal, see Om Prakash, “Coastal Burma and the Trading World of the Bay of Bengal, 1500–1680,” in Jos Gommans and Jacques Leider, eds., The Maritime Frontier of Burma: Exploring Political, Cultural, and Commercial Interaction in the Indian Ocean World, 1200–1800 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002).
5. Jon Fernquist, “Min-gyi-nyo, the Shan Invasions of Ava (1524–27), and the Beginnings of Expansionary Warfare in Toungoo Burma: 1486–1539,” SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research 3 (Autumn 2005).
6. John King Fairbank, China: A New History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 128–40.
7. Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
8. On Bayinnaung’s conquests, see Htin Aung, History of Burma, 102–27; Victor Lieberman, Burmese Administrative Cycles: Anarchy and Conquest, c. 1580–1760 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); see also Harvey, History of Burma, 162–79; and Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 123–67.
9. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portugese Empire in Asia: A Political and Economic History (London: Longman, 1993), chapter 4.
10. Harvey, History of Burma, 160–62.
11. On Arakan’s history, see Michael Charney, “Arakan, Min Yazagyi and the Portuguese: The Relationship Between the Growth of Arakanese Imperial Power and Portuguese Mercenaries on the Fringe of Southeast Asia,” SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research 3:2 (2005); Richard Eaton, “Locating Arakan and Time, Space and Historical Scholarship,” in Gommans and Leider, The Maritime Frontier of Burma; Harvey, History of Burma, 137–49; Pamela Gutman, Burma’s Lost Kingdoms: Splendours of Arakan (Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2001); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “And a River Runs Through It: The Mrauk-U Kingdom and Its Bay of Bengal Context,” in Gommans and Leider, The Maritime Frontier of Burma.
12. Father A. Farinha, “Journey of Father A. Farinha, S.J., from Diego to Arakan, 1639–40,” in Sebastião Manrique, Travels of Fray Sebastien Manrique, 1629–1643 (Oxford: Printed for Hakluyt Society, 1927), 172–75.
13. G. E. Harvey, “Bayinnaung’s Living Descendent: The Magh Bohmong,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 44:1 (1961), 35–42.
14. Duarte Barbosa, A Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar in the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century, trans. from an early Spanish manuscript by Henry E. J. Stanley (1866; repr., New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1995), 182–83.
15. François Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire (London: W. Pickering, 1826), 175.
16. D. G. E. Hall, “Studies in Dutch Relations with Arakan,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 26 (1936), 1–31.
17. ARA, Letter from Governor-General Coen and Council at Batavia to Andries Soury and Abraham van Uffelen at Masulipatam, 8 May 1622, VOC 1076, ff. 76–78, quoted in Om Prakash, “Coastal Burma and the Trading World,” in Gommans and Leider, The Maritime Frontier of Burma, 98.
18. Alexander Hamilton, New Account of the East Indies (Edinburgh: J. Mosman, 1727), quoted in Henry Yule, Narrative of the Mission to the Court of Ava in 1855 (repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 110.
19. On de Brito’s career, see Harvey, History of Burma, 185–89; Htin Aung, A History of Burma, 134–44.
20. Harvey, History of Burma, 187.
21. Htin Aung, A History of Burma, 137.
22. Ibid., 140.
23. Paul Ambroise Bigandet, An
Outline of the History of the Catholic Burmese Mission from the Year 1720 to 1887 (Rangoon: Hanthawaddy Press, 1887), 11.
24. G. E. Harvey, “The Fate of Shah Shuja 1661,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 12 (1922), 107–15.
25. Harvey, History of Burma, 146–48.
26. Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 26–48.
27. Ibid., 37.
28. Fernquist, “Min-gyi-nyo, the Shan Invasions of Ava.”
29. Harvey, History of Burma, 196–201, 352–53.
30. For a comprehensive account of Burmese state formation up to the early nineteenth century, see Lieberman, Strange Parallels, chapter 2.
* From the Arabic firanj, or Frank.
FIVE
THE CONSEQUENCES OF PATRIOTISM
Burma’s last dynasty comes to power during the Seven Years’ War and then goes on to build an empire, fighting the Siamese and the Manchus and inspiring a new martial spirit
Aung Zeyya was an unlikely savior of his people. For decades fierce Manipuri horsemen had been raiding up and down the valley of the nearby Mu River, torching villages all around, ransacking pagodas, and stealing away captives. Led by their rajas Jai Singh and Gharib Newaz and riding the stylish little ponies for which they would later be renowned, the Manipuris defeated again and again the soldiers dispatched to stop them. The Burmese court seemed powerless against the rising menace, and its frailty lost it support at home and even the nominal allegiance of its eastern tributaries. In the summer of 1739 Gharib Newaz’s cavalry reached the Irrawaddy itself, burning the monastic libraries on the north shore and halting, the Burmese believe, to bathe in the holy waters of the river. In 1743 the famed Manipuri teacher Maha Tharaphu arrived in person at Ava, intending to instruct the Burmese king in the ways of the Hindu faith. The dynasty founded two hundred years before by Bayinnaung was on its last legs. For Aung Zeyya, the kyedaing, or hereditary chief, of Moksobo, it would soon be time to take matters in his own hands.
The source of the immediate trouble was Manipur, a fertile and compact plain, about the size of Connecticut, enclosed by pine-clad mountains and set today along the Burmese-Indian border, a few hundred miles to the northwest of Aung Zeyya’s hometown. The area had once been the site of innumerable warring clans, but more recently Manipur had been united under a passionately neo-Hindu regime. Brahmin priests from Bengal, devotees of the god Vishnu, had converted the Manipuri ruling class, encouraging new ceremonies and caste rules. A fresh energy was instilled that was then channeled into a southward military advance. The first raids into Burma had taken place in the middle and late seventeenth century, but they were now increasing in frequency and destructiveness.
With the king’s authority crumbling in the north, the southern provinces—around Pegu and the delta—seized the opportunity and declared their independence. Dissatisfaction had been fermenting for years in the south as taxes increased and people felt the weight of a harsh but ever more ineffectual government. The rebellion began at Pegu in 1740, led by a local Mon nobleman, Bannya Dala, who crowned himself king in 1747 and promised to restore the greatness of the onetime imperial capital. Many in the area were speakers of Mon, the language of the Pegu kingdom in the fifteenth century, and dreams of a Mon kingship had never disappeared.
Within a few years all the key towns of the south—Henzada, Prome, Martaban, as well as Pegu—were in the hands of the popular rebel regime, and Bannya Dala’s army then moved slowly northward to complete its victory. A bright future seemed guaranteed. The oncegreat fortress of Ava itself fell without much of a fight. The old royal family had surrendered and was led away into captivity. All that seemed left was a mopping-up operation, and small military detachments were sent out from Ava to secure the loyalty of the local chiefs to the new Pegu-based king. This was 1753, and on the other side of the world, a Virginia militia under Major George Washington was trudging west, through blinding snowstorms and freezing cold, toward Fort Le Boeuf, to check the French advance in the Ohio Valley. Few then could have imagined the connection between these two events or how the tables would soon turn in Burma, changing not only Burma but the course of European imperial history.
THE GENTLEMEN OT THE MUVALLEY
When Bannya Dala’s cavalry careered past Ava into the valley of the Mu River, they had hoped to win the easy submission of the hereditary gentry class that governed the area. Through periods of strong and weak kings, the same gentry chiefs had managed the affairs of the countryside, not just in the Mu Valley but everywhere in Burma, administering justice, collecting taxes, and presiding over the many ceremonies and Buddhist festivals at the heart of rural life. Traditional gentlemen and part-time soldiers, they were the all-important intermediaries linking ordinary villagers to the world of princes and courtiers.
The most important of these chiefs held the hereditary office called myothugyi, and these were powerful men, sometimes ruling over hundreds of towns and villages. But there was a confusing plethora of other offices, depending on local custom and history. As a class the gentry were an exceptionally proud group of men and women, marrying among themselves and wearing clothes and living in houses that set them apart from the common people. They were customarily descended from the founding lineages of their home area and valued their special role of providing the officers and officials of the Court of Ava. This was no more true than in the Mu Valley, where Burma’s very first kingdom at Tagaung was located and which was the home of its best fighters.
At the time Ava fell to the southern army, Aung Zeyya was thirty-six years old and married, with teenage sons. A tall man for the times (just under six feet), he was solidly built and had the dark, sunburned complexion of many Upper Burmans. His village was Moksobo, a not particularly important place with perhaps a few hundred households, about sixty miles north of Ava, set in the middle of fields of rice, millet, and cotton, a ridge of low teak-covered mountains to the east and Indaing forests and hills to the west.1 Aung Zeyya came from a large family and was related by blood and marriage to many other gentry families throughout the valley; for generations his ancestors had held important local offices, and he claimed descent from a fifteenth-century cavalry commander and ultimately from the Pagan royal line.
Some of Aung Zeyya’s fellow chiefs had sensed the way the wind was blowing and had meekly submitted to the new overlords at Pegu. But not Aung Zeyya. When he heard that Bannya Dala was sending an armed force to Moksobo to administer the new oath of loyalty, he immediately swung into action, organizing the nearby villages, chopping down palm trees and using the trunks to fortify the walls, sharpening his swords, collecting a few old muskets, and ambushing the unsuspecting Mon soldiers as they came through the thorny scrub jungle.
The Mons then sent a larger force to punish the recalcitrant chief. But they too were met by Aung Zeyya and were quickly defeated. News spread. And soon the kyedaing of Moksobo was mustering a proper army from across the Mu Valley and beyond, using his family connections and appointing fellow gentry leaders as his key lieutenants. Fresh levies were sent from Pegu, but all were routed, and their allies among the local leadership were crushed. Success drew fresh recruits every day. There were other centers of resistance, at Salin along the middle Irrawaddy and at Mogaung in the far north, but it was Aung Zeyya who had emerged as the unexpected and exciting champion of the Burmese north against the Mon south.
On a frosty morning at the beginning of 1754 Aung Zeyya left his little village and made his formal entry into the smoldering ruins of Ava to worship at the old city’s royal pagodas. Tributary princes from the eastern hills came and knelt before him and made their submission. Their dreams of problem-free conquest crumbling quickly, Pegu then sent their entire army upriver, only to have the whole force beaten back by the man who now called himself king.2
MONSIEUR DUPLEIX AND THE DREAM OF A BIRMANIE FRANÇAISE
Joseph François Dupleix had already lived in the East for nearly thirty years, as a successful merchant and as
a colonial administrator, when he became governor-general of French India in 1742. This was before England’s East India Company had established its mastery of the subcontinent and when the French, with their own bases and own Indian armies, could still pose a threat to English designs. Ambitious and imaginative, Dupleix, like many Europeans in the East, had come to affect the dress and style of an Oriental prince and sought alliances with native rulers as a way of increasing French power. His appointment as governor-general was during the War of the Austrian Succession. When the war ended in 1748, without much satisfaction for the French or the English, Dupleix looked for the right chance to strengthen his country’s position against his Anglo-Saxon enemies, including across the bay in Burma.
Dupleix knew that Bannya Dala had recently seized power at Pegu. He also knew that Pegu was already running into problems in the north and that Bannya Dala would need help if he were to keep his brand-new throne. Dupleix’s strategy in India had often been to support the weaker side with the aim of ensuring a future dependent relationship. And though Bannya Dala seemed to be doing reasonably well, his was still an upstart regime that would likely need all the help it could get. When an embassy from Bannya Dala arrived at Pondicherry, the principal French town in India, in 1750, it was welcomed with great pomp and enthusiasm. In return, Dupleix sent as his representative Sieur de Bruno, a man of some charm who proved a big hit and quickly won over Pegu’s Mon leaders. A treaty of friendship was signed, promising French military aid in return for lucrative trading concessions. It looked as if Pegu would soon be in France’s pocket. Dupleix wrote home to the directors of the Compagnie Royale about a new French empire on the shores of the Irrawaddy.
The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma Page 12