The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma

by Thant Myint-U

  The English at Fort St. George were alarmed. The English East India Company had been involved in Burma since the seventeenth century. It too was looking for opportunities, not so much to expand its influence in Burma as to offset any French initiatives. In 1746 Madras had been taken by a naval force under Bertrand François, Comte Mahé de La Bourdonnais, the governor of the isle of Bourbon,* and French power was still formidable in the Carnatic. The Company was aware that in a future war, England’s Indian ports could again be lost, and reckoned that a safe harbor not too far away in Burma was a good fallback. Burma’s shipbuilding industry was world class, and in the 1730s and 1740s the French had commissioned there many of their best warships. Hearing of the French concessions, the English quickly sent their own mission to Pegu, asking Bannya Dala for permission to open an office at Negrais, a small island off Burma’s extreme southwestern coast. But they were met with studied hostility. French muskets and cannons were making their way into the Mon arsenal, and Pegu was moving decisively into the French camp. Soon Bruno was appointed resident at Bannya Dala’s hopeful new court. Dupleix’s dreams seemed to be coming true.

  Panicked, the English decided to take a gamble and occupy Negrais by force. This was a mistake. By then Paris had actually rejected Dupleix’s plans. In normal times he might have disregarded this, but his hands were full in South India. The English didn’t really need to do anything. But now they had taken Negrais, and the little colony there was paralyzed from the very beginning by all manner of tropical diseases, food shortages, and the occasional mutiny. For better or for worse, the Company was now involved in Burma’s civil war. Both the English and the French were of course still keen to back the winning horse. And it was beginning to look as though the tide were turning against Bannya Dala and that Dupleix had miscalculated. Not only had Aung Zeyya, whom neither side had ever heard of before, cleared Upper Burma of the Pegu army, but this unknown village chief was now proceeding in strength down the Irrawaddy. A master tactician, and perhaps one of the greatest military leaders of his time, Aung Zeyya was outmaneuvering any opposition and winning submission from gentry leaders and influential officeholders all along the way. In early 1755 he took the strategic river city of Prome, honoring there the lords of Salay and Pakhannge, both of whom had led local risings in support of his campaign.

  Three more years of bitter fighting were to follow, but few now doubted the eventual outcome. The delta stronghold of Danubyu was captured in a brilliant victory, and in May 1755 the old pagoda town of Dagon fell into Aung Zeyya’s hands. In all his new possessions, the new king enforced a harsh but effective system of justice and proved himself a capable administrator as well as general. Hoping the civil war would soon be over, he renamed Dagon Rangoon, meaning “the end of the enemy.” Some of his followers began to call him Alaungpaya, “the future Buddha.”

  A nervous Dupleix now tried to increase his hold over the Pegu government by threatening to switch sides and help the Burmese under Aung Zeyya, now Alaungpaya. Both to make good on his threat and to cover his bases, Dupleix then sent a gift of arms to Alaungpaya, who accepted the weapons while still clearly regarding the French as his enemy. Alaungpaya’s strong preference was for an alliance with the English. He protested the unilateral occupation of Negrais, but he also offered to cede the island to England in return for military help. Alaungpaya was winning, and both Dupleix and Fort St. George knew this. The problem for both was that they had few arms to spare. In Europe, England had just declared war on France in the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. Prussia under Frederick the Great was fighting an array of nations from Spain to Sweden, and the English would soon be battling Louis XV’s armies and navies across North America, the Caribbean, and India. Burma might be an important sideshow, but it was still a sideshow in this critical test of global supremacy.

  SYRIAM AND THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR

  The King said that if all the Powers of The World was to come, he could drive them out of His Country. He then asked me if we were afraid of the French; I told him that the English and the French had no great liking for each other but there never was that Englishman born, that was afraid of a Frenchman …3

  —English envoy Ensign Robert Lester at his audience with Alaungpaya4

  For the Burmese under Alaungpaya, two places remained to be taken: Syriam and Pegu itself. The first attempt to take Syriam in 1755 was a failure. Bruno and a number of French officers had reinforced the garrison already there, and the sturdy walls and modern cannon made difficult any attempt to simply storm the fortress. Around this time an English ship, the Arcot, had somewhat clumsily, and apparently without instruction, joined a combined French and Mon attack on Rangoon. The attack was unsuccessful, but the English, now justifiably fearing reprisals from the Burmese, sent an envoy, Captain George Baker, to Alaungpaya with presents of cannons and muskets and with orders to speedily conclude a treaty of friendship.

  Alaungpaya was then back in his home village, which was not a village anymore. Thousands of people from the nearby countryside had been moved to Moksobo, and new walls and buildings were quickly transforming the little settlement into a proper national capital. Moksobo means “the hunter chief.” Alaungpaya decided this wasn’t good enough and renamed it Shwebo, the “golden chief.” Shwebo-tha (“sons of Shwebo”) became the war cry of his followers, with more than a hint of Upper Burma (and Burmese ethnic) patriotism against the Monspeaking culture of the south.5 He was temporarily in Shwebo directing an expedition into Manipur, turning the tables on that onceaggressive little principality, in the first Burmese invasion involving firearms and the first of several devastating invasions of Manipur to come. He also sent the captain of his musketeers, Minhla Mingaung Kyaw, into the Shan hills to secure the submission of the highland chiefs.

  Though Syriam and Pegu had not yet fallen, Alaungpaya was already master of a huge territory stretching from the Himalayas down to the border with Siam. The young English envoy George Baker got more than a dose of bravado. “See these arms and this thigh,” Alaungpaya said to Baker as he drew up the sleeves of his shirt and tucked up his paso. “Amongst 1,000 you won’t see my match. I myself can crush 100 such as the King of Pegu.” He agreed that the English could stay at their pestilential colony at Negrais but postponed signing any immediate treaty with the Company. Instead he sent a letter on gold leaf ornamented with precious stones to King George II:

  The King, Despotick, of great Merit, of great Power, Lord of the Countries Thonahprondah, Tomp Devah and Camboja, Sovereign of the Kingdom of the Burmars, the Kingdom of Siam and Hughen and the Kingdom of Cassey; Lord of the Mines of Rubies, Gold, Silver, Copper, Iron and Amber, Lord of the White Elephant, Red Elephant and Spotted Elephant, Lord of the Vital Golden Lance, of many Golden Palaces and of all those Kingdoms, Grandours and Wealth whose royal person is descended of the Nation of the Sun, Salutes the King of England, of Madras, of Bengal, of Fort St. David and of Deve Cotah, and let our Compliments be presented to His Majesty and acquaint him that from the time of Our Ancestors to Our Time, there has been a great Commerce and Trade carry’d on by the English and Burmars, with all possible Liberties, Affection, Advantage and Success…6

  The letter goes on to suggest a firm alliance between the two countries. But months would go by, and there would be no reply from the Hanoverian king or his secretaries at Hampton Court. And despite what Alaungpaya regarded as a magnanimous gesture over Negrais (against the advice of his Anglophobe Armenian advisers), no military help of any kind materialized. Had he been tricked? He wasn’t sure. But the idea that the English could not be trusted was planted early in the hearts of the new dynasty and in the imagination of early Burmese patriots.7

  Meanwhile, Bruno and his fellow Frenchmen, trapped in sweltering Syriam, were growing desperate for reinforcements from Pondicherry. Alaungpaya had recently arrived from the north together with some of his best men to finish the job. It seemed only a matter of time. Food was running out. At this point Bruno decided to do the less tha
n honorable thing and tried secretly to negotiate with the Burmese. He was found out and placed in shackles.

  For Alaungpaya, the worry was that French reinforcements would indeed soon arrive. He decided that the time had come for the fortress to be stormed, now. He knew that the French and the Mons, expecting no quarter, would resist fiercely and that hundreds of his men would die in any attempt to breach the walls. He called for volunteers and then selected ninety-three, whom he named the Golden Company of Syriam, a name that would find pride of place in Burmese nationalist mythology. They included guards, officers, and princes of the blood, descendants of Bayinnaung. The afternoon before, as the early monsoon rains poured down in torrents outside the makeshift huts, they ate together in their new king’s presence. Alaungpaya gave each a leather helmet and lacquer armor.

  That evening, as the Burmese banged their drums and played loud music to encourage Syriam’s defenders into thinking festivities were under way and to relax their watch, the Golden Company scaled the walls. After bloody hand-to-hand fighting they managed to pry open the great wooden gates, and in the darkness, amid the war cries of the Burmese (“Shwebo-tha!”) and the screams of the women and children inside, the city was overrun. For the men of the northern villages, the wealth of Syriam, crammed with luxury goods from around the world, could hardly be imagined. The next morning Alaungpaya stacked up the captured gold and silver and presented the combined loot as a reward to the twenty men of the Golden Company who survived and to the families of the seventy-three who died.8

  A few days later and a few days too late, two French relief ships, the Galatee and the Fleury, arrived, crammed with troops as well as arms, ammunition, and food from Pondicherry. As they approached the river (Syriam was several miles from the sea), they sent a small boat to ask for a pilot. The boat was captured by Alaungpaya’s men, who then forced the captive Bruno to write a letter in French decoying them up the river. The trick worked. The ships ran aground and were quickly surrounded by Burmese war boats. On board were two hundred French officers and soldiers. They were now press-ganged into Alaungpaya’s army. Also on board were thirty-five ship’s guns, five field guns, and over a thousand muskets. It was a considerable haul. Bruno was executed, some say impaled and left to die in the searing heat, together with his senior aides.

  The newly arrived Frenchmen were, however, generally well treated. Many of the gunners were given Burmese wives and were recruited into the royal service, some rising to become officers of the Household Guard. They were settled in the feringhi villages, Bretons and Normans adding to the Portuguese and other Catholic subjects of the king already there. One, the chevalier Pierre de Millard, lived for nearly twenty more years, becoming a captain of the king’s artillery and serving his new master in the field against Pegu, Ayutthaya, and Manipur.

  *

  By this point Pegu’s fate was no longer in question. The great city fell to Alaungpaya in May 1757. Bannya Dala had sent his only daughter on a gorgeous palanquin as a peace offering, but there would be no mercy for the starving city. Pegu was taken at moonrise, and the assembled Burmese horde massacred men, women, and children without distinction. Alaungpaya entered through the Mohnyin Gate on his best elephant, surrounded by a crowd of his guardsmen and French gunners, and prostrated himself before the Shwemawdaw Pagoda. The city walls and the twenty gates, built by Tabinshweti and Bayinnaung two centuries before, were then razed to the ground.

  For the Mon-speaking people of Pegu and the nearby countryside, this was the end of their dream of independence. For a long time they would remember the utter devastation that accompanied the final collapse of their short-lived kingdom. Thousands fled across the border into Siam. Many others were sold into slavery. Wrote one Mon monk of the time: “Sons could not find their mothers, nor mothers their sons, and there was weeping throughout the land.”9 Soon entire communities of ethnic Burmese from the north began settling in the delta as centuries of Mon ascendancy along the coast came to an end.

  And by now the Seven Years’ War was over as well, and England’s global mastery over the French well ensured. The East India Company under Robert Clive had chased the French across the Carnatic, and in September 1759 General James Wolfe defeated the marquis of Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec, gaining for Britain all of New France. More important for the Burmese, Clive had also routed the forces of Siraj-ud-Daula, the nawab of Bengal, and entrenched British power throughout the Indian east. Without Alaungpaya, Pegu would likely have ruled over a new Burmese kingdom, backed by the Dupleix and Pondicherry and influenced from Paris, but now only English power held sway all around the Bay of Bengal.

  THE SACKING OF AYUTTHAYA

  For the next half century Alaungpaya would be followed on the Konbaung throne (“Konbaung” for the area around Shwebo) by three of his sons and one of his grandsons, in one of the most militarily ambitious and expansionist periods in Burmese history. The destruction of Mon-speaking society in the south had removed the possibility of southern revolt and laid the basis for a more compact ethnic nationalism throughout the Irrawaddy Valley. And in the years before Britain was viewed as the number one threat, all eyes at Ava looked eastward, to dominion over Siam.

  It was Alaungpaya himself, energized with the blood of his conquests from Manipur to Mergui, who first ventured across the Tenasserim hills. In the cold weather of 1759–60, he personally led the attack on Ayutthaya, calling on the besieged city to submit to him as the new chakravartin, or universal emperor. The king of Siam refused, despite the thinness of his defenses; luckily for them, Alaungpaya suddenly took ill, and his army felt forced to retreat. But the Burmese would soon be back, and the results this time for the Siamese would be catastrophic.

  Two of the country’s most distinguished soldiers, Naymyo Thihapati and Maha Nawrata, were given joint command. Naymyo Thihapati invaded from the north, heading an army made up mainly of highland Shans under their own chiefs. The northern city of Chiangmai was taken in 1763, and within months all of the old kingdom of Lanna (now northern Thailand) was in Thihapati’s hands. As the Burmese chronicles put it: “having mopped up all the people in the towns of the fifty-seven provinces of Chiang Mai who insolently were unsubmissive, there was no trouble and everything was as smooth as the surface of water.”10 The Lao king of Vientiane had already offered to become a vassal of Ava and his rival the king of Luang Prabang would be crushed in March 1765, thus giving the Burmese complete control of Siam’s entire northern border. Naymyo Thihapati moved down the Chao Phraya Valley, taking the towns of central Siam along the way and meeting with the main Burmese invasion force, led by Maha Nawrata, which had crossed the Dawna Range from Martaban and Tavoy. The Burmese-led armies, swelled by local levies, were joined on the outskirts of Ayutthaya at the end of the January 1766, the goldcovered palaces and temple spires shining in the near distance.

  Against this massive threat, the Siamese response was belated and uncoordinated. King Suriyamarin had sent out several of his best legions some months before, but these had been chopped to pieces by Maha Nawrata.The Siamese hoped that if they could only hold out until the summer monsoon rains, the Burmese would be forced to retreat. But then the rains came, the city held out, and the Burmese refused to be disheartened, concentrating their men on newly fortified high ground, and building or commandeering boats to keep their forces in action. A few attempts were made to break the siege toward the end of the year, but to no avail. A year into the encirclement the great city was starving, and disease began to take a severe toll. As if this were not enough, a fire at the very start of 1767 then destroyed thousands of homes. Facing imminent defeat, Suriyamarin offered his submission, but Ava’s generals, now haughty with the smell of success, would agree only to an unconditional surrender.

  On 7 April 1767 the Burmese breached the defenses. Everything in sight was put to the torch, and tens of thousands were led away to Burma in captivity. Virtually nothing was left of the fourteenth-century Grand Palace, home to kings—thirty-three in
all—of five dynasties, or the glittering Sanphet Prasat, used to welcome foreign envoys and state visitors, including an ambassador of Louis XIV in 1695. The last king of Ayutthaya was believed to have slipped away in a small boat, only to starve to death days later. A former king, hundreds of ministers, noblemen, and members of the royal family were resettled in Burma. Romantically named after the capital of the Rama of legend, the city of Ayutthaya, far greater than any in Burma, with a population said to rival contemporary London and Paris, was reduced to ashes by the seemingly unstoppable Burmese military machine.

  Myedu, Alaungpaya’s second son and now king, had planned to leave behind a substantial garrison at Ayutthaya, either placing a protected Siamese prince on the throne or appointing senior Burmese officials to rule the country directly. But an unexpected threat was now looming: a huge Manchu invasion from the north.

  CREATING BORDERS

  The Qianlong emperor Aishin Gioro was the fifth emperor of the Manchu Qing dynasty. He was a successful military leader and presided over a period of enormous territorial expansion, made possible by the strength of his armies and by the weakness and disunity of the Mongol and Turkish peoples to the west. In 1759 the Qing conquered Kashgar and Yarkand and slaughtered the last of the Dzungar forces with great cruelty, extending Peking’s control to the heart of Central Asia. And in 1793 it was Qianlong, then in his eighties, comfortable and complacent, who was to tell Britain’s envoy, Sir George McCartney, that the Middle Kingdom had no use for things foreign, as it was entirely self-sufficient. His reign, from 1736 to 1799, was the longest in the history of China.11 But amid all these victories and the arrogance they brought was one fantastic and largely secret failure: the Burma campaigns of 1767–70, the most disastrous ever waged by the Qing.12