The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma

by Thant Myint-U

  The English were a newer breed of feringhi and had an early reputation as a commercial race, less interested in war making and less useful as mercenaries than their Spanish and Portuguese predecessors. Sometimes they were called the tho-saung kala, the “sheep-wearing kala,” no doubt a reference to the wool outfits they wore and that they encouraged the comfortably cotton-clad Burmese to buy and wear as well.

  But slowly the rising power of the English in India became apparent, even to the somewhat isolated Court of Ava, and during the civil war of the 1750s friendship with either the English or the French became a natural aim of both sides. Alaungpaya wanted cannons and muskets, but he also wanted a more lasting partnership. Through some oversight, his letter to King George II never received a reply. Muslim and Armenian courtiers whispered in his ear that the British could never be trusted.

  Apprehension over the Raj then worsened for two reasons. The first was knowledge of British expansion. By the turn of the century the Court of Ava had become increasingly aware of the mushrooming of British control across India. Spies were sent deep into British territory; many masqueraded (or doubled) as pilgrims visiting Buddhist holy sites. To better understand the enemy, an Englishman, known to posterity only as George, was employed to teach some of the royal family the rudiments of the English language. “Only the East India Company flag flies along the Coromandel coast,” warned one intelligence report. Another compared the British to a banyan tree, which first leans on others to grow and then drains the life out of them when it is stronger.

  The fate of numerous Indian princes and potentates was worryingly plain to see.

  Between the 1750s, when Alaungpaya made his offers of friendship, and the early nineteenth century, the Company’s army had grown more than six times, from just around eighteen thousand men to well over one hundred thousand. And they had proved themselves more than a match for any force in the subcontinent, defeating rivals, including the nawab of Bengal and the Tipu Sultan. The Burmese king had attempted to engineer some kind of alliance with the Tipu (and with many other Indian courts), but he and his determinedly Anglophobic state were now long gone. By the 1820s the kingdom of Nepal had been reduced to a protectorate, and even the once-undefeatable Marathas had been wiped off the map by the most powerful commercial firm in the world.

  The second reason was Burma’s own imperial ambitions, which were, within its own modest world, in many ways no less belligerent than the Company’s. The road east was largely shut. Despite the devastating 1767 sack of Ayutthaya, the Siamese were able to regroup farther downriver at the new port city of Bangkok and from there, under a vigorous new leadership, quickly developed the wherewithal to resist further Burmese attacks. The Qing invasions of northern Burma had given the Siamese the respite they needed, and this had proved decisive. By 1800 any Burmese occupation of Siam seemed unlikely. Instead it was Siam that was growing stronger, annexing bits of Cambodia and Malaya and asserting its authority over the middle Mekong states once under the king of Burma’s thumb. And no Burmese moves to the northeast seemed possible either. China was now right on the country’s doorstep, and with the resumption of trade in the late eighteenth century the Court of Ava had no desire to rekindle hostilities with the Qing. That left the smaller fry to the west.

  In 1784, a dissident member of the Arakanese royal family, Naga Sandi, formally requested Bodawpaya to intervene, and the king was more than willing to accept. The campaign, placed under the command of the crown prince, Thado Minsaw, was ordered to defeat and occupy the kingdom and seize the ancient and much revered Maha Muni image, the very emblem of Arakanese sovereignty. The main army, totaling over thirty thousand men, arrived at Prome just after the end of the rainy season and marched in stages over the mountains, joining up with a smaller force that had come up along the coastline from Bassein. Their objective was not an easy one. The beleaguered city, enclosed by rugged hills and once considered impregnable, had formidable defense works running over nineteen miles and moats with giant sluice gates. Some say that the attacking force was helped from the inside. In any case, on the last day of the year, the great fortress of Mrauk-U fell. Twenty thousand people were deported to populate the king’s new capital, Amarapura, “the Immortal City.” In the looting and destruction that followed, much of Arakan’s cultural and intellectual heritage was lost. The royal library was burned to the ground. The country was to be annexed and ruled through four governorships, each supported by a garrison.1

  The Burmese occupation was bloody and repressive. Huge numbers of Arakanese began fleeing north and west into Company territory. The Court of Ava had been hungry for labor and rounded up thousands of Arakanese men for building and irrigation projects in the center of the country. In 1795 a levy of twenty thousand men to expand a lake south of the capital set off a wave of desperate refugees into British Bengal. It also began a strong Arakanese resistance movement, led by a local hereditary chief, Chin Byan. In 1811 a new levy, this time for forty thousand men, led to another exodus toward Chittagong. The resistance strengthened, overwhelming the local Burmese garrison and momentarily holding Mrauk-U. Chin Byan offered to rule Arakan as a vassal of the East India Company, and this aroused Ava’s suspicions of the British, especially as the Arakanese rebels were staging many of their attacks from bases inside Company territory. Soon the first clashes between British and Burmese forces took place as Burmese soldiers attempted to pursue Chin Byan’s men across the Naaf River border.

  *

  Manipur was another target of aggression. Alaungpaya had already ravaged that kingdom in 1758, and this brutal invasion was followed up by another in 1764. Thousands of people were deported, and the valley was left nearly empty for years. Many of the captives were smiths, weavers, and craftsmen of all sorts. They were formed into hereditary groups owing special service to the crown, and for generations they and their descendants labored as servants and agricultural workers for the Burmese nobility. They also formed the new Cassay Horse, an elite cavalry regiment that supplied some of Ava’s best polo players. Two more invasions followed together, and a Burmese-educated puppet prince was installed.

  Even farther to the north and west, from their most northern forts along the Hukawng River, the army pushed farther west to Assam. The kings of Assam had ruled over the Brahmaputra Valley from the descent of the great river in southeastern Tibet to its turn into the rice plains of Bengal. A narrow valley hemmed in by high mountains, Assam had for centuries been under the rule of the Ahoms, a Hindu royal house. The Ahoms had fought in a series of plucky defensive wars against the Mughal Empire, but by the late 1700s their power was on the wane. Intradynastic disputes came together with a widespread uprising to create more and more instability. Rival groups appealed to both Ava and Calcutta for assistance. In the winter of 1792–93 the East India Company moved in with a small force to help the king, or swagadeo, of Assam quell a popular rebellion. But the Burmese were also interested.2

  In 1817 a representative of a rival court faction appealed to the Burmese to intervene against the swagadeo Chandrakanta Singh. Bodawpaya had already been looking to send a force in support of the rebels and now decided to send a well-equipped army eight thousand strong. They began their march at Mogaung, marshaling along the way thousands of tribal levies. In an amazing logistical feat, they then crossed nine-thousand-foot-high Himalayan passes and entered the valley at its northern end, near Tibet. It was a punishing, many-week-long march past scenery unlike anything the men had ever seen. The officers rode horses and elephants; the ordinary foot soldiers hiked alongside in thick quilted cotton jackets, hardly enough to keep them warm in the subfreezing nighttime temperatures. They passed for weeks through dark leech-infested jungle, so dense that sunlight never touched the ground, and waded through frigid mountain streams in nothing but bare feet. In the higher elevations, oak trees and rhododendrons would suddenly give way to sheets of ice and snow leopards on the distant cliffs.

  With the army still amazingly intact, the Assamese were dec
isively defeated at the battle of Kathalguri, and a pro-Burmese minister was placed in power. But several years of local princely intrigue followed, and in 1821 the Court of Ava became convinced of the need for tighter control. A new expedition crossed the snowy mountains and extinguished the Ahom court once and for all. Assam would become a Burmese province under a military governor-general. The Burmese then turned their guns to the little hill principality of Cachar to the south, and early in November 1823 assembled a sizable force of about five thousand troops on the Cachar frontier. An alarmed Calcutta sent its own troops in defense of the raja of Cachar, and bloody encounters with the Burmese almost immediately followed.

  Early in January 1824 the governor-general warned the East India Company’s Court of Directors at Leadenhall in London that war might very soon be inevitable, in order “to humble the overweening pride and arrogance of the Burmese monarch.”3

  *

  The king at the time was Bagyidaw, grandson of Bodawpaya (the “Grandfather King”) and a great-grandson of the dynasty’s founder, Alaungpaya. He had inherited the empire at its very height. Described by the British as a “mild, amiable, good-natured and obliging” man, said to be “fond of shews, theatrical exhibitions, elephant catching and boatracing,” he was in 1824 very much under the influence of the war party, those pressing for confrontation.4 Part of the war party was his senior queen, Me Nu, and her power-hungry brother, the lord of Salin.

  Another member of the war party was the Burmese commander in the theater, the lord of Alon, Thado Maha Bandula, stalwart idol of the modern Burmese armed forces and an ambitious soldier then in his early forties. He was the firstborn son of a minor gentry family who had taken on early responsibilities after the death of his father. A stocky man of medium height and blunt demeanor, Bandula was as well known for his outspokenness as for his successes on the battlefield. He had risen through the ranks of the royal service, first through special assignments for the crown prince and later as the governor of the Dabayin. His later promotions were rapid, and he had become the spokesman of a faction at court bent on an aggressive westward policy.

  Bandula was supported by twelve of the country’s best battalions, including one under his personal command, all totaling ten thousand men and five hundred horses. His general staff included some of the country’s most decorated soldiers, men like the lord of Salay and the governors of Danyawaddy, Wuntho, and Toungoo. In those days, as today, many senior officials held both administrative and military offices. In Jaintia and Cachar, Burmese forces were led by one of Bandula’s top lieutenants, the lord of Pahkan, Thado Thiri Maha Uzana.

  On 5 March 1824 Lord William Amherst, governor-general of Fort William and best known until then for leading a failed diplomatic mission to Peking, formally declared war on the kingdom of Ava. For the next two years the armies of the Burmese king and the English East India Company would fight the longest and most expensive war in British Indian history. Fifteen thousand European and Indian soldiers died, together with an unknown (but almost certainly higher) number of Burmese. The campaign cost the British exchequer five million pounds, or about ten billion pounds (roughly eighteen and a half billion U.S. dollars) today if measured as a percentage of the country’s economy.5

  Leading the British side was Sir Archibald Campbell, born at Glen Lyon in the Scottish highlands to an old army family, an experienced East India Company soldier who had devoted more than thirty years to the service, mainly in South India and the war against the Tipu Sultan. He had also taken an active part in the Peninsular War, under the future duke of Wellington, and had firsthand knowledge of the latest in European warfare.

  A combined force of over ten thousand men soon set sail from Fort William in Bengal and Fort St. George in Madras. The initial objective was to seize the port city of Rangoon.

  *

  At Amarapura the king’s men knew from their spies at Calcutta or Madras that the English were coming by sea. How should they respond? Should Bandula and the army along the Bengal border be recalled? This would lead to a collapse of the western front and the certain loss of Arakan and Assam. How big would the English force be? No one could say for sure. But the strategic choice seemed clear: either admit defeat in the west now and throw everything against the English once they landed, or hope for the best and maintain a two-front strategy. The Burmese liked to hope for the best. With some luck, the English would land and be defeated, and Bandula’s army would push forward and take eastern Bengal. The key was to destroy the English force as soon as it landed, most likely at Rangoon. And to do this, the Burmese would employ tactics the English had never seen.

  ALL WAS MYSTERY OR VAGUE CONJECTURE

  Rangoon was a not particularly attractive and sometimes fishy-smelling town of about twenty thousand people, a good half day’s sail upriver from the sea, with a strong wooden wall, about eighteen feet high, which cut off the town from the river and prevented any view of the water. It occupied a small fraction of today’s Rangoon and was centered just east of where the Strand Hotel and British embassy are today. A handsome teak palace served as the home and court of the king’s governor. But there were few brick structures, other than a big customshouse and the Armenian and Portuguese churches; most of the buildings were made of wood and bamboo, giving the place a sort of ramshackle look, except for the glittering Sule Pagoda just to the west. And beyond the town walls was a scattering of villages, today all neighborhoods within Rangoon, but then separated from the main settlement by forests and gardens and grasslands crowded with tigers (especially in the area near where Prome Road is today, which was well into the nineteenth century known as Tiger Alley). A map of greater Rangoon is a little like a map of lower Manhattan, with the old town at the very bottom and rivers to both sides. Rangoon was a commercial port. But to ordinary Burmese what was much more important was what lay sitting on a great hill just five miles north: the Shwedagon Pagoda, the country’s most important place of pilgrimage and the pride of Buddhists across the region.

  British military planners hoped that the Burmese court would sue for peace as soon as Rangoon was captured. They expected a fight, perhaps a tough fight, but fully expected that this second city of Burma would before long be theirs. Perhaps the ordinary people themselves, believed to be cruelly oppressed, would rise up and help. At best the king’s envoys would then open negotiations, and after some give-and-take, a peace treaty favorable to the Company would be signed. At worst the Burmese wouldn’t give in so easily. Rangoon would be used as a base. Boats and boatmen would be requisitioned, food supplies would be restocked, and the invading army would quickly make its way northward to the capital itself. The campaign would still be over in a matter of months, if not weeks.

  But the British had no plan for what actually happened. As the tall wooden ships approached the shore on 11 May, they noticed only an intermittent row of fires, apparently burning at observation posts in and around Rangoon. The HMS Liffey was the first to sail into the King’s Wharf, and soon the first Company troops landed on Burmese soil. But there was no fight. No artillery fire. No gunfire. Moreover, there were no people, soldiers or civilians. The town was entirely deserted, a ghost town. The Burmese had begun a policy of scorched earth. There would be no boats to be had or boatmen and certainly not any food. No crowds of oppressed peoples would welcome Sir Archibald or his men.

  The withdrawal must have been harsh; it was also alarmingly total, for not only were no supplies or collaboration to be found, but the British were unable even to gather any sort of intelligence.6 The native state and society had simply been rolled back like a giant carpet before the invaders, leaving nothing useful behind, not even a scrap of information. There were certainly no white flags to be seen or offers for immediate negotiations.

  There were also no boats, and boats were key to moving beyond the Rangoon area. There were few real roads, only some dusty and seldom used footpaths. Other than waterways, only malaria-infested jungle separated the villages and towns of the delta. What
British planners back at Fort St. David had not known was that all the boatmen of the Irrawaddy were crown servants, organized into close-knit regiments under their own hereditary chiefs. In peacetime they made their livelihoods ferrying people and goods. But in wartime they were the king’s men, and all had disappeared without a trace.

  Over the next several days, as he conferred with his red-coated officers about next steps, Sir Archibald did his best to establish defensive positions in and around Rangoon. Against little or no resistance, the British and Indian soldiers moved north and took the Shwedagon Pagoda and the Singuttara Hill, on which it stood, as well as several nearby hamlets. But they had no idea what lay beyond the marshlands and small lakes they could see. As one officer remembered, “Neither rumour nor intelligence of what was passing within [the enemy’s] posts ever reached us. Beyond the invisible line which circumscribed our position, all was mystery or vague conjecture.”7

  *

  Unknown to Campbell, and just beyond the last Company outpost, the king’s generals had assembled a huge force of over twenty thousand men. The pullout from Rangoon complete, the Burmese had focused their energies on building fortified positions along an east-west ten-mile arc. Here and there they massed their musketeers and cannons, on little hillocks and at strategic points leading away from the city. They were led by an experienced military man and a half brother of the king’s, the prince of Dwarawaddy, until then the commander of the royal garrison in the Shan hills. There were several other princes of the blood, including the future king Tharawaddy, each on his decorated elephant, and the broader aristocracy was also well represented. Among the commanders waiting for battle in the forests north of Rangoon were the lords of Zayun and Yaw and even the sawbwa of Kanmyaing, a remote upland principality near the Chinese border.