By the time the first Europeans arrived in Burma, the model had been cast, and in this way Mandalay was a replica or at least a subtle variant of past royal citadels, the same twelve gates, the same nine-tiered roofs of the principal throne hall. When there was a change, like the oblong rather than square shape of Pegu, it was a conscious attempt to veer from the norm rather than a misunderstanding of what was expected.
Even the buildings and building materials were the same, meaning that they were not only the same type or design, but the actual same thing, moved from capital to new capital. One imagines that the same incredibly long and straight teak beams today at Mandalay once served the same function at Amarapura and even at Ava long ago. The British saw a nomadic spirit in all this; this was an exaggeration, but the taking apart of the dark wooden palaces, moving them by men and animals over dusty roads, and setting them back up just as they were before, is perhaps not altogether unlike the folding and unfolding of the great tent cities of desert khans.
In another way it is the newness of Mandalay that is important to note. The Burmese like new things. One can travel the length and breadth of the country and be hard pressed to find a single nonreligious structure more than a hundred years old. To a large extent this is of course the result of war and weather. But there is also no special value in living in an old house with some history or aristocratic connections; the pukka house is a brand-new house and not a refurbished one. Most dwellings are (and were) simple constructions. They are generally made of some wood, bamboo, and thatch, and people would tear down their homes and reconstruct them every few years so that they looked as recently made as possible. This inclination, deeply held, extended later on to more solid structures as well. Whereas in the West shop owners will take pride in a sign proclaiming the age of their building (BUILT IN 1791), in Burma the opposite is often true. The original dates on a colonial-era building (BUILT IN 1921) will be hidden under coats of white paint, and a new sign might instead proclaim the year of the most recent repair.
And so Mandalay was also an attempt at freshness. It was in many respects a very modern project, an attempt to fit new ideas and new concepts into a purposely old form, in order to achieve a new beginning. It tried to say that custom and tradition were important but could be remade to serve in a new environment and that Burma’s past would help it engage with a very troubling future. When, on the muggy day of 16 July 1858, King Mindon was carried in a gem-encrusted palanquin by retainers, men of known blood and exact rank, in a grand procession clockwise around his new domain, then seated himself on his Lion Throne to the sound of a distant orchestra, he was hoping that traditional Burma would find itself a place in the modern world.2
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When the idea of Mandalay was first coming to light in the middle years of the 1850s, the world was going through a period of far-reaching change and political restlessness. The decade saw considerable advances in science and technology. The production of steel was revolutionized by the Bessemer process, the first transatlantic cables were laid, and Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species to instant acclaim. Much of America was enjoying an era of sustained economic prosperity, as trains pulled west to the gold rush in California and as millions of hopeful Irish and German immigrants disembarked from famine and unrest in Europe.
For the British, long decades of Indian expansion were only momentarily checked by the Great Mutiny of 1857, a passionate rebellion across the northern plains that led first to the collapse of the Raj in Lucknow and Kanpur and then to a bloody and vengeful reconquest, the overthrow of the last Mughal king, and the replacement of the East India Company with direct administration from London. Atrocities on both sides were to leave lasting scars and new thinking about colonial relationships.
Earlier in the decade, in 1852, a second Anglo-Burmese War, briefer than the first, had led again to an unambiguous British victory and the loss of more Burmese territory. Whereas the first was the result of aggression by the Burmese as well as British expansion, in this one the blame was entirely with Calcutta. It started with an incident: The governor of Rangoon fined the captains of two British ships for alleged customs violations. And then there was an ultimatum in which Lord Dalhousie, the governor-general of India, demanded that the Burmese rescind the fine and sack the offending governor. The Burmese government, aware of what might be in store, quickly accepted. But then the British naval officer on the scene, Commodore George Lambert (the “Combustible Commodore”), went ahead and blockaded the entire coastline anyway, without any additional provocation.3 Dalhousie, though furious with Lambert, then surmised that war was inevitable and decided to demand one million rupees, with the justification that this was the amount the British had already spent preparing for war. And finally, without even waiting for a Burmese response, the British seized Rangoon and other port towns in the south.
The Burmese were drawn into a war they neither wanted nor were ready for. The army was led by the lord of Dabayin, son of the Maha Bandula and a career military man. But despite an energetic resistance at Pegu, thirty years of technological advance on the British side and few improvements on the Burmese side meant that the defenders had little hope.
The fighting dragged on and effectively ended only when a revolution at the Court of Ava overthrew the incumbent king and placed the prince of Mindon, a half brother of the king’s and the future builder of Mandalay, on the Konbaung throne. In the dark days of the second war, when defeat was again staring them in the face, those inclined to face reality banded together around the thirty-nine-year-old prince, earning him the animosity of the more conservative and militant faction then in charge. Rumors circulated, and as British troops pushed north, Mindon fled north to his ancestral home at Shwebo and raised the standard of revolt.
He was accompanied by his brother the prince of Kanaung as well as many armed retainers. More men were recruited and organized, and before long, along the banks of the Irrawaddy, they were able to smash the loyalist troops sent out against them. When they then appeared on the outskirts of Ava, at the head of their new army, their pennants flying against the low blue green hills in the clear November light, the nobility, not wishing for more bloodshed, changed sides. Two of the court’s most powerful ministers, the lords of Kyaukmaw and Yenangyaung, convinced the Household Guards to stand down. The gates were thrown open, and Mindon and Kanaung entered the great teak ramparts unopposed. It was more a coup than anything else, and now a new generation was in charge.
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By 1853 the old men of the once sprawling Burmese empire had finally retired from the chambers of government and were being replaced by a younger generation that had grown up under the shadow of English power. The older men included military men like the accomplished general Mingyi Maha Minhla Mingkaung, a cavalry officer who had commanded all Burmese forces in Manipur and Assam in the 1810s and had gone on to be a deputy of Bandula’s during the first English war. However much they may have tried, it would have been difficult for these men, fueled by memories of earlier conquests and martial pride, to grasp Burma’s new position.
But there were also others who did try to learn new things and who made possible the burst of reformist activity that would soon follow. The lord of Myawaddy, for example, best known in Burma today as a man of letters, was also famous in his own time for his beautiful works of music and drama and especially his translations of the Javanese epic Enao. He was a soldier as well and an all-around scholar-administrator, and he came from a line of courtiers more than two hundred years old. Schooled at the Parama Monastery near Ava, he rose to the rank of minister while at the same time making a name as both a distinguished artist and musician and a brave soldier. In the war against the English he had been the commander of the left on the Arakan frontier and had seen firsthand the destructive power and discipline of the East India Company’s army.
While this turned some men to simply hate the enemy, Myawaddy instead became curious and more eager to learn about the outside world. He taug
ht himself some Hindi and learned a few lines of a Latin hymn that he happily sang for visiting British envoys.4 He encouraged new ideas and new thinking. He too died just after Mindon’s takeover at the old age of ninety-two.
The real doyen of European learning in the interwar years was a member of the royal family, the new king’s great-uncle, the prince of Mekkaya. The American Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson described him as “a great metaphysician, theologian and meddler in ecclesiastical affairs.” Born in 1792, he had learned to read and understand spoken English, taught by a mysterious English member of the court known only as Rodgers, and had obtained a copy of Dr. Abraham Rees’s recent Cyclopaedia, a massive multivolume work, keenly poring over thousands of articles on the recent Industrial and Scientific Revolution. Later he helped compile the very first English-Burmese dictionary, and at numerous meetings with the British envoy, Sir Henry Burney, Mekkaya would question him relentlessly on matters of geography, science, and mathematics. Burney noted that the prince had both a barometer and a thermometer hanging in his apartment and that his personal library included Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, the Holy Bible, and recently translated papers on the calculation of eclipses and the formation of hailstones. He concluded that “he had never met an individual with as great a thirst for knowledge as this Prince.”5 Ahead of Siam, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, the Burmese court was opening itself up to the West, and with Mindon’s coming to power, the stage seemed set for reform.
THE PENULTIMATE KING
Mindon is remembered by many Burmese as their last great king and among the most devout patrons of Buddhism ever. He is remembered for his innumerable works of merit, the monasteries and pagodas he built, the thousands of monks he sponsored, and his convening of the Fifth Great Buddhist Synod in 1871. The synod was billed as the first of its kind in twenty centuries, bringing together twenty-four hundred monks, including several from overseas, in a grand attempt to review and purify the scriptures. The monks recited the new edition day and night for six months under the shadow of Mandalay Hill, while over seven hundred enormous stone slabs, each engraved with a page of the revised canon, were being chiseled away by master craftsmen, there to be read for all time.6
That Mindon was a passionately religious man who took his religious beliefs to heart is not in doubt. He was passionate but not a fanatic in the sense of being intolerant of other faiths. He patronized the Islamic community in Mandalay, building a mosque and even a guesthouse at Mecca for the convenience of Burmese Muslim pilgrims. He was also happy to see the Anglican mission set up a new school just outside the palace walls, agreeing to send a number of his own sons there to be educated by the head of the mission, Dr. Marks.
But what is nearly never appreciated nor even remembered at all are Mindon’s political reforms, his attempt to refashion government and help his country modernize in the face of continuing British Indian expansion. They are not remembered largely because they failed in the end, lost with the conquest of General Prendergast and the titanic political and social changes that followed. But they were important nonetheless, deeply affecting the very fabric of Burmese society in the late nineteenth century and creating the context within which British colonial rule developed.
He worked closely with his half brother the Kanaung prince, and the two divided up between them the main areas of government, with Kanaung specializing in areas of military and administrative reform. It was almost a joint kingship, and Kanaung was designated heir apparent, to the deep chagrin of Mindon’s elder sons, with a lavish personal court rivaling that of the king himself. Mindon’s chief queen was also an important influence. She was his cousin, from a more senior branch of the royal family, and was well known for both her interest in science and astrology—learning to use an English nautical almanac for her calculations—and for her uncontested dominance over the hundreds of other royal women.
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Burma was not alone in its realization that it had to adapt to an increasingly European-dominated and fast-changing world. In Egypt, Mehmet Ali and his successors had already set in motion a series of reforms, encouraging the learning of Western science and technology, modernizing the armed forces, overhauling administration, and making possible the development of a huge cotton export industry. Similar reforms would be enacted in Siam under Mindon’s contemporary, King Mongkut (the king from The King and I), and in Japan sweeping social and political changes would begin in 1868 with the end of the Tokugawa shogunate and the Meiji restoration. Other countries in North Africa and Asia that had survived colonization into the late nineteenth century followed suit. Burma was not at the very head of the pack, but it was certainly not behind.
As an important part of their reform drive, Mindon and Kanaung arranged for dozens of young Burmese men, mainly sons of court officials, to be sent abroad for their education. Some went nearby to schools and universities in India, but a good number went farther afield, to Italy, France, and Germany. By the late 1870s several in the upper echelons of the Court of Ava were foreign-trained, and they would all become part of the final and ill-fated push for modernization.7
The army was also strengthened and reorganized.8 Factories were set up and began producing rifles and ammunition to replace the antiquated muskets still in use. Steamships were also imported, ten in all, and though they were meant for regular transportation, they came to play a critical role in maintaining internal security. Much more important, the system by which families provided men and officers on a hereditary basis into the army was dismantled, and instead a proper standing force was set up. For centuries the same families, proud of their martial tradition, had supplied Ava’s troops, and this connection to the crown had been a pivotal source of their status in their own rural communities. This was now undone.
In 1870 a telegraph line was laid linking Mandalay to Rangoon as well as to other towns in Upper Burma, and a system of Burmese Morse code was invented. Western books on chemistry, physics, and biology were eagerly sought, and plans were made to translate the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. Ambitious schemes and generous amounts of silver were poured into new industries, with factories producing everything from glassware to textiles, and though these were never economically viable, they were meant to show that a new Burma was being born just outside the ocher-colored ramparts of Mandalay.
At the same time, the business of government itself was refashioned, changing the workings of political power and, in the process, undermining (as with the ending of the crown service system) the very basis of social organization in the Irrawaddy Valley that had existed for hundreds of years. Administration was centralized and made more systematic, old royal agencies were abolished and new ones created, and an entirely new system for financing government was devised and implemented, replacing the traditional and often haphazard arrangements that had grown up organically over the centuries. The idea was that to be modern, there had to be uniformity, definite lines of authority, and clear boundaries of jurisdiction. These were things that had never existed before. The power of the hereditary gentry, the old clans whose influence over their townships had held sway since long before the present dynasty, was now diminished against the influence of Mandalay and its appointed agents. For as long as anyone could remember, members of the royal family and nobility had received towns or villages as their appanage, drawing their income from the income of these places (and thus known as the town’s myozas, or “eaters”). Now they would receive a salary instead, severing their links with the countryside. And a new tax was set up, meant to replace all existing (and again haphazard) taxes and fees. It was a revolution in the system of government and soon threw Upper Burma’s society into disarray.
Like Egypt’s, much of Burma’s modernization was to be financed by the cotton trade. Now without the fertile delta, the areas that made up Mandalay’s reduced kingdom rarely had a rice surplus, and Mindon realized early on that cotton was the one cash crop that could be encouraged and sold abroad, both to China and overseas, and that this
could keep his coffers full. For a while it worked, and in the 1860s as the American Civil War and the Union blockade of Confederate ports drove up world cotton prices, Mindon’s brokers were able to make a handsome profit. For a while times were good.
DIPLOMATS
For Mindon war with England was not an option. Unlike his father, who had tried saber rattling and may have entertained on more optimistic days dreams of driving the infidels into the sea; and unlike his great-grandfather, who actually believed that conquest in India was possible, Mindon had no similar illusions. But he did have an illusion of sorts, which was that friendship on equal terms was possible and that the British, convinced of his pacific intentions, might one day return to him the southern half of his kingdom.
Shortly after taking the throne, he had dispatched the lord of Magwe to Calcutta in a bid to negotiate a British withdrawal from Rangoon, but this had ended in total failure, temporarily strengthening the hand of hard-liners who wanted to fight on. But both the new king and Sir Arthur Phayre, recently appointed chief commissioner of British Burma, were committed to a peaceful resolution of relations, and their diplomacy, ably supported by the informal British agent at Amarapura, Sir Thomas Spears, slowly eased tensions. Through Spears, a Scottish merchant, Phayre even arranged for 250 durians, the foul-smelling “king of fruits,” native to the lost southern territories and a favorite of Mindon’s, to be shipped specially to the Burmese king as a gesture of goodwill.
Sir Arthur made a formal visit to the Court of Ava at the end of the rains in 1855. In the manner of the mid-Victorian imperialist-explorer, he was accompanied by geographers and scientists as well as an escort of over four hundred Indian infantry and cavalry, all traveling on two top-of-the-line steamships. But the Burmese had no desire to be outshone in the test of diplomatic wills, and Mindon ordered that the embassy be met at the frontier by his Armenian minister and confidant, T. M. Makertich, a scion of a local Armenian trading family, and a flotilla of over a thousand teak war boats and gilded barges.
The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma Page 18