When Phayre and Mindon first met, Mindon began the interview by asking in the traditional Burmese manner, whether “in the English country … the rain and air were propitious so that all living creatures were happy.” They spoke amiably about such diverse topics as sailing and steamships, the size of the Russian Empire, America’s republican system of government, Anglo-American relations, recent developments in Persia, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire, and the relationship between the (soon-to-be-last) Mughal emperor and the British Empire.9
The last topic was more than a passing interest. Mindon did not care as much about the substance of his relationship with Calcutta and London as about the form. It was a matter of personal and national pride that Burma be treated as a sovereign country even if in every way its actions were to be circumscribed by British power. Mindon was conscious of history. On the Burmese Glass Palace Chronicle, he said: “Read it carefully and let it enter your heart. The advantage will be two-fold. First, you will learn the events which have passed, and the kings who have succeeded each other; and secondly, as regards the future, you will fathom from them the instability of human affairs and the uselessness of strife and anger.”10
They were wise words. He also said: “Our race once reigned in all the countries you hold in India. Now the kala have come close up to us.”11 By this he meant that the Burmese and kindred peoples were the original peoples of the subcontinent, pushed aside over the centuries by men from the West, Muslims and now Europeans. It hinted of better times long past and that history was not on the side of the Burmese.
All the same, for now the Civil War in America was keeping cotton prices high. But soon three things would come together to undercut the king’s reforms: The first was Britian’s insistence on liberal trade, something that would cripple the royal treasury. The second was the gathering crisis in China. The third was rebellion at home.
THE PRINCELY REBELLIONS OF 1866
At around noon on 2 August 1866 the princes of Myingun and Myinhkondaing, elder sons of the king, set fire to buildings within the palace walls as a signal that their rebellion had begun. They had been unhappy with their father’s appointment of Kanaung as heir apparent, and relations between uncle and nephews had worsened over time. The two princes had once been caught stealing into the palace in the middle of the night after an evening of frolicking outside (and, according to one story, killing the sacred royal cow for some late-night steaks), and on this and other occasions the king had, perhaps unwisely, left it to Kanaung to discipline the youths. Now they would have their revenge.
Kanaung had been chairing a meeting to examine recent changes in the tax system. About halfway through, Myingun and Myinhkondaing together with several dozen followers entered the small pavilion where the meeting was taking place, drew their machete-like dahs, and cut down the heir apparent as well as a number of other ministers and royal secretaries. My own great-great-great-grandfather Maha Mindin Thinkaya, the lord of Dabessway, who was at the time a royal secretary, would have normally been in the pavilion. But then in his seventies and complaining in the morning of a cold (caught, he believed, from washing his hair too late the night before), he had decided to take the day off and stay at home.
Kanaung was not so lucky, and his head was cut off and paraded about. The conspirators had also sent messages to several other princes, pretending they were from the king, and then killed the unsuspecting royals when they rushed to the scene. Soon general fighting broke out between the rival sides, and several high-ranking military officers were killed while personally leading efforts to contain the rebellion.
Mindon himself was about a mile away, at a temporary summer residence at the foot of Mandalay Hill. Together with another son, the Mekkaya prince, and his royal bodyguard, he managed to reenter the royal city unopposed. Two of the king’s senior ministers were now dead, one was captured, and only one, his old tutor, the lord of Pakhan, remained with him. Only after fierce fighting through the afternoon did loyalist forces manage to reorganize and throw the two princes on the defensive. Realizing they would not be able to get to the king, the conspirators retreated through the Red Gate, commandeered the king’s ship the Yenan Setkya, and regrouped near British territory.
The shocked king sent a column against them under an experienced general, the lord of Yenangyaung, who mustered the royal troops under the shadows of the medieval ruins at Pagan and then headed south under drenching rain.
But the rebellion was now evolving in an entirely different direction, for the attempted putsch at Mandalay had set off another princely revolt, this one by the son of the murdered Kanaung Prince. With other members of Kanaung’s family, the son, the prince of Padein, had left the city and decamped north at the ancestral home at Shwebo. Traumatized by his father’s gruesome end, he had feared for his own life and was uncertain of the king’s position. Mindon offered him amnesty and complete protection. But he was now encouraged by a growing crew of supporters and decided to raise his own flag of rebellion. The powerful local governor joined him and cobbled together a sizable force, which quickly marched on the capital.
It was now mid-September, and the British Resident at Mandalay, Colonel Sladen, guessed that Mindon’s days on the throne were numbered. He therefore refused the king’s request to make use of the residency steamer, and officials in Rangoon likewise refused to release the two royal steamers docked in Rangoon. There is no evidence for British complicity in the actual assassination of Kanaung and half the government, but neither did the British choose to lend a hand to Mindon at his hour of greatest need.
Padein was approaching from the north, east, and west, and Myingun in the south attracted an even larger following. Mindon considered abdication. But his chief queen, a respected astrologer, consulted her charts and predicted victory. Mindon carried on, and finally, after repeated appeals, the British released two Rangoon steamers. Together with two hundred war boats and ten thousand men, they then closed in on Mindon’s wayward sons. By October the sons had fled into British Burma and surrendered.
Padein was next. Another even bigger force, under the king’s loyal son, the prince of Nyaunggyan, including a division from the Shan hills under the sawbwa of Yawnghwe, was assembled at Mandalay. A delegation of Buddhist monks attempted a last-ditch negotiation, but this failed, and on a cloud-covered autumn morning, royalist forces under the prince of Nyaunggyan forded the Irrawaddy River with artillery, sixteen war elephants, and six hundred handpicked cavalry. Padein was routed by his cousin in a series of battles. He was eventually captured, confined for some time in the privy treasury, and finally executed for treason.
Mindon never really recovered from the affair. He had lost his closest colleague and friend, and his own eldest sons had turned against him. Reform efforts continued, but the king was increasingly drawn to matters of religion and left the business of government and diplomacy to a new generation of scholar-officials. And they had to deal with yet another set of problems, to the north, in China.
THE LAST STAND OF THE PANTHAY
On 19 May 1856, Qing officials in Kunming, the capital of the southwestern province of Yunnan, methodically oversaw a three-day massacre of the city’s Muslim community. Ethnic Chinese townspeople, the local militia, and imperial officials joined together and slaughtered between four and seven thousand Yunnan Panthay—men, women, and children—burned the city’s mosques to the ground, and posted orders to exterminate Muslims in every prefecture, department, and district in Yunnan. This was genocide, and the widespread attacks that followed triggered the beginning of the eighteen-year Panthay Rebellion, one that had devastating consequences for the Burmese kingdom next door.
In the latter part of the eighteenth century Yunnan experienced a dramatic transformation. The interior of China was already incredibly densely populated, and the pressures of continuing demographic growth coupled with generous government incentives convinced large numbers of people to migrate in ever-increasing numbers to Yunnan. These were the years after the Qing inv
asions of the 1760s and after trade had begun to resume between southwestern China and Burma. The migration led to an increase in the province’s total population from around four million in 1775 to ten million in 1850, larger than all of Burma at the time.12
Yunnan had a mixed society, Chinese as well as many other peoples, including many who spoke languages very similar to Burmese and who had lived in the area since at least the days of the medieval Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms. It also had a sizable Muslim minority, descendants of long-ago Mongol and Turkish soldiers and settlers as well as local converts. These were the Panthay. The new Chinese arrivals were different from the older Chinese inhabitants who had been there for generations. They were brash and aggressive, illegally occupying land, forcefully taking over silver and other mines, and enjoying a close relationship with the Qing government. Through them, Yunnan’s basic economic and cultural orientation took a decisive turn away from Tibet and Southeast Asia and toward China proper.
But for Burma, Yunnan remained important. In the nineteenth century, overland trade—cotton, silk, tea, silver—with the Chinese province was very important, especially after the British seized the coastline. And to the extent that this trade was in the hands of the king’s brokers and was taxed, financing for Mindon’s reforms relied on the steady progress of commerce. This would now change.
With the huge influx of Chinese settlers into Yunnan, animosity between the various ethnic groups, especially between the Chinese and the Panthay, flared into violence. In 1839 a local official organized a militia that with government consent slaughtered seventeen hundred Panthay in the border town of Mianning. Six years later in the early hours of 2 October 1845, local Qing officials, aided by bands from Chinese secret societies, barred the city gates of Baoshan and unleashed three days of frenzied violence on the Panthay population.13
But now, as Chinese repression moved into high gear, the Panthay were determined to fight back. Within four months of the Kunming massacre, Panthay forces captured Dali, where they declared the establishment of a new and independent kingdom. In the southern and eastern regions of Yunnan, fierce battles erupted as panicked provincial officials struggled to maintain lines of supplies and communications between Kunming and central China.
On 23 October 1856, in a ceremony marking the founding of the new state, the Panthay leader Du Wenxiu was formally declared Generalissimo and Sultan of All the Faithful. He had been born in the western Yunnan city of Baoshan in 1823, was educated in the Chinese classics, and studied for the Chinese Civil Service exams, a practice not uncommon among elite Panthay families. Though multiethnic in its support base and many of its policies, the new Panthay government also sought to revitalize Islamic teaching, establishing madrassas and printing the first Koran in China and encouraging the use of Arabic.
For Mandalay, this was not good news. Mindon sympathized with the Panthay, whom he saw as oppressed and as descended from the original inhabitants of the Yunnan. But he could ill afford the censure of Peking. Peking demanded sanctions against the renegade province, and Mindon was forced to comply; all trade to the north was stopped, crippling the royal treasury.
All this was happening against the backdrop of a much greater drama across China, the Taiping Rebellion, a civil war that consumed the lives of at least twenty million people between 1851 and 1864. Qing power was already being challenged, both from internal uprisings and from outside imperialist powers, when the self-proclaimed mystic and little brother of Jesus Christ Hong Xiuquan launched his massive revolt. At its height the Taiping (the “Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace”) controlled much of southern and central China. But by 1864 the tide had turned, partly with the help of Western forces, and the theocratic army was crushed.14
Once the main Taiping revolt was over, Qing forces mercilessly bore down on the Panthay and other more minor rebellions that had spread around the country. On 26 December 1872 imperial troops surrounded Dali. Du Wenxiu, in a move that he hoped would spare the lives of the city’s residents, decided to hand himself over to the Qing general. Swallowing a fatal dose of opium as his palanquin carried him to the Qing camp, Du was already dead by the time that he was delivered. But not to be robbed of the gratification of killing him, Qing officials hastily dragged Du’s body before the waiting troops to be decapitated. His head was encased in honey and sent to the emperor.
Three days later imperial troops began a massacre that, according to the government’s own conservative estimates, took ten thousand lives, including four thousand women, children, and old people. Hundreds drowned trying to swim across the near freezing waters of Erhai Lake. Others attempted to flee through the narrow passes at either end of the valley. All were chased down and killed by the Manchu cavalry. An ear was cut from each of the dead, and these filled twenty-four baskets, which, together with Du’s severed head, were sent to Peking. Thousands fled to Burma, where they still form a unique minority at Mandalay and in the hills closer to home.
By the time the rebellion was finally crushed and the first tentative mule caravans again began winding their way up and down the Shan hills, Burma’s finances were in growing disarray, and British and Burmese attempts to place their relationship on a steady keel were coming to a head.
AN EMBASSY TO VICTORIA
On a hot and sticky March morning, the SS Tenasserim, flying the peacock flag of the Burmese kingdom as well as the Union Jack, steamed down the Rangoon River and into the salty waters of the Indian Ocean. It was a new state-of-the-art ship, built in Glasgow for the Henderson passenger line, and came with no less than twenty well-appointed first-class cabins. On board was a delegation from the Court of Ava, led by the scholarly Kinwun Mingyi, a minister of the king’s, destined for England and for what he and his companions knew was their country’s last best chance at preserving its centuries-old independence.15
It wasn’t just a short trip in the manner of today’s diplomatic missions. The Kinwun and his team would remain in Europe for more than a year, mainly in England but with side trips to other parts of the British Isles as well as to Rome and Paris. Their hope was for a direct treaty between their king and Queen Victoria, which in their minds and those of the Burmese government would elevate them above the princely states of India and would serve as a guarantee against future aggression. But in visiting the West, the Kinwun also saw for himself the great gulf that had grown up between his country and contemporary Europe, not just in science and technology but in so many other things as well. What he saw and heard influenced him deeply and, through his writings, influenced others at Mandalay as well and would ultimately lead to change and tragedy.
The Kinwun was then fifty years old, having been born just before the First Anglo-Burmese War in a small town appropriately called Mintainbin (“The King’s Advice”) along the Chindwin River, not far to the northwest of Ava. He had followed a classical education, studying at the Bagaya Monastery at Amarapura, and developed a reputation as a first-rate scholar and poet. He was from the military caste, but he was destined for a softer career, entering first the establishment of the prince of Kanaung and then Mindon’s own service as a gentleman of the household and later as a chamberlain. When Mindon came to the throne, he appointed the Kinwun his privy treasurer and raised him to the nobility. From then on his ascent up the court ladder was assured. He rose to become the governor of Alon, the chief secretary to the Council of State, and finally a minister in his own right. Along the way he had been charged with studying the designs of ancient capitals and submitted detailed plans for the creation of Mandalay.
He had been of significant help to Mindon during the 1866 rebellion, and a grateful king had now asked him to take on this most important of tasks. Accompanying him were three other royal envoys. The first was Maha Minhla Kyawhtin, a junior minister, selected for his American mission school education and his knowledge of English. The second was Maha Minkyaw Raza, an aristocrat of partly Portuguese or Armenian background, educated at Calcutta and then in Paris at the École Centrale des Art
s et Manufactures. Europeans who knew him praised his polished and winning manner; he was perhaps the most Westernized of all the Burmese at court, often wearing French dress; he was even the subject of a brief poem by the Kinwun (such was the literary bent in those days of the Burmese ruling class), admonishing him for giving up his Burmese habits and for having taken a wife in Paris.
The last envoy was Naymyo Mindin Thurayn, a scion of an old aristocratic lineage that traced its ancestry back to courtiers of the old Ava dynasty, a graduate of the French military academy L’École Saint-Cyr and destined for a short career in the Cassay Horse regiment of the soon-to-be-extinct Burmese cavalry. And rounding out the team was a Mr. Edmund Jones, a “merchant of Rangoon” and king’s consul.16
Their ship sailed over the dark blue waters of the Indian Ocean, around Ceylon, and then through the Suez Canal and on to Cairo, where they marveled at the Pyramids. They also approved of what they saw as the Western-style administration of Egypt. In Italy, their first stop on the European continent, they were treated to a grand parade and an audience with King Victor Emmanuel before venturing on as tourists to Pompeii. The Kinwun described the ruined ancient city in detail and noted that through such excavations “people of modern times can learn how wise and advanced their ancestors were.” He said: “This is the habit of all Europeans—to endeavor always to discover and preserve ancient towns and buildings.” In general the Burmese envoys were impressed with newly unified Italy and saw in the Italian progress of the time something that Burma might usefully copy.
The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma Page 19