The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma

by Thant Myint-U

  It was onward through Florence and the south of France and Paris (where they stopped to have a look at Napoleon’s tomb) and arriving, on 4 June, at Dover. There the envoys received a very pleasant welcome from British officials (“we can never forget Dover until the end of our days”) and left in special carriages to a nineteen-gun salute as ordinary people waved and cheered from the sidewalks and their houses. Finally in London, they took up rooms at the Grosvenor Hotel, and Jones set about hiring the appropriate carriages and outriders, footmen, waiters, and messengers, all in special livery, for the new embassy of Burma.

  The next few weeks were a whirlwind tour of late Victorian society. First it was Ascot on a bright and sunny June day, where the Kinwun and his compatriots noticed that the Prince of Wales “was wearing an ordinary suit and moved about the crowd, speaking freely with everybody, without assuming the airs of a prince, as if he were an ordinary lord or a commoner.” All along the way people had cheered them on, and they had bowed and nodded in return. The envoys were warned such bright and sunny days were rare in England. They visited “a school where 700 young boys were not only taught, but also clothed, lodged and fed,” and they went with the lord mayor of London to the Tower of London, “where we saw the dungeon and the place where traitors were executed,” and then to a reception at the Kensington Museum. On another day they went to see the country home of the duke of Devonshire, listened to a concert, and enjoyed a five-course meal at Westminster with various members of Parliament.

  The Kinwun and his colleagues also visited Madame Tussaud’s, where they saw figures of people they had seen in real life, such as the Prince of Wales. As the Kinwun looked into a hall full of wax figures and visitors, he noted in his diary that he “found it difficult to differentiate between the lifeless wax figures and the human beings.” They were given a book about the museum, which they looked through together back at the hotel. When they visited a charity bazaar at the home of the earl of Essex, the earl took them inside and showed them “a painting of a monkey which had been bought by his parents for 40,000 rupees.” They attended that year’s Eton and Harrow cricket match, toured Middlesex Prison, spent an afternoon at the Crystal Palace, and walked around the “clean and tidy” casualty ward at St. George’s Hospital. Then it was Bethlehem Mental Asylum, where “patients were cared for in very pleasant surrounding.” Over the next week the team visited Westminster Abbey, went on a boat trip up to Hampton Court, and gazed at the exhibits at the British Museum. On a hot July evening, “as hot as any October day in Burma,” the envoys had a chance to repay some of the hospitality shown by throwing a reception on board the royal ship.

  For the Kinwun (less so for the others who had already spent time in the West) all this was eye-opening. If he had any doubts before that Burma could resist future Western aggression, he would only have more now. The gap, not only in science and technology but in so many aspects of society and political life, was plain to see. Until the fall of the kingdom the Kinwun would counsel restraint and compromise with the British; he would also be on the side of those pushing for ever more radical reforms within the palace walls. But for now he still had his mission, a treaty with the queen.

  On 21 June the mission was received by the queen herself at Windsor Castle. Dressed in their most gorgeous silk and velvet robes, they traveled in excited anticipation on the royal train and were met at the little station outside London by the queen’s lord chamberlain, Viscount Sydney, and three state coaches. In the castle they noted that the queen stood up to receive them (“the European way of showing the deepest respect”), and the Kinwun handed the queen a casket containing the royal letter of greeting and the boxes of gifts.

  “Is His Burmese Majesty, the King of the Sunrise, well?”

  “His Majesty is well, Your Majesty.”

  “Did Your Excellencies have a pleasant journey to England?”

  “We had a pleasant journey, Your Majesty.”

  It wasn’t much more than that, and the envoys were disappointed that they had been presented to Victoria not by the foreign secretary but by the duke of Argyll, the secretary of state for India. But they hoped this was a start, and after a final walk around the castle, it was back to the Great Western Station and the Grosvenor Hotel for a rest. That evening the Kinwun and his aides were invited to a state ball at Buckingham Palace, “where members of the royal family, their friends, ambassadors of foreign countries and their ladies, lords and dames, high officials and their wives romped, danced and made merry.”

  A big part of their time in Britain was also spent meeting with the various chambers of commerce, whose real interest was not so much Burma as Burma as a back door to the fabled markets of China. A China–Burma railway seemed to hold the key to untold fortunes. The Kinwun visited Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and several other industrial cities, touring factories and meeting with local businessmen, and at each place the interest in China loomed large. Crowds of curious people followed the envoys everywhere, and at the Lime Street Station in Liverpool nearly two thousand men, women, and children greeted the embassy as they arrived on the six o’clock train from Birmingham.

  The Kinwun tried to impress the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce with Burma’s potential. It was a way of describing the country that was to be often repeated over the next century.

  [O]ur land is fertile and richly endowed with minerals and raw materials. We have great mines of rubies and other precious stones. Our teak has no equal in the whole world. European visitors marvel at our gushing oil wells. We have also iron and coal. We produce gold and silver. Our land produces enormous amounts of sesame, tobacco, tea, indigo, all kinds of paddy, all kinds of wheat, and all kinds of cutch. We are glad to note that western nations agree with us that the time has now come to develop this rich country.17

  By this time the notion that the Burmese king was somehow a hindrance to opening a backdoor trade to China was gaining currency, and at Halifax the Kinwun took pains to make clear that Mandalay was not at all opposed to a railway to China but that the routes suggested thus far were impossible to follow as they would pass wild and desolate areas where the terrain would challenge even the most modern engineering.

  At Glasgow, after a visit to the stock exchange, they were hosted to a lunch at the town hall with three hundred merchants. This was the home of many of Rangoon’s primarily Scottish business community. The president of the Chamber of Commerce said: “[W]e must be truthful and say that the commerce of the Burmese kingdom of the past few years has not progressed at all, because of many difficulties and hindrances, and only when the Burmese King is prepared to remove those difficulties and hindrances, will the two kingdoms really benefit.”

  The tour continued. On 26 September they crossed the Irish Channel, and took the train to Dublin, where they stayed at the Shelburne Hotel and visited St. Patrick’s Cathedral as well as the “great teaching school of Dublin” (Trinity College). For evening entertainment, their Irish hosts organized a show that included a pair of Siamese twins and dances by a couple of dwarfs. As heavy rains fell, they traveled through the countryside; the Kinwun noted that there was very little cultivation and that the soil in Ireland seemed much less fertile than in England, consisting only of “marshy lands, dark brown in colour.”

  At a private observatory in Newcastle, the Kinwun was interested to learn that the moon was covered by deep valleys, that its water boiled, then froze during alternate weeks, and that there were no living creatures. And at Holyrood, in Edinburgh, the Kinwun and his colleagues gazed at the portraits of the Scottish rulers, and the Kinwun expressed particular interest in the “tragic history of the beautiful Mary Queen of Scots.”

  All this was wonderful, but after months of traveling around, there had been only the one audience with the queen and no sign that the British were at all interested in a treaty. Back home Mindon was fast losing patience, and in November he ordered the Kinwun and the others to Paris, a veiled warning to London that Burma had other friends and in the h
ope of finalizing a new commercial treaty with the new French republic. But here there were sights to be seen as well, even amid the destruction of the recent Franco-Prussian War, including at the Louvre, where they marveled at the collection of weapons, the Japanese silks, and the Egyptian mummies, and at the National Library, where the Kinwun was startled to find an old map that included Burma and was apparently drawn by Marco Polo at the time of Pagan. This, he said, made him realize “that Europeans had been visiting Burma for so many centuries.” Then, as Christmas approached and under their very first snowfall, the team trekked up to Versailles, where they met the French president and signed a commercial treaty. It was the beginning of a Franco-Burmese relationship that in practice came to little but that would soon encourage the British to imagine the worst and decide to end the Kinwun’s kingdom.

  THE LAST GAMBLE

  Ever since the princely rebellions of 1866 the king had been reluctant to create a new heir. The murder of his half brother Kanaung by his own sons and the bloodbath that followed had sickened him. He knew that a smooth succession required that he choose among his sons, but he also knew that in choosing one, he could be condemning others to imprisonment, exile, or worse. There had been peaceful transfers of power in the past, most recently in 1819, but these were different times, and often reckless British intrigue only encouraged rivalry and distrust within the royal clan. And so he had chosen to ignore the issue, though every year the future cost of this willful neglect must have weighed increasingly heavy on his conscience. His favorite son was the Mekkaya prince, intelligent and capable but also ambitious. He had for a while been given charge of the new factories being built outside the city walls and had considerable experience in government. But when he was discovered conspiring with a particular ministerial clique, a new edict had to be issued to end all private communications between officials and royals.

  Mindon’s death, when it came during overcast days of late 1878, was sudden. The king was struck down with dysentery, and the best efforts of his German physician had little effect on his fast-worsening health. His Majesty was confined to his gilded thalun bed in his private apartments and was looked after night and day by his wives and daughters and the retainers of his innermost court.

  A few hundred yards to the northeast, the power brokers of Mandalay were gathered to decide what would happen next. Present were all the senior ministers—the wungyis and the atwinwuns—together with the captains of the Household Guards, men whose very titles (Master of Gate) suggested their value in any palace coup. They all were members of the nobility, and several were closely related by blood and marriage. Together they represented a political establishment that reached back over 130 years to the founding of the dynasty. More than a few were descended from lineages even older than the royal family itself.

  Their first desire was to avoid civil war. If the king wouldn’t appoint a successor, then the responsibility, by tradition, fell to them. The obvious choices were the eldest princes: the prince of Mekkaya, already mentioned; the prince of Nyaunggyan; and the prince of Thonze. They had stood by Mindon in the darkest days of 1866, and their mothers were high-ranking queens, each with considerable following and influence. But few wanted any of these three princes. Theirs would be a radical choice.

  By the time they met, some dressed in snow white silk jackets and others in long cherry-colored velvet robes, they already knew what they wanted: a pliant prince, pliant, they said, as “soft bamboo,” someone they could collectively control.18 The world was much too dangerous for an irresponsible or a headstrong royal to be placed in charge. They all were deeply devoted to monarchy but were more than willing to assert themselves over the actual descendants of Alaungpaya, now doubtless scheming themselves, in other gardens and behind other teak walls, for power at the Court of Ava. Beyond the few mature princes, there were many more in their teens or even younger available for election.

  A minority added another element for consideration. These were the men around the Kinwun, the erstwhile ambassador to Queen Victoria. He was the most experienced minister in government, and he and his protégés were inspired by what they knew of European government and the idea of constitutional monarchy. The Kinwun was a former holder of high military office and had a certain backing within the army. He had also served as governor of Alon, the principal recruiting grounds for the Household Guards, and had married into the family of the hereditary chief of that province. The old man added muscle to the younger scholar-officials attracted to his leadership.

  The old lord of Yenangyaung was one of those who met that damp September day. A member of the twinzayo gentry, from the rich oil-producing area to the south, he was allied by marriage with a number of important ministerial and military office-holding families. Tough and resourceful, he had fought the English in 1852 and enjoyed showing off his battle scars as well as his most recent twenty-something mistress. One of his many daughters was married to the king, and her son, the eight-year-old prince of Pyinmana, was his natural candidate. But many princes were related by blood to the aristocratic clans represented that day, and other suggestions were also put forward.

  The deciding influence was that of the Middle Palace queen. Mindon’s chief queen had died some years before, and the Middle Palace queen was the highest-ranking of all the royal women. She was ambitious but had no sons, and so her ambition was to ensure that one of her daughters be the most senior wife of whoever next ascended the Konbaung throne. She too wanted a pliant prince, and her choice was the prince of Thibaw, the son of Mindon by a relatively inconsequential queen. Unknown to some, Thibaw was then already in love with the Middle Palace queen’s eighteen-year-old daughter, slight and with luminous brown eyes, the princess Supayalat. In the end it was a coalition between the Kinwun and his reformists, on the one hand, and the dying king’s ranking wife, on the other, that sealed the election. On 19 September 1878 the Council of State appointed Prince Thibaw as heir.19

  This was only phase one of the Kinwun’s plans. He and the Middle Palace queen secured control over the palace complex with the help of the Household Guards and then ordered the arrest of many prominent members of the royal family, including all the elder princes, Mekkaya, Thonze, and the rest. Mindon on his deathbed heard what had happened and, after listening to the desperate pleas of the princes’ mothers and wives, had them released. But the old man knew that his days were numbered, and as his last edict he named each of the eldest princes viceroy of a distant region, a way of getting them to leave Mandalay and out of harm’s way at once. But it was no good. No one was afraid of the ailing king anymore, and his orders were rescinded by the Council of State and the princes rearrested. Soon Mindon was dead, believing to the last that his sons were safe.

  On 8 October, Thibaw appeared at the Glass Palace and was proclaimed king of Burma.

  REFORMERS IN CHARGE

  Thibaw was then all of twenty years old, shy and little known even within the palace walls. For a few years he had been sent to school at Dr. Marks’ Anglican mission, just across the street from the southern ramparts, where he arrived every morning with three other princes on elephant back, with a retinue of gaily dressed attendants and golden parasols overhead.20 On occasion he was made to stand in the corner for bad behavior. He had also learned to play cricket and was remembered as tolerably good with a bat, “being something of a slogger” as well as using unprincely language when bowled. On leaving he entered the prestigious Bagaya monastic college, busying himself during his teenage years with his Pali grammar and arcane Burmese legal treatises and becoming an accomplished classical scholar. Just a year before, he had passed the next to highest Patama-gyi examination and had been feted by his proud father in a grand ceremony. It was around then that he fell under the spell of Supayalat, his strong-willed half sister, who was no scholar but was already adept at understanding how power really worked at the Court of Ava.

  A month after Thibaw was formally appointed king, the Kinwun and the other senior officials met at a
newly built pavilion in the South Royal Gardens and set in motion a series of sweeping reforms. Dozens of princes and other members of the royal family were still in prison. To ensure that others in the conservative establishment could do no harm, they dismissed from office the heads of powerful ministerial factions, together with a host of other courtiers. In their place, ministers and army officers who had supported their coup were rewarded with new posts and attractive titles.21

  Government was reorganized around fourteen ministries, the old system of audiences with the king was abolished, and a cabinet-style regime was set up. A proper salary scale was also instituted with bureaucratic ranks, and even the new king and queen were now required to apply to the treasury secretary for funds. All this was done in deliberate imitation of Western administrations, and for a short while it looked as if there would be a fresh start. In an interview with the London Times in November 1885, Thibaw remarked that he had been, for his first year as king, virtually a prisoner of his own ministers.

  On specific policy issues there was also quick action. A tentative agreement was reached with a British firm for the construction of a railway through Upper Burma (something the merchants of Glasgow had been impatiently demanding), restrictions on trade were relaxed, and as a friendly gesture, an armed guard was permitted to be stationed outside the British Residency. More traditionally, and reflecting the literary inclinations of many of the court’s grandees, the new king was also presented with thirty-six new works of orthography.

  *

  All this time the young king was practically powerless, but he was still the king, and the hopeful lord of Yaw took it upon himself to bring his new monarch into the reformist fold.22 Yaw, like nearly all others in the top echelons at court, came from a long line of courtiers and Guard officers, his father having been a chief minister in the 1830s and his father-in-law having been Mindon’s first foreign minister. He was also brilliant, authoring numerous and learned works on everything from law to chemistry and even becoming an accomplished architect. A beautiful brick monastery he helped design, called Itakarama, based on Italian Renaissance designs he had studied, still stands, abandoned, just behind the Mandalay Golf Club.