Golden Earth

by Norman Lewis

  With the death of Mindon the atmosphere of mania thickened. The ministers of state had manoeuvred the supine Thibaw into the kingship in the mistaken belief that he could be more easily controlled than any of the more intelligent of Mindon’s numerous descendants. The stage was now set for a traditional and regularly recurrent Burmese drama, but one which, on this occasion, provoked an unwonted flurry owing to the presence of a foreign colony. All the king’s half-brothers and sisters who might have been considered dangerous to the succession and had been promptly popped into gaol, were now, according to the current Burmese euphemism, ‘cleared’. The English were much impressed by the preparations for this ceremony, which consisted chiefly in the making of a large number of capacious velvet sacks, a piece of exquisite sensibility on the part of whoever was in charge of arrangements. The ‘clearing’ was completed in a festival lasting three days, in the course of which the victims were placed in the sacks and respectfully beaten to death; princes, by light blows on the back of the neck; princesses, on the throat. The ingenious purpose of the red velvet was to camouflage any unseemly effusion of royal blood, an advance on the method of Thibaw’s ancestor, Bodawpaya, who burned to death all his surplus relations, complete with children and servants. Thibaw had shown, too, consideration for the modesty of the female sufferers, an aspect of Inquisitional burnings which was never found altogether satisfactory.

  The Burmese have always been ready to excuse such methods of State, as the lesser evil; and even survivors of the Thibaw massacre told English friends frankly that, placed in Thibaw’s position, they would have done the same thing. The trouble is always ascribed to the harem system, and the superfluity of potential heirs that it produced. Burmese apologists find excuses for this too. It was expected by the king’s feudatories and allies that he would take their daughters into his household, and not to have done so, in the face of immemorial custom, would have given offence. In this way, too, the Empire was held together. Certainly, history does not show the kings as unduly concerned with family matters. The only concubine who is highly praised in the chronicle for her capabilities, is one who knew where to scratch the king’s back without being told where it itched. For the rest, the kings are represented as not even being informed of the children born to lesser queens. A principal queen could be returned at her own request to an old lover: the fantastic tests which Brantôme reports as carried out by Renaissance princes to ensure they married virgins, would have filled the Burmese kings with amazement. Even when a queen was seduced, the royal reaction reads more like irritation than wrath. It seems that the kings were content to procreate a polite minimum of a hundred or so descendants, and leave it at that.

  Mandalay’s foreign colony had hardly recovered from this shock, when another unpleasant affair occurred. A smallpox epidemic carried off two of the king’s children; and as epidemic disease was always ascribed to demonic interference, the Indian soothsayers were called in. A formal inspection of the jars of oil buried with Mindon’s human sacrifices was made. In the remote past a magic correlation had been established between the condition of the oil thus buried, and the efficacy of the haunting. In this case only one of the four jars of oil was found to be intact; and at the full conclave of court astrologers which followed, it was unanimously voted that the city must be abandoned. When the king’s ministers refused to do this, the astrologers presented their alternative: the sacrifice of six hundred more persons. Five hundred were to be Burmese, most carefully assorted to include representatives of all ages and stations. A hundred were to be foreigners.

  Mindon had secured his fifty-two victims with tact, giving lavish public spectacles which attracted crowds, from which an odd spectator could be quietly spirited away without attracting attention. Thibaw, lacking Mindon’s solid, meditative endowments, went at the thing like a bull at a gate, and ordered wholesale arrests. Accounts of such Burmese customs by the early travellers had been too much for the reason of the eighteenth century; consequently they had been denied in Europe as fictitious: ‘an abundance of monstrous and incredible Relations … which one would not think could gain credit even with the weakest of their Readers.’ But now the Europeans were to see for themselves. A wave of utter terror seized the city, and wholesale evacuation began. The populace crowded aboard the Irrawaddy steamers or stampeded into the fields and hills. The paralysis of the life of the city together with some doubt as to the possible effect on relations with the English of the inclusion of the hundred foreigners necessary to make a success of the sacrifice, produced an official démenti of the project. A few of those arrested were never seen again and it was concluded that, in his usual ineffectual way, the king had contented himself with merely tinkering with the problem.

  * * *

  Beyond the walls stretched a desolation of tumbled bricks and weeds I found the spot where, according to a scale-model of the palace which had been erected, the apartments of the white elephant had stood. But of these, too, only the foundations remained. This singular beast dominated the imaginations of all the monarchs of South-East Asia; and although regarded as an avatar of Gautama in numerous previous existences – and therefore primarily of interest only to Buddhists – a kind of collector’s fever had developed, seizing such non-Buddhist potentates as the Emperor of Annam. This pressure by the uninstructed – the Hearsts of their day – on a limited supply, only increased the ferocity of the competition between the Buddhist rulers.

  The wars between the Burmese and their Siamese neighbours were usually undertaken – in theory, at any rate – for the acquisition, or recovery, of these picturesque symbols of power. ‘The king in his title,’ said Ralph Fitch, writing in 1586, ‘is called the king of the white elephants. If any other king have one, and will not send it to him, he will make warre with him for it; for he had rather lose a great part of his kingdom than not conquer him.’ In spite of the alleged rarity of albinism in elephants one could be relied upon to turn up sufficiently often in the days of imperial expansion to keep both kingdoms in a state of devastation.

  The whiteness of the elephant was nominal, and its sanctity depended upon so many esoteric factors, beyond the layman’s grasp, that a substantial body of literature on the subject grew up. The pinkness of the outer annulus of the eye entered into this, as well as the length of the tail, and the number of toenails. Ten toenails instead of the normal eight were required in a successful candidate. Black elephants possessing this number were collectors’ items, although not entitled to adoration, and were classified as white elephants debased by sin in previous existences. The final test, when all others had been passed, was the water one. If the skin, whether black, grey or otherwise, took on a reddish tinge when water was poured on it, the animal was conclusively white. It was elevated immediately to the position of first personality in the land after the king, accorded white and golden umbrellas, given the revenues of a province, diverted daily by a corps de ballet, lulled nightly to sleep by a sweet-voiced choir, and if of tender years suckled daily by a line of palace women – an honour eagerly contested by those in a position to aspire to it.

  But of all these spectacles and splendours, not a vestige remained. Nothing had survived the citadel’s devastation but a few antique cannon. The largest of them turned out to be imitations, with great immovable wheels made of brick. In the later centuries cannon assumed for the Burmese a purely magic significance, having taken over the protective qualities of the leogryph. As they were never fired, there could be no objection to their being fakes, with enormous intimidating bores and twenty-foot-long barrels. The kings were usually ready to offer its weight in silver for any piece of ordnance however old or cracked, and the palace of Mandalay where all the firearms in the country were stacked up, was a repository of strange museum pieces. They were drawn, when mobile, by teams of auspiciously marked bullocks, which were trained at the word of command to kneel and bow their heads to the ground. The gunners’ personal kit was stored in the muzzles. Occasionally a cannon would become, like
Alaungpaya’s three-pounder, the centre of a cult, and receive offerings of flowers and libations of brandy.

  By the end of Mindon’s reign it must have been clear that nothing could save Burma. The Burmese, together with all the rest of the Easterners, except the Japanese, were the prisoners of a cosmology composed of interlocking systems, all complete and perfect, and founded in error. Everything had been decided and settled once and for all two thousand years ago. No question had been left unanswered. It was all in the Three Baskets of the Law, its commentaries and subcommentaries; dissected and classified beyond dispute: the seven qualities, the five virtues, the six blemishes, the eight dangers, the ninety-six diseases, the ten punishments, the thirty-two results of Karma. Although Burma was a young nation it had inherited a civilisation with the hardened arteries of senility. By comparison with the certainities and self-sufficiency of Eastern Asiatic thought, the people of medieval Europe lived in intellectual anarchy. When the end came, the Burmese were beaten not so much by nineteenth-century gunners, as by the Galileos of three centuries before.

  * * *

  That day I was invited to Tok Galé’s house for lunch. He lived in the sere reflection of an English suburb, in a detached villa with front garden, gate and path. It was about two miles from the town’s centre, in the dacoit belt, and two or three miles from the White-Flag Communists’ frontier which ran through some low hills to the east.

  The Tok Galés were grandchildren of the Burmese ambassador to France under King Thibaw, and there was a faded photograph in the drawing-room of this dignitary in his court uniform, looking rather sullen, as a result, perhaps, of the long period of immobility imposed by the time-exposure. The family had adopted the Baptist creed, in its tolerant and accommodating Burmese form, and had taken English Christian names. The youngest sister, mild, sweet, and mysteriously unmarried, was Anne, who, in spite of not being a Buddhist had recently been accorded the great honour of acting for a short distance as pall-bearer at the cremation of the venerable U Khanti. Although she had the good sense to retain the Burmese costume, Anne was much anglicised by the friendships she had formed in the old days with members of the British Colony. She produced two autograph albums full of the familiar unrevealing snippets in which their memory was enshrined. An American officer had called her, unjustly I thought, a yellow Burmese rose, never having noticed, I suppose, that the complexion of the so-called yellow races is rarely yellow. In any case, if obliged to employ a floral analogy, I should have found this charming lady’s grace suggestive of the lily rather than the rose. Although the foreign colony of Mandalay was now completely dispersed, Anne maintained her westernisation at full strength by correspondence. She was a member of the Robert Taylor fan club, through which she had made many pen-friends, both in England and the United States.

  Lunch consisted of various curries, served in the Burmese style with soup, which was supped throughout the meal. The Tok Galé servitors stood behind our chairs, fanning us vigorously, while we maintained a gently platitudinous conversation that was at once both oriental in flavour and curiously Victorian.

  After lunch Tok Galé asked me if I would like to be presented to distinguished neighbours of his, the last surviving members in direct descent of the Burmese royal family; children of King Mindon, by different queens, who, in accordance with custom, had married each other.

  We found the Prince Pyinmana and the Princess Hta Hta Paya living in what is usually described, with grim understatement, as reduced circumstances. The Prince was much embarrassed because dacoits had broken into the house a fortnight before, and stolen all his clothes. Before I could be received, Tok Galé went home and came back with a jacket for the Prince to wear for the interview.

  The old couple received us in their living room. They looked very fragile, and Tok Galé said that in recent years audiences had very rarely been granted. The villa, which might have been damaged by bombing, was in a state of advanced disrepair. Plaster was flaking from the walls, which had been repaired by sheets of asbestos and iron grilles. The only pieces of furniture were a few worn-out chairs.

  Flanked by Tok Galé and myself, the Prince and Princess sat side by side on two of the broken chairs. They were waited upon by a female servant and her husband, who also served as interpreter. Coming into the royal presence from opposite directions, they shuffled along at a surprising speed on their knees and elbows, smoking large cheroots which were rarely out of their mouths. When a respectful proximity had been reached, they dropped into a comfortable kneeling position and awaited the royal commands with the benevolent patience of spaniels. Occasionally the interpreter leaned forward, took the cheroot out of his mouth, grasped the end of the Prince’s ear-trumpet, and bawled a translation of my remarks into it. Once, after shuffling backwards a short distance, he turned and made off to fetch some object of interest the Prince had called for, and on returning collected his baby which was shrieking in a back room, and came into sight still crawling, but this time on one elbow, the baby gathered in the other arm.

  In vain I sought in these aged, placid faces some vestige of the magic presence of their ancestor Alaungpaya, the village headman, who had conquered the Burmese throne with followers armed only with cudgels, driven the French from Syriam, spurned the English, waded in the blood of his enemies. It was generally acknowledged that fire streamed from Alaungpaya’s personal weapons; that, like the heroes of the Ramayana, he fought with fairy javelins and thunderbolts, and that wherever he stopped gorgeous birds and butterflies entered his dwelling. Here his race had come to an end, in these two feeble, affable old persons, subdued by resignation, and possessing no more than the normal dignity of old age.

  Occasionally there was a shrewdness in the Prince’s expression, inherited from his father, as well as evidence of a sense of humour, inappropriate in a ruling monarch, but which now in lustreless adversity could be given its wings. He was one of four brothers who had escaped the famous massacre, having been considered too young and unimportant for the dignity of the red sack. Later, to avoid the possibility of any second thoughts, he had become a monk. He was clearly well prepared for certain standard questions; particularly when asked for his opinion of Queen Supayalat, commonly considered to have been Thibaw’s evil genius. Why did Queen Elizabeth have Mary Queen of Scots killed? asked the Prince, apropos of Supayalat’s Borgia-like methods with rivals. The Prince’s eyes were twinkling merrily; he was obviously enjoying himself, and had suddenly taken over from the interpreter, and relapsed into fluent English. It was clear that he liked to stagger his visitors over matters of Burmese high policy in the past. ‘Supayalat’, said the Prince firmly, ‘was as good as the average Burmese lady. If an ordinary woman comes across her rival in love, she’ll do everything she can. Supayalat had the power, that’s all.’

  The Princess was the daughter of a Siamese lesser queen, and was also considered too insignificant for inclusion in the massacre. She was only fourteen when her mother took her by the hand and they went together out on to their balcony to watch the British troops march in. All she remembered of them was the shining helmets and the plumes. The Burmese, who had expected a sack and massacre of the traditional kind, were much amazed at the mildness of the soldiers.

  On the whole the Prince and Princess seemed to regret the old colonial days. Perhaps this was natural because, since Burma had become a free nation, their allowance had been reduced from eight hundred rupees each a month to four hundred rupees. The Prince also complained of the lack of intellectual nourishment these days, and asked me to try to send him a volume of Thomas Hood’s poems from England.

  CHAPTER 10

  Anawrahta’s Pagoda

  BEFORE coming to Mandalay it had been my intention to visit, if I could, the village of Taungbyon. Taungbyon lies only about twenty miles south of the capital, but I now realised that in the South-East Asia of today it might have become as inaccessible as Lhasa in the last century. This village was associated in about 1070 with Anawrahta’s attempt to stam
p out the indigenous Burmese religion of nat-worship. Anawrahta was a kind of minor Charlemagne of Buddhism. Conducting a crusade against the kingdom of Thaton he captured the unprecedented total of thirty-two white elephants, each of which was loaded with sacred books for the return to the capital. He also obtained by conquest or negotiation, the Buddha’s collarbone, his frontlet bone and an authentic duplicate of the tooth of Kandy. As a result of these triumphs he was acclaimed the foremost champion of Buddhism of his day.

  Anawrahta’s method of combating the older faith was to order the destruction of the nat shrines found, at that time, in every house in Burma, and to limit the practice of the religion to one village only – Taungbyon. Here elaborate arrangements were made for the celebration of the rites. The site was inaugurated by a spectacular assassination. On the pretext that they had failed to contribute a brick apiece towards the building of a pagoda, the king’s chief generals, the Shwepyi brothers, were executed by castration. Reading between the blurred lines of history, it may be supposed that the king was disappointed at the failure of their expedition to China which immediately preceded this event. Sent to obtain another Buddha tooth from the chief of Nanchao (Yunnan), they were fobbed off with a mere jade replica, which had been allowed by contact to absorb a trifling amount of virtue from the original. The generals happened also to be popular heroes, victors of numerous campaigns undertaken to carry the light of religion into adjacent countries; and the king perhaps felt they had usurped some of the lustre that was rightly his alone. As twins, and the sons of a well-known ogress, it must have been clear that they had the makings of superior nats, and it only required such a piece of monstrous regal caprice as their murder to complete the process.