The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (11 page)

Of a tribe known as the Loxing Man (“Man” meaning a type of barbarian), this learned study says: “They are not warlike by habit but are naturally friendly and submissive …  Their men folk and women folk are plentiful all over the mountain wilds. And they have no princes or chiefs …  They wear no clothes, but only take the bark of trees to conceal their bodies.” Others included the Bu Man in the forests to the east of the upper Irrawaddy: “They are brave, fierce, nimble and active … they breed horses, white or piebald, and trained the wild mulberry to make the finest bows.” Another, the Wangzhu Man, lived in the snowy ridges closest to Tibet, the home of the sand-ox with horns four feet long. Of these distant Burmese forebears, the book observes that “their women only like milk and cream. They are fat and white and fond of gadding about.” The Mo Man seemed even more carefree: “Every family has a flock of sheep. Throughout their lives they never wash their hands or faces. Men and women all wear sheep-skins. Their custom is to like drinking liquor, and singing and dancing … ”

It was these people who were marshaled into the Nanzhao war machine, trained to be fighters, and died in not inconsiderable numbers on far-flung battlefields, against Tibet and China and even farther afield. They also battled aliens closer to home. In 801, when Nanzhao was allied with China against Tibet, a combined Nanzhao-Chinese army defeated a polyglot Tibetan force, commanded by Tibetan generals but made up largely of captives from the far west. And in this way thousands of men from Samarkand and Arabs from the Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad, men from the court of Harūn ar-Rashīd and A
Thousand and One Nights
, were taken prisoner on a high Burmese mountain valley together with twenty thousand suits of armor.
¹⁷

By this time much of the Irrawaddy Valley was also under Nanzhao authority as the warlike peoples of the north pressed down. The ancient city-states one by one surrendered or were overrun by the powerful mounted archers coming down from the north. In 832, Nanzhao destroyed the city of Halin, close to old Tagaung, returning again in 835 to carry off many captives. According to the
Manshu
, “They took prisoner over three thousand of their people. They banished them to servitude
tude at Chetung and told them to fend for themselves. At present their children and grandchildren are still there, subsisting on fish, insects, etc. Such is the end of their people.”
¹⁸

Their cavalry are said to have swept down all the way to the Bay of Bengal despite stiff resistance. It’s difficult to imagine these men of the Yunnan plateau, perhaps in the captured chain mail armor of Baghdad, on their tough little ponies, with a scent of the windswept Central Asian grasslands, riding all the way to the palm-fringed beaches along the Andaman Sea. But these were different times, when unlettered nomads and the descendants of unlettered nomads were fighting their way into all kinds of unlikely places, like the Goths and Vandals in Sicily and North Africa.

By the tenth century the Nanzhao empire had slowly faded from history. By this time Buddhism, primarily the Mahayana and Tantric variety from Bengal, had become the dominant religion at Dali, and the Nanzhao court became keen patrons of the new faith. Perhaps this had sapped their warlike vigor. Or perhaps two centuries of campaigning had drained the Yunnan heartland of the men and wherewithal to continue its policies of expansion. In 902 the entire Nanzhao ruling family was killed in an internal power struggle, and around the same time contacts with China became less frequent. But intercourse with Burma may have deepened, both culturally and politically. The old elite, who spoke the Burmese-related language of Yi, was replaced, and the new elite established a more modest kingdom, simply known as the Dali kingdom, which survived for three more centuries.
*

But some of the old martial spirit must have remained, and as in all former empires, there would have been those who felt cheated from a life of invasion and plunder. They were still first-rate horsemen. And the Irrawaddy Valley, weakened from a century of invasion and subjugation, could hardly resist those tempted by the warmer weather and rich paddy fields. The tribes in the west—whose womenfolk had been enjoying their milk and cream or who wore sheepskins, and had never washed, looking forward only to drinking, singing, and dancing—these tribes under their
mang
(chiefs) began filtering south, perhaps following the course of the great river, and finally occupying the fertile rice
lands near present-day Mandalay. They called themselves the Myanma, or the strong horsemen.
*

THE TRAMPER OF ENEMIES

In 849, seventeen years after the Nanzhao’s cavalry had last swept through the towns of the Irrawaddy Valley, Pagan
†
was founded as a fortified settlement along a bend in the Irrawaddy River.
¹⁹
The new settlement may have been designed to help the Nanzhao pacify the surrounding countryside. It was certainly a strategic spot, close to the confluence of the Irrawaddy and its main tributary, the Chindwin, and just to the west of a richly irrigated rice plain. Perhaps there was a long tradition of ironsmithing and a vibrant weapons industry.
²⁰
Within two hundred years Pagan had become the center of a great Buddhist kingdom, and its ruins today are one of the most magnificent sites in all Southeast Asia. Its core area was this flat arid expanse (once called
tattadesa
—the “parched land”), but its imperial writ would one day cover much of present-day Burma, from Tibet to the Straits of Malacca.

The Burmese chronicles say that after the Nanzhao invasions a new dynasty arose, founded by a semimythical warrior-king named Pyusawhti. An expert archer, he came to Pagan and defeated, in the manner of St.
George,
a great bird, a great boar, a great tiger, and a flying squirrel, freeing the local folk from their terror. Some accounts say that he was born of the union of a prince of the sun and from the egg of a dragon; others that he was a scion of the Sakiyan lineage of Tagaung, that he lived to the age of 110 years, and that he was a giant of a man, five cubits tall.

It seems very likely that whatever his measurements and human or superhuman ancestry, he was connected in some still slightly mysterious way with the old and fallen house of Nanzhao. The ruling class of Nanzhao had a peculiar naming system, in which the last name of the father became the first name of the son. And this was the naming system
of Pyusawhti and his descendants for seven generations. Somehow, two hundred years of the Nanzhao Empire had washed up on the banks of the Irrawaddy and would find a new life, fused with an existing and ancient culture, to produce one of the most impressive little kingdoms of the medieval world. From this fusion would result the Burmese people and the foundations of modern Burmese culture.

*

For two hundred years or so this new kingdom at Pagan slowly gained ground. Then in the eleventh century came a great burst of human energy in the form of Aniruddha, who seized the throne as a teenager in 1044 after killing his cousin in single combat, “his mother’s milk still wet upon his lips.” His name means “the ungovernable, the self-willed,” and he would make Pagan the center of a new all-Burma Empire.
²¹

The chronicles remember him campaigning in every direction, aided by his four captains. To Prome, enclosed by massive walls and with a proud and ancient court, Aniruddha rode with a “great company of elephants and horse,” annexing the city-state and taking away its fabled Buddha relics. He also led his men to the old Nanzhao heartland and then built a line of fortified towns at the foothills of the Shan plateau to guard against any fresh incursions. It was an energetic reign, much still lost in legend, but after thirty-three years this king had done what no one had done before. He unified the Irrawaddy Valley under a single sovereign and created a kingdom that matched fairly closely the borders of today’s Burma.

He did this not simply because of a love of conquest. Shipping across the warm waters of the Indian Ocean was becoming commonplace as sailors slowly mastered the monsoon currents and as economic expansion in both the East and West made long-distance trade ever more profitable. From Ceylon and South India to the South China Sea the most direct route took ships first to the Tenasserim coast and then through the Straits of Malacca. For Aniruddha and his court, capturing these seaports and profiting from global business must have been an attractive proposition. He took Thaton, a principality along the coast, and then fought his way all the way down to the Malay Peninsula. His votive tablets have been found there, near the breezy shoreline, not far from the island of Phuket and a thousand miles away from Pagan.

The society over which he presided espoused eclectic religious
beliefs, with the worship of spirits and
naga
dragons happily coexisting with Buddhism and Hinduism and even currents of Islam. The Theravada Buddhism of Ceylon and South India competed with the ever more fashionable Mahayana and Tantric beliefs and practices of neighboring Bengal and Tibet, including Tantric practices that would shock and disgust the more prudish Burmese Buddhists of later generations. Aniruddha himself, like many in medieval times, was a man of passionate religious fervor, building temples and pagodas at Pagan and elsewhere. He was also the patron of the indigenous
nat,
or spirit cults of Burma, organizing their worship around a single national system.

By the twelfth century—the time of Saladin and the crusader kings—Pagan was at the height of its glory and extent. Buildings of sublime beauty soon rose up along the banks of the Irrawaddy. It was a society of great creativity and energy, absorbing and transforming art and ideas from across the Indian subcontinent. Its kings and nobility wrote in Sanskrit and Pali as well as different native languages, experimenting with various Indian alphabets. The Burmese language itself was reduced to writing (with an alphabet from South India), and new books of Burmese grammar were enthusiastically compiled. Ideas and institutions of government, many inherited from Prome, others perhaps from Nanzhao or imported fresh from India, were brought together to become a tradition that lasted into the nineteenth century.

Pagan’s growing wealth and power did not escape notice overseas. In 1106 an embassy was sent to the haughty Chinese imperial court at Kaifeng. The dynastic history of the Sung records that the emperor first ordered that the embassy be treated with the same rank and ceremony as the Colas of South India. But the Grand Council observed that the Colas were subordinate to the Sri Vijaya kingdom of Sumatra, whereas Pagan was now a big and independent kingdom. In earlier times imperial decrees to the Burmese court were written on “thick-backed paper and enclosed in box and wrapper.” Now, the Grand Council recommended the same ritual should be followed toward Pagan as toward the king of Annam and the caliph of Baghdad. All appointments and decrees should be written on “white-backed, gold-flowered, damask paper, and stored in a partly gold-gilt tube with key, and forwarded in a brocade silk double wrapper as sealing envelope.” The emperor consented to this wise advice.
²²

Aniruddha was followed by a line of able kings. Together they erected thousands of temples and hundreds of monasteries, libraries,
and colleges and repaired and constructed the dams and weirs that made middle Burma a great producer of rice. The chronicles even say that one of the Pagan kings, Aniruddha’s grandson Alaungsithu, sailed around the world, to Sumatra, Bengal, and Ceylon, climbing Mount Meru at the center of the earth and then traveling to the Zambutha-byebin, the fabulous rose apple tree that grows at the World’s End.
²³

The period of Pagan’s greatness in the eleventh and twelfth centuries coincided with a time of unrest and upheaval throughout much of Asia, when Buddhism was in retreat nearly everywhere. In India, Mahmud of Ghazni and his Turkish and Afghan cavalry were sweeping across the Ganges plain, sacking the holy city of Benares in 1033. To the north, in China, the Sung dynasty was overseeing a gradual decline in popular support for Buddhism and the parallel rise of neo-Confucian ideas. To the south, the Colas, worshipers of the Hindu god Shiva, were extending their reach into Ceylon and Sumatra. And in Bihar, the Buddha’s birthplace and very center of Buddhist learning, the ancient universities of Nalanda and Vikramasila, once home to thousands of scholars and tens of thousands of students from around Asia, were falling into decline, waiting to be overrun by the energetic Islamic armies to the west. Scholars from these universities traveled to Tibet for refuge, and others may have traveled to Pagan. The people of Pagan, as fervent practitioners of Buddhism and increasingly of Theravada Buddhism, saw themselves more and more as the defenders of a threatened faith and an island of conservative tradition in a hostile and changing world.

Once Burma had been part of a far-flung and dynamic conversation, a component of the Buddhist world that linked Afghanistan and the dusty oasis towns of the Silk Road with Cambodia, Java, and Sumatra, with scholar-officials in every Chinese province, and with students and teachers across India. Now the conversation was shrinking. Burma’s Buddhism would become even more impassioned. Not part of Christendom, the Islamic world, or the cultural worlds of Hindu India and Confucian China, Burma, proud and resolutely Theravada, would be left largely to talk to itself.

*

Visitors to Pagan today will have a good intimation of the onetime prosperity and splendor of this medieval Buddhist kingdom. There remain
a multitude of temples and pagodas, thousands by some accounts, some in ruins but many in good repair, piles of elegant masonry stretched over miles of sandy windswept plain, the reddish pink earth bordered by scrublands and the dark blue of the Irrawaddy, here over a mile across, and then the denuded mountains in the distance. But it is difficult to really imagine what Pagan was like at its height as only the religious structures remain, the rest gone or buried by earthquakes, fires, and long years of natural decay. Except for parts of a wall and the royal library, there is nothing left of the royal residences and government buildings or the streets and shops and ordinary homes of eight centuries ago. Here and there are patches of cultivated land, growing sesame, cucumbers, and groundnuts, where once were grand plazas and crowded markets, and bamboo and thatch huts, where there stood magnificent teak palaces.