The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (16 page)

I spoke to a local schoolteacher and to a nun, who had only recently returned from Rome, both very aware and proud of their unique inheritance. They said that no one in the village any longer spoke a language other than Burmese and some English, but that as recently as their grandfathers’ time (both women were in their thirties or forties), there were some who knew a bit of Portuguese. The schoolteacher said that her great-grandfather had served in Thibaw’s palace as part of a Royal Fifty regiment, and other ancestors had been translators at the royal court. Nearby, a crowd of children, many with brown hair and green eyes, were playing football. There was a sadness that things were at a turning point and that a community that had maintained its identity for so long would very soon lose its difference. They didn’t have the money to rescue their cemetery, its tombstones inscribed with the names of Galicians, Bretons, and Walloons, and no encouragement from the government to celebrate their heritage.

In 1861 Bishop Bigandet of the Roman Catholic mission in Mandalay made a pastoral visit to these same villages and wrote:

It is a remarkable fact that despite the great effect that must have been produced by the accession of the predominating Burmese element, the Christians of Burma exhibit unmistakable signs of their primitive origin in the features of their face. They have all[,] without exception, lost their family names, which would at once reveal the origin of their ancestors, but on a close examination of their personal appearance, particularly of the face, we can, with perfect ease, trace up their origin. At Monhla, for example, the writer remarked an old man with green eyes, and a face of the Dutch type. With other people, the French features could not be mistaken, whilst with most of the people dwelling in the village of Khiaonio, an observer could not fail to remark the striking resemblance between them and the descendants of the Portuguese as we see them, on the Western coast of the Indian peninsula and the Straits of Malacca.
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There would soon be other additions to the Burmese melting pot.

MUGHAL FUGITIVES

Shah Shuja, the Mughal viceroy of Bengal and Orissa in the middle years of the seventeenth century, was the second son of the emperor Shah Jehan and the empress Mumtaj Mahal.
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The Mughals were the new overlords of a vast Indian empire that stretched across nearly the entire subcontinent. Originally Central Asians, they claimed descent from Genghis Khan through Tamerlane, the great conquering warrior of Samarkand (and the Tamburlaine of Christopher Marlowe). The first Mughal emperor, Babur, had taken Delhi in 1526. From there he and his successors expanded east, soon establishing their authority over the entire Ganges Basin and by 1612 crushing the last remaining pockets of Afghan and Hindu resistance in eastern Bengal, stopping only at the swampy frontiers of Arakan. The Bengal sultanate was gone, and Mughal Bengal was Mrauk-U’s new neighbor.

Shah Shuja was a first-rate soldier. As a young prince he had taken part in many military campaigns, and even as viceroy he twice broke his tenure to travel to the northwest, where he led the fighting against Afghan rebels along the Khyber Pass. A typical Mughal aristocrat, Shah Shuja was also a man of considerable learning, cultured and polished, and his court was soon filled with appropriately refined Persian poets and scholars. There were minor border wars, against the kingdom of Kamarupa in the north and the small dependency of Cooch Behar, but
otherwise Bengal was largely at peace, and the local zamindars seemed overawed by the presence of a member of the imperial family as their immediate overlord. Grand buildings were built at Dacca, and the English and Dutch traders eager for a share of Bengal’s riches were welcomed.

In the autumn of 1657 the emperor fell ill. Rumors spread that the emperor had in fact died but that his death was being kept secret by his eldest son, Prince Dara Shikoh, to give him time to secure his position on the throne. The other three senior princes—Shuja included—then began their march on Delhi. In the end, and after many bloody battles, it was Prince Aurangzeb who emerged victorious. Dara was captured and killed, and Shuja, pursued by an imperial army under Mir Jumla, decided to flee to the east.

On 6 May 1658 Shah Shuja boarded at Dacca a Portuguese ship headed for Arakan and eight days later made contact with representatives of the Arakanese king. His plan was to stay in Arakan for only a short while and then to proceed to Mecca and ultimately to Persia or Constantinople. But the monsoon rains were just beginning, and the seas were rough. He asked for asylum in Arakan and help in later making his way to the west.

Shah Shuja was at first warmly received by the king of Arakan, Sanda Thudamma, and a house was built for the princely guest on the outskirts of the city. Mrauk-U, even in its heyday, must have seemed like a provincial backwater to the scion of one of the greatest imperial families in the world. He is said to have remained aloof from the Arakanese court, and this did little to enamor him to Sanda Thudamma, who presently cast an envious eye over the enormous treasure Shuja had brought with him. Even greater treasure was soon offered by Aurangzeb’s envoys for the new emperor’s fugitive brother. Weeks went by, and then months, eight months altogether. Sanda Thudamma did not hand over Shah Shuja to the Mughals. But neither did he allow him to leave. Instead the love-struck Arakanese monarch (even without advantage of a “damp cloth”) asked for the hand of Shah Shuja’s eldest daughter, the beautiful princess Ameena.
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The thought of his daughter marrying this half-barbarian chief drove the hapless prince over the top. He couldn’t escape, and in his desperation Shah Shuja decided to try to seize power. He had two hundred good men with him and the support of at least some of the local
Muslim community. But the plot could not be kept secret, and the king heard of it in time. Shuja’s followers were quickly rounded up. There was fighting, and parts of the city were set on fire, but Sanda Thudamma’s position was never in peril. Shuja managed to escape into the interior, hiding in the jungle for weeks before he was found and executed. The great treasure he had brought was melted down and brought into the palace. Ameena and the other princesses were taken into the king’s harem. Within a year the king suspected a plot against him and killed all the surviving members of the imperial family, including Ameena, who was said to be in an advanced stage of pregnancy. Her brothers were beheaded.

When the news reached Delhi, Aurangzeb was incensed. He would have killed Shuja and the rest himself, but he couldn’t tolerate the idea of some distant foreign monarch’s spilling the blood of his kinsmen. He also wanted to teach the Arakanese a more general lesson and check their still formidable military power. In 1665 Shayista Khan, the new Mughal viceroy of Bengal, sailed east at the head of a huge fleet of nearly three hundred warships, driving the Arakanese out of their fortress on Sandwip Island, while another force of sixty-five hundred under Buzurg Umid Khan hacked its way down the coast. The following year, after a long siege, Chittagong fell to the Mughals, marking the end of Arakan’s century-long hold over eastern Bengal. Two thousand Arakanese were sold into slavery, and over a hundred ships were taken. Many of the Portuguese mercenaries at Mrauk-U had changed sides and were permitted to settle in Mughal territory; their descendants still live at a place called Feringhi Bazaar, twelve miles south of Dacca.

Some of Shah Shuja’s followers also survived. After his abortive takeover attempt, those who were not killed were retained by the Arakanese king as archers and formed a special palace guard, eventually growing in strength and helped by fresh arrivals from Indian lands. They were finally disbanded in 1692 and then deported to the island of Ramree. Their descendants are known to this day as Kaman (the Persian word for “bow”) and live both in Ramree and elsewhere in Arakan. They speak Arakanese but often retain the Afghan or Persian features of their forebears. The present military government has categorized them as a distinct ethnic group and one of the 303 nationalities of the Union of Myanmar, surely the only one able to claim descent from the fleeing soldiers of an imperial prince.

Arakan as a kingdom did not fare very well after this onslaught of Mughal power. There was now no longer any possibility of raiding Bengal for slaves, and the Mughals made sure that Dutch ships steered clear of Arakanese ports. And on the kingdom’s other side more secure Burmese kings, rid of de Brito and other challenges, prevented any Arakanese aggression. The authority of Mrauk-U gradually shrunk, and by the early eighteenth century much of the countryside had lapsed into anarchy and conflict. Earthquakes regularly shook the land for decades, confirming in people’s minds the onset of bad times. And in 1761 an enormous earthquake raised the entire coastline by five feet. The end of the kingdom was near.

THE FLIGHT OF THE MING PRINCE

From the west it was the Mughals, moving in against the borders of a fast-shrinking Arakan. But to the north and east, it was an ever more vigorous China, pressing down hard, right into the heart of Burma. In China in 1646, after the fall of the Yangtze Valley and the eastern coast to the invading Manchu armies, the twenty-three-year-old prince of Gui, the last surviving grandson of the Wanli emperor, became the last and desperate hope of the Ming imperial cause. For years China had been at war. The Manchus under their leader, Nurhaci, had unified the Tungusic-speaking normads along the Amur River valley, first threatening the northern border regions and then taking Peking in 1644. Their new dynasty, the Qing, then moved down into China proper, scattering the loyalists of the old regime. Until the republican revolution of 1911, China would be ruled by these milk-drinking, cheese-eating onetime nomads of the far north.
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The prince of Gui’s father was the seventh son of the Wanli emperor, and the young prince had been brought up among the sybaritic pleasures and strict hierarchies of the Imperial City. He was now on the run, fleeing first to his ancestral estates in Hunan, central China, and then to the southwest near present-day Hong Kong. It was there, among the limestone cliffs of the Pearl River delta, that his fugitive court named him the Yongle emperor and rightful heir to the three-hundred-year-old Ming throne.

He became a lightning rod for the growing resistance to the Manchu occupation. For the next year and a half the prince of Gui and his
men trekked across the far south of China, along the borders of Vietnam, and then southwest into the tribal regions of Guangxi. The long flight from Peking meant that the self-styled imperial court was far from what a proper Ming court should be, and one contemporary observer described it as being filled with “all manner of betel-nut chewers, brine-well workers and aborigine whorehouse owners.”
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But it did rally the die-hards and for a while kept the advancing Qing rulers at bay.

By early 1650 Qing forces had managed a breakthrough, crushing opposition in areas that had declared their support for the prince of Gui and launching a direct attack on his southern bases. In this offensive the Manchus relied on Ming Chinese generals who had defected more than a decade before, and these generals pursued the loyalists farther and farther southwest until, in 1658, they made their last stand at the little border town of Tengyue and then slipped over the hills into the kingdom of Burma.

The prince of Gui entered Burmese territory in the hills of the northeast, part of a great arc of upland areas only indirectly under Ava’s rule. Here the the vast majority of the local people were not Burmese at all but spoke instead a variant of Thai or Siamese, known in Burmese as Shan. Some of these principalities were of considerable size. Chiangmai and Kengtung, for example, were the size of modern Belgium or Wales, while others were little more than a collection of impoverished mountain tracts. In the early years of the Ming dynasty many of these principalities, perhaps the first in Southeast Asia to acquire knowledge of guns and gunpowder from the Chinese, had expanded aggressively to the south, overrunning Ava and the Burmese plains. But more recently they had adopted a more modest posture; in varying degrees their rulers, or sawbwas, maintained a tributary relationship with the Court of Ava, providing daughters for the royal harem and gifts of silver and horses for the king.
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When the prince of Gui arrived with over seven hundred followers at the border post of Momein, he met first with a local Shan chief, requesting refuge in Burma and offering his sovereign a not inconsequential treasure in gold. The king at the time was Pindalay, who agreed, welcoming the prince and constructing for him a residence at Sagaing, just across the Irrawaddy River from Ava. But it turned out that the prince of Gui was only the first of many thousands of Chinese now streaming across the border, some refugees, others bandits and freebooters who had taken advantage of the anarchy in southwestern
China and now sought to terrorize the Burmese countryside. These marauding bands declared their allegiance to the prince of Gui and asked their leader to leave Sagaing and join them. They seized the towns of Mongnai and Yawnghwe in the east and routed the army Pindalay sent to try to stop them. Monasteries were burned. Whole villages were looted, and men and women taken captive and carried off. Soon they were at Tada-u, just outside the gates of Ava itself, where only the tough resistance of the king’s Portuguese artillery managed to stave off their advance.
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The prince of Gui was deeply apologetic. He insisted that he had nothing to do with what was going on in his name. Blame fell first on the Burmese king. Pindalay was a weak ruler, the son of a concubine rather than a queen and thus enjoying less than normal legitimacy. He had all along been manipulated by an increasingly powerful noble class, and this nobility now turned against him, making him the scapegoat for the troubles and replacing him with his younger brother the prince of Prome. It was the hereditary officer corps in the army that had first agitated for his removal. They had seen the devastation in the countryside firsthand. Many had families in the irrigated lands to the south of Ava, and when food became scarce in these lands as a result of the invading Chinese, they had appealed for their king’s help. Instead Pindalay had allowed his favorites and concubines to sell rice to the hungry at exorbitant prices. The army men then appealed to the royal ministers, who were quick to replace Pindalay with his half brother Prome.