The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (18 page)

With the king’s authority crumbling in the north, the southern provinces—around Pegu and the delta—seized the opportunity and declared their independence. Dissatisfaction had been fermenting for years in the south as taxes increased and people felt the weight of a harsh but ever more ineffectual government. The rebellion began at Pegu in 1740, led by a local Mon nobleman, Bannya Dala, who crowned himself king in 1747 and promised to restore the greatness of the onetime imperial capital. Many in the area were speakers of Mon, the language of the Pegu kingdom in the fifteenth century, and dreams of a Mon kingship had never disappeared.

Within a few years all the key towns of the south—Henzada, Prome, Martaban, as well as Pegu—were in the hands of the popular rebel regime, and Bannya Dala’s army then moved slowly northward to complete its victory. A bright future seemed guaranteed. The oncegreat fortress of Ava itself fell without much of a fight. The old royal family had surrendered and was led away into captivity. All that seemed left was a mopping-up operation, and small military detachments were sent out from Ava to secure the loyalty of the local chiefs to the new Pegu-based king. This was 1753, and on the other side of the world, a Virginia militia under Major George Washington was trudging west, through blinding snowstorms and freezing cold, toward Fort Le Boeuf, to check the French advance in the Ohio Valley. Few then could have imagined the connection between these two events or how the tables would soon turn in Burma, changing not only Burma but the course of European imperial history.

THE GENTLEMEN OT THE MUVALLEY

When Bannya Dala’s cavalry careered past Ava into the valley of the Mu River, they had hoped to win the easy submission of the hereditary gentry class that governed the area. Through periods of strong and weak kings, the same gentry chiefs had managed the affairs of the countryside, not just in the Mu Valley but everywhere in Burma,
administering justice, collecting taxes, and presiding over the many ceremonies and Buddhist festivals at the heart of rural life. Traditional gentlemen and part-time soldiers, they were the all-important intermediaries linking ordinary villagers to the world of princes and courtiers.

The most important of these chiefs held the hereditary office called
myothugyi
, and these were powerful men, sometimes ruling over hundreds of towns and villages. But there was a confusing plethora of other offices, depending on local custom and history. As a class the gentry were an exceptionally proud group of men and women, marrying among themselves and wearing clothes and living in houses that set them apart from the common people. They were customarily descended from the founding lineages of their home area and valued their special role of providing the officers and officials of the Court of Ava. This was no more true than in the Mu Valley, where Burma’s very first kingdom at Tagaung was located and which was the home of its best fighters.

At the time Ava fell to the southern army, Aung Zeyya was thirty-six years old and married, with teenage sons. A tall man for the times (just under six feet), he was solidly built and had the dark, sunburned complexion of many Upper Burmans. His village was Moksobo, a not particularly important place with perhaps a few hundred households, about sixty miles north of Ava, set in the middle of fields of rice, millet, and cotton, a ridge of low teak-covered mountains to the east and Indaing forests and hills to the west.
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Aung Zeyya came from a large family and was related by blood and marriage to many other gentry families throughout the valley; for generations his ancestors had held important local offices, and he claimed descent from a fifteenth-century cavalry commander and ultimately from the Pagan royal line.

Some of Aung Zeyya’s fellow chiefs had sensed the way the wind was blowing and had meekly submitted to the new overlords at Pegu. But not Aung Zeyya. When he heard that Bannya Dala was sending an armed force to Moksobo to administer the new oath of loyalty, he immediately swung into action, organizing the nearby villages, chopping down palm trees and using the trunks to fortify the walls, sharpening his swords, collecting a few old muskets, and ambushing the unsuspecting Mon soldiers as they came through the thorny scrub jungle.

The Mons then sent a larger force to punish the recalcitrant chief.
But they too were met by Aung Zeyya and were quickly defeated. News spread. And soon the
kyedaing
of Moksobo was mustering a proper army from across the Mu Valley and beyond, using his family connections and appointing fellow gentry leaders as his key lieutenants. Fresh levies were sent from Pegu, but all were routed, and their allies among the local leadership were crushed. Success drew fresh recruits every day. There were other centers of resistance, at Salin along the middle Irrawaddy and at Mogaung in the far north, but it was Aung Zeyya who had emerged as the unexpected and exciting champion of the Burmese north against the Mon south.

On a frosty morning at the beginning of 1754 Aung Zeyya left his little village and made his formal entry into the smoldering ruins of Ava to worship at the old city’s royal pagodas. Tributary princes from the eastern hills came and knelt before him and made their submission. Their dreams of problem-free conquest crumbling quickly, Pegu then sent their entire army upriver, only to have the whole force beaten back by the man who now called himself king.
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MONSIEUR DUPLEIX AND THE DREAM OF A BIRMANIE FRANÇAISE

Joseph François Dupleix had already lived in the East for nearly thirty years, as a successful merchant and as a colonial administrator, when he became governor-general of French India in 1742. This was before England’s East India Company had established its mastery of the subcontinent and when the French, with their own bases and own Indian armies, could still pose a threat to English designs. Ambitious and imaginative, Dupleix, like many Europeans in the East, had come to affect the dress and style of an Oriental prince and sought alliances with native rulers as a way of increasing French power. His appointment as governor-general was during the War of the Austrian Succession. When the war ended in 1748, without much satisfaction for the French or the English, Dupleix looked for the right chance to strengthen his country’s position against his Anglo-Saxon enemies, including across the bay in Burma.

Dupleix knew that Bannya Dala had recently seized power at Pegu. He also knew that Pegu was already running into problems in the north
and that Bannya Dala would need help if he were to keep his brand-new throne. Dupleix’s strategy in India had often been to support the weaker side with the aim of ensuring a future dependent relationship. And though Bannya Dala seemed to be doing reasonably well, his was still an upstart regime that would likely need all the help it could get. When an embassy from Bannya Dala arrived at Pondicherry, the principal French town in India, in 1750, it was welcomed with great pomp and enthusiasm. In return, Dupleix sent as his representative Sieur de Bruno, a man of some charm who proved a big hit and quickly won over Pegu’s Mon leaders. A treaty of friendship was signed, promising French military aid in return for lucrative trading concessions. It looked as if Pegu would soon be in France’s pocket. Dupleix wrote home to the directors of the Compagnie Royale about a new French empire on the shores of the Irrawaddy.

The English at Fort St. George were alarmed. The English East India Company had been involved in Burma since the seventeenth century. It too was looking for opportunities, not so much to expand its influence in Burma as to offset any French initiatives. In 1746 Madras had been taken by a naval force under Bertrand François, Comte Mahé de La Bourdonnais, the governor of the isle of Bourbon,
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and French power was still formidable in the Carnatic. The Company was aware that in a future war, England’s Indian ports could again be lost, and reckoned that a safe harbor not too far away in Burma was a good fallback. Burma’s shipbuilding industry was world class, and in the 1730s and 1740s the French had commissioned there many of their best warships. Hearing of the French concessions, the English quickly sent their own mission to Pegu, asking Bannya Dala for permission to open an office at Negrais, a small island off Burma’s extreme southwestern coast. But they were met with studied hostility. French muskets and cannons were making their way into the Mon arsenal, and Pegu was moving decisively into the French camp. Soon Bruno was appointed resident at Bannya Dala’s hopeful new court. Dupleix’s dreams seemed to be coming true.

Panicked, the English decided to take a gamble and occupy Negrais by force. This was a mistake. By then Paris had actually rejected Dupleix’s plans. In normal times he might have disregarded this, but his hands were full in South India. The English didn’t really need to do
anything. But now they had taken Negrais, and the little colony there was paralyzed from the very beginning by all manner of tropical diseases, food shortages, and the occasional mutiny. For better or for worse, the Company was now involved in Burma’s civil war. Both the English and the French were of course still keen to back the winning horse. And it was beginning to look as though the tide were turning against Bannya Dala and that Dupleix had miscalculated. Not only had Aung Zeyya, whom neither side had ever heard of before, cleared Upper Burma of the Pegu army, but this unknown village chief was now proceeding in strength down the Irrawaddy. A master tactician, and perhaps one of the greatest military leaders of his time, Aung Zeyya was outmaneuvering any opposition and winning submission from gentry leaders and influential officeholders all along the way. In early 1755 he took the strategic river city of Prome, honoring there the lords of Salay and Pakhannge, both of whom had led local risings in support of his campaign.

Three more years of bitter fighting were to follow, but few now doubted the eventual outcome. The delta stronghold of Danubyu was captured in a brilliant victory, and in May 1755 the old pagoda town of Dagon fell into Aung Zeyya’s hands. In all his new possessions, the new king enforced a harsh but effective system of justice and proved himself a capable administrator as well as general. Hoping the civil war would soon be over, he renamed Dagon Rangoon, meaning “the end of the enemy.” Some of his followers began to call him Alaungpaya, “the future Buddha.”

A nervous Dupleix now tried to increase his hold over the Pegu government by threatening to switch sides and help the Burmese under Aung Zeyya, now Alaungpaya. Both to make good on his threat and to cover his bases, Dupleix then sent a gift of arms to Alaungpaya, who accepted the weapons while still clearly regarding the French as his enemy. Alaungpaya’s strong preference was for an alliance with the English. He protested the unilateral occupation of Negrais, but he also offered to cede the island to England in return for military help. Alaungpaya was winning, and both Dupleix and Fort St. George knew this. The problem for both was that they had few arms to spare. In Europe, England had just declared war on France in the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. Prussia under Frederick the Great was fighting an array of nations from Spain to Sweden, and the English would soon be battling Louis XV’s armies and navies across North America, the
Caribbean, and India. Burma might be an important sideshow, but it was still a sideshow in this critical test of global supremacy.

SYRIAM AND THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR

The King said that if all the Powers of The World was to come, he could drive them out of His Country. He then asked me if we were afraid of the French; I told him that the English and the French had no great liking for each other but there never was that Englishman born, that was afraid of a Frenchman …
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—English envoy Ensign Robert Lester at his audience with Alaungpaya
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For the Burmese under Alaungpaya, two places remained to be taken: Syriam and Pegu itself. The first attempt to take Syriam in 1755 was a failure. Bruno and a number of French officers had reinforced the garrison already there, and the sturdy walls and modern cannon made difficult any attempt to simply storm the fortress. Around this time an English ship, the
Arcot,
had somewhat clumsily, and apparently without instruction, joined a combined French and Mon attack on Rangoon. The attack was unsuccessful, but the English, now justifiably fearing reprisals from the Burmese, sent an envoy, Captain George Baker, to Alaungpaya with presents of cannons and muskets and with orders to speedily conclude a treaty of friendship.

Alaungpaya was then back in his home village, which was not a village anymore. Thousands of people from the nearby countryside had been moved to Moksobo, and new walls and buildings were quickly transforming the little settlement into a proper national capital.
Moksobo
means “the hunter chief.” Alaungpaya decided this wasn’t good enough and renamed it Shwebo, the “golden chief.”
Shwebo-tha
(“sons of Shwebo”) became the war cry of his followers, with more than a hint of Upper Burma (and Burmese ethnic) patriotism against the Monspeaking culture of the south.
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He was temporarily in Shwebo directing an expedition into Manipur, turning the tables on that onceaggressive little principality, in the first Burmese invasion involving firearms and the first of several devastating invasions of Manipur to come. He also sent the captain of his musketeers, Minhla Mingaung Kyaw, into the Shan hills to secure the submission of the highland chiefs.

Though Syriam and Pegu had not yet fallen, Alaungpaya was already master of a huge territory stretching from the Himalayas down to the border with Siam. The young English envoy George Baker got more than a dose of bravado. “See these arms and this thigh,” Alaungpaya said to Baker as he drew up the sleeves of his shirt and tucked up his
paso
. “Amongst 1,000 you won’t see my match. I myself can crush 100 such as the King of Pegu.” He agreed that the English could stay at their pestilential colony at Negrais but postponed signing any immediate treaty with the Company. Instead he sent a letter on gold leaf ornamented with precious stones to King George II: