The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (19 page)

The King, Despotick, of great Merit, of great Power, Lord of the Countries Thonahprondah, Tomp Devah and Camboja, Sovereign of the Kingdom of the Burmars, the Kingdom of Siam and Hughen and the Kingdom of Cassey; Lord of the Mines of Rubies, Gold, Silver, Copper, Iron and Amber, Lord of the White Elephant, Red Elephant and Spotted Elephant, Lord of the Vital Golden Lance, of many Golden Palaces and of all those Kingdoms, Grandours and Wealth whose royal person is descended of the Nation of the Sun, Salutes the King of England, of Madras, of Bengal, of Fort St. David and of Deve Cotah, and let our Compliments be presented to His Majesty and acquaint him that from the time of Our Ancestors to Our Time, there has been a great Commerce and Trade carry’d on by the English and Burmars, with all possible Liberties, Affection, Advantage and Success…
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The letter goes on to suggest a firm alliance between the two countries. But months would go by, and there would be no reply from the Hanoverian king or his secretaries at Hampton Court. And despite what Alaungpaya regarded as a magnanimous gesture over Negrais (against the advice of his Anglophobe Armenian advisers), no military help of any kind materialized. Had he been tricked? He wasn’t sure. But the idea that the English could not be trusted was planted early in the hearts of the new dynasty and in the imagination of early Burmese patriots.
⁷

Meanwhile, Bruno and his fellow Frenchmen, trapped in sweltering Syriam, were growing desperate for reinforcements from Pondicherry. Alaungpaya had recently arrived from the north together with some of his best men to finish the job. It seemed only a matter of time.
Food was running out. At this point Bruno decided to do the less than honorable thing and tried secretly to negotiate with the Burmese. He was found out and placed in shackles.

For Alaungpaya, the worry was that French reinforcements would indeed soon arrive. He decided that the time had come for the fortress to be stormed, now. He knew that the French and the Mons, expecting no quarter, would resist fiercely and that hundreds of his men would die in any attempt to breach the walls. He called for volunteers and then selected ninety-three, whom he named the Golden Company of Syriam, a name that would find pride of place in Burmese nationalist mythology. They included guards, officers, and princes of the blood, descendants of Bayinnaung. The afternoon before, as the early monsoon rains poured down in torrents outside the makeshift huts, they ate together in their new king’s presence. Alaungpaya gave each a leather helmet and lacquer armor.

That evening, as the Burmese banged their drums and played loud music to encourage Syriam’s defenders into thinking festivities were under way and to relax their watch, the Golden Company scaled the walls. After bloody hand-to-hand fighting they managed to pry open the great wooden gates, and in the darkness, amid the war cries of the Burmese (“Shwebo-tha!”) and the screams of the women and children inside, the city was overrun. For the men of the northern villages, the wealth of Syriam, crammed with luxury goods from around the world, could hardly be imagined. The next morning Alaungpaya stacked up the captured gold and silver and presented the combined loot as a reward to the twenty men of the Golden Company who survived and to the families of the seventy-three who died.
⁸

A few days later and a few days too late, two French relief ships, the
Galatee
and the
Fleury
, arrived, crammed with troops as well as arms, ammunition, and food from Pondicherry. As they approached the river (Syriam was several miles from the sea), they sent a small boat to ask for a pilot. The boat was captured by Alaungpaya’s men, who then forced the captive Bruno to write a letter in French decoying them up the river. The trick worked. The ships ran aground and were quickly surrounded by Burmese war boats. On board were two hundred French officers and soldiers. They were now press-ganged into Alaungpaya’s army. Also on board were thirty-five ship’s guns, five field guns, and over a thousand muskets. It was a considerable haul. Bruno was executed,
some say impaled and left to die in the searing heat, together with his senior aides.

The newly arrived Frenchmen were, however, generally well treated. Many of the gunners were given Burmese wives and were recruited into the royal service, some rising to become officers of the Household Guard. They were settled in the
feringhi
villages, Bretons and Normans adding to the Portuguese and other Catholic subjects of the king already there. One, the chevalier Pierre de Millard, lived for nearly twenty more years, becoming a captain of the king’s artillery and serving his new master in the field against Pegu, Ayutthaya, and Manipur.

*

By this point Pegu’s fate was no longer in question. The great city fell to Alaungpaya in May 1757. Bannya Dala had sent his only daughter on a gorgeous palanquin as a peace offering, but there would be no mercy for the starving city. Pegu was taken at moonrise, and the assembled Burmese horde massacred men, women, and children without distinction. Alaungpaya entered through the Mohnyin Gate on his best elephant, surrounded by a crowd of his guardsmen and French gunners, and prostrated himself before the Shwemawdaw Pagoda. The city walls and the twenty gates, built by Tabinshweti and Bayinnaung two centuries before, were then razed to the ground.

For the Mon-speaking people of Pegu and the nearby countryside, this was the end of their dream of independence. For a long time they would remember the utter devastation that accompanied the final collapse of their short-lived kingdom. Thousands fled across the border into Siam. Many others were sold into slavery. Wrote one Mon monk of the time: “Sons could not find their mothers, nor mothers their sons, and there was weeping throughout the land.”
⁹
Soon entire communities of ethnic Burmese from the north began settling in the delta as centuries of Mon ascendancy along the coast came to an end.

And by now the Seven Years’ War was over as well, and England’s global mastery over the French well ensured. The East India Company under Robert Clive had chased the French across the Carnatic, and in September 1759 General James Wolfe defeated the marquis of Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec, gaining for Britain all of New France. More important for the Burmese, Clive had also routed the forces of Siraj-ud-Daula, the nawab of Bengal, and entrenched
British power throughout the Indian east. Without Alaungpaya, Pegu would likely have ruled over a new Burmese kingdom, backed by the Dupleix and Pondicherry and influenced from Paris, but now only English power held sway all around the Bay of Bengal.

THE SACKING OF AYUTTHAYA

For the next half century Alaungpaya would be followed on the Konbaung throne (“Konbaung” for the area around Shwebo) by three of his sons and one of his grandsons, in one of the most militarily ambitious and expansionist periods in Burmese history. The destruction of Mon-speaking society in the south had removed the possibility of southern revolt and laid the basis for a more compact ethnic nationalism throughout the Irrawaddy Valley. And in the years before Britain was viewed as the number one threat, all eyes at Ava looked eastward, to dominion over Siam.

It was Alaungpaya himself, energized with the blood of his conquests from Manipur to Mergui, who first ventured across the Tenasserim hills. In the cold weather of 1759–60, he personally led the attack on Ayutthaya, calling on the besieged city to submit to him as the new
chakravartin,
or universal emperor. The king of Siam refused, despite the thinness of his defenses; luckily for them, Alaungpaya suddenly took ill, and his army felt forced to retreat. But the Burmese would soon be back, and the results this time for the Siamese would be catastrophic.

Two of the country’s most distinguished soldiers, Naymyo Thihapati and Maha Nawrata, were given joint command. Naymyo Thihapati invaded from the north, heading an army made up mainly of highland Shans under their own chiefs. The northern city of Chiangmai was taken in 1763, and within months all of the old kingdom of Lanna (now northern Thailand) was in Thihapati’s hands. As the Burmese chronicles put it: “having mopped up all the people in the towns of the fifty-seven provinces of Chiang Mai who insolently were unsubmissive, there was no trouble and everything was as smooth as the surface of water.”
¹⁰
The Lao king of Vientiane had already offered to become a vassal of Ava and his rival the king of Luang Prabang would be crushed in March 1765, thus giving the Burmese complete control of Siam’s entire northern border. Naymyo Thihapati moved down the
Chao Phraya Valley, taking the towns of central Siam along the way and meeting with the main Burmese invasion force, led by Maha Nawrata, which had crossed the Dawna Range from Martaban and Tavoy. The Burmese-led armies, swelled by local levies, were joined on the outskirts of Ayutthaya at the end of the January 1766, the goldcovered palaces and temple spires shining in the near distance.

Against this massive threat, the Siamese response was belated and uncoordinated. King Suriyamarin had sent out several of his best legions some months before, but these had been chopped to pieces by Maha Nawrata.The Siamese hoped that if they could only hold out until the summer monsoon rains, the Burmese would be forced to retreat. But then the rains came, the city held out, and the Burmese refused to be disheartened, concentrating their men on newly fortified high ground, and building or commandeering boats to keep their forces in action. A few attempts were made to break the siege toward the end of the year, but to no avail. A year into the encirclement the great city was starving, and disease began to take a severe toll. As if this were not enough, a fire at the very start of 1767 then destroyed thousands of homes. Facing imminent defeat, Suriyamarin offered his submission, but Ava’s generals, now haughty with the smell of success, would agree only to an unconditional surrender.

On 7 April 1767 the Burmese breached the defenses. Everything in sight was put to the torch, and tens of thousands were led away to Burma in captivity. Virtually nothing was left of the fourteenth-century Grand Palace, home to kings—thirty-three in all—of five dynasties, or the glittering Sanphet Prasat, used to welcome foreign envoys and state visitors, including an ambassador of Louis XIV in 1695. The last king of Ayutthaya was believed to have slipped away in a small boat, only to starve to death days later. A former king, hundreds of ministers, noblemen, and members of the royal family were resettled in Burma. Romantically named after the capital of the Rama of legend, the city of Ayutthaya, far greater than any in Burma, with a population said to rival contemporary London and Paris, was reduced to ashes by the seemingly unstoppable Burmese military machine.

Myedu, Alaungpaya’s second son and now king, had planned to leave behind a substantial garrison at Ayutthaya, either placing a protected Siamese prince on the throne or appointing senior Burmese officials to rule the country directly. But an unexpected threat was now looming: a huge Manchu invasion from the north.

CREATING BORDERS

The Qianlong emperor Aishin Gioro was the fifth emperor of the Manchu Qing dynasty. He was a successful military leader and presided over a period of enormous territorial expansion, made possible by the strength of his armies and by the weakness and disunity of the Mongol and Turkish peoples to the west. In 1759 the Qing conquered Kashgar and Yarkand and slaughtered the last of the Dzungar forces with great cruelty, extending Peking’s control to the heart of Central Asia. And in 1793 it was Qianlong, then in his eighties, comfortable and complacent, who was to tell Britain’s envoy, Sir George McCartney, that the Middle Kingdom had no use for things foreign, as it was entirely self-sufficient. His reign, from 1736 to 1799, was the longest in the history of China.
¹¹
But amid all these victories and the arrogance they brought was one fantastic and largely secret failure: the Burma campaigns of 1767–70, the most disastrous ever waged by the Qing.
¹²

For much of the preceding Ming dynasty, the southwestern region of Yunnan, next to Burma, was only somewhat integrated into the imperial administration. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the region became a sort of freewheeling frontier province, with tens of thousands of fortune-hunting migrants from elsewhere in China attracted to its vast and lucrative silver mines. There were few, if any, remnants of the old Dali kingdom, and instead Kunming and the other big towns took on a sort of pan-China character, with Mandarin Chinese acting as a lingua franca between the patchwork of peoples who now called Yunnan home.

In the southwest of the province many small chieftainships and principalities were keen to preserve at least a de facto independence, both from Kunming and from the Burmese kingdom to their other side. With Alaungpaya’s rise to power and his determination to assert his control as far into the Shan uplands as possible, many of these chiefs and princes reckoned that a closer relationship with China was their best strategy. In the 1760s Myedu continued his father’s aggressive policies and quickly became embroiled in several conflicts along the eastern border.

The Burmese chronicles say that the war began when a Chinese merchant was killed in a barroom brawl in Kengtung, a semiautonomous principality not far from the Mekong. Burmese and Chinese troops had already clashed in the Pu’er Prefecture (famous for its tea),
and the Chinese had been utterly defeated. The governor of Yunnan at the time, Liu Zao, was known as an upright and honest man, but in his embarrassment first tried to conceal what had happened. When the emperor became suspicious, he ordered Liu’s immediate recall and demotion, but instead of complying, the humiliated Liu committed suicide by slicing his throat with a stationery knife, writing as the blood was pouring from his neck: “[T]here is no way to pay back the emperor’s favour; I deserve death with my crime.”
¹³
This sort of suicide in the face of bureaucratic failure was apparently no unusual thing in Manchu China, but it enraged Qianlong nonetheless. Sorting out the Mien (the Chinese word for “Burmese”) was now a matter of imperial prestige, and the new man to address the Burma problem knew that he would be closely watched and expected to deliver. And so the real war began.