The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (21 page)

8
. Harvey,
History of Burma
, 229–31.

9
. Sayadaw Athwa III, 148, quoted in Harvey,
History of Burma
, 235.

10
. Tin,
Konbaungzet Maha Yazawindaw-gyi
, vol. 1, 182.

11
. Spence,
The Search for Modern China
, 90–116.

12
. On the Qing invasions of the 1760s, I’ve relied on Yingcong Dai’s seminal study “A Disguised Defeat: The Myanmar Campaign of the Qing Dynasty,”
Modern Asian Studies
38:1 (2004), 145–89; see also Harvey,
History of Burma
, 253–58, 355–56; Htin Aung,
A History of Burma
, 175–83.

13
. Quoted in Yingcong Dai, “A Disguised Defeat,” 157.

14
. Ibid., 166.

15
. On Bodawpaya’s reign, see Myint-U,
The Making of Modern Burma
, 13–17.

 
*
Modern Réunion, a department of France in the southern Indian Ocean.

SIX

WAR

The Burmese kingdom and the East India Company fight an epic war for two years, with devastating consequences for the Court of Ava

I
n the early years of the nineteenth century the generals and grandees of the Court of Ava, brimming with confidence and expectation from years of martial conquest, became convinced that the English and their East India Company were their principal adversaries. They dreamed of alliances against the English and worried about the English upsetting their own increasingly belligerent ambitions. They tried to learn more about the Company and assess their chances in an actual war. Few harbored illusions about the extent of English power. But the Court of Ava was riding a wave of military victories, and those factions that advised audacity gained the upper hand.

These were new feelings. Ralph Fitch, a merchant of Elizabethan London, was the very first Englishman to arrive in Burmese lands (in the mid-sixteenth century), and he was followed, at varying intervals, by several other traders and fortune seekers, all hoping that the eastern shores of the Bay of Bengal, so close to bases in India, would somehow prove as lucrative as the Spice Islands, farther away. But the prospects for trade never really materialized, and the effort of developing a Burmese market seemed little worth the cost of dealing with a new and outlandish court and all manner of tropical disease. The Company had set up small stations at Syriam and Ava in the 1600s, but these were later closed for no reason other than being unprofitable. To the Burmese, though, these were all peripheral matters, and the English and English trade were not viewed as particularly significant.

The English, to the extent that they were considered, were seen initially as just another group of people from the West. And for Burma the West began in Bengal. All the many and varied visitors and immigrants— Bengalis, Tamils, Singhalese, Afghans, Persians, Arabs, Armenians, Jews, Greeks, and Portuguese—were classified together under the single ethnic category of
kala
, an old word of no clear derivation. The newer
kala
from Europe were sometimes referred to as the
bayingyi kala
.
Bayingyi
was a Burmese corruption of the Arab
feringhi
or “Frank,” a term with wide circulation (and many different pronunciations) throughout the Indian Ocean world, a legacy of the Crusades in a country that had no knowledge of the Christian-Islamic wars of medieval times.

The English were a newer breed of
feringhi
and had an early reputation as a commercial race, less interested in war making and less useful as mercenaries than their Spanish and Portuguese predecessors. Sometimes they were called the
tho-saung kala
, the “sheep-wearing
kala
,” no doubt a reference to the wool outfits they wore and that they encouraged the comfortably cotton-clad Burmese to buy and wear as well.

But slowly the rising power of the English in India became apparent, even to the somewhat isolated Court of Ava, and during the civil war of the 1750s friendship with either the English or the French became a natural aim of both sides. Alaungpaya wanted cannons and muskets, but he also wanted a more lasting partnership. Through some oversight, his letter to King George II never received a reply. Muslim and Armenian courtiers whispered in his ear that the British could never be trusted.

Apprehension over the Raj then worsened for two reasons. The first was knowledge of British expansion. By the turn of the century the Court of Ava had become increasingly aware of the mushrooming of British control across India. Spies were sent deep into British territory; many masqueraded (or doubled) as pilgrims visiting Buddhist holy sites. To better understand the enemy, an Englishman, known to posterity only as George, was employed to teach some of the royal family the rudiments of the English language. “Only the East India Company flag flies along the Coromandel coast,” warned one intelligence report. Another compared the British to a banyan tree, which first leans on others to grow and then drains the life out of them when it is stronger.

The fate of numerous Indian princes and potentates was worryingly plain to see.

Between the 1750s, when Alaungpaya made his offers of friendship, and the early nineteenth century, the Company’s army had grown more than six times, from just around eighteen thousand men to well over one hundred thousand. And they had proved themselves more than a match for any force in the subcontinent, defeating rivals, including the nawab of Bengal and the Tipu Sultan. The Burmese king had attempted to engineer some kind of alliance with the Tipu (and with many other Indian courts), but he and his determinedly Anglophobic state were now long gone. By the 1820s the kingdom of Nepal had been reduced to a protectorate, and even the once-undefeatable Marathas had been wiped off the map by the most powerful commercial firm in the world.

The second reason was Burma’s own imperial ambitions, which were, within its own modest world, in many ways no less belligerent than the Company’s. The road east was largely shut. Despite the devastating 1767 sack of Ayutthaya, the Siamese were able to regroup farther downriver at the new port city of Bangkok and from there, under a vigorous new leadership, quickly developed the wherewithal to resist further Burmese attacks. The Qing invasions of northern Burma had given the Siamese the respite they needed, and this had proved decisive. By 1800 any Burmese occupation of Siam seemed unlikely. Instead it was Siam that was growing stronger, annexing bits of Cambodia and Malaya and asserting its authority over the middle Mekong states once under the king of Burma’s thumb. And no Burmese moves to the northeast seemed possible either. China was now right on the country’s doorstep, and with the resumption of trade in the late eighteenth century the Court of Ava had no desire to rekindle hostilities with the Qing. That left the smaller fry to the west.

In 1784, a dissident member of the Arakanese royal family, Naga Sandi, formally requested Bodawpaya to intervene, and the king was more than willing to accept. The campaign, placed under the command of the crown prince, Thado Minsaw, was ordered to defeat and occupy the kingdom and seize the ancient and much revered Maha Muni image, the very emblem of Arakanese sovereignty. The main army, totaling over thirty thousand men, arrived at Prome just after the end of the rainy season and marched in stages over the mountains,
joining up with a smaller force that had come up along the coastline from Bassein. Their objective was not an easy one. The beleaguered city, enclosed by rugged hills and once considered impregnable, had formidable defense works running over nineteen miles and moats with giant sluice gates. Some say that the attacking force was helped from the inside. In any case, on the last day of the year, the great fortress of Mrauk-U fell. Twenty thousand people were deported to populate the king’s new capital, Amarapura, “the Immortal City.” In the looting and destruction that followed, much of Arakan’s cultural and intellectual heritage was lost. The royal library was burned to the ground. The country was to be annexed and ruled through four governorships, each supported by a garrison.
¹

The Burmese occupation was bloody and repressive. Huge numbers of Arakanese began fleeing north and west into Company territory. The Court of Ava had been hungry for labor and rounded up thousands of Arakanese men for building and irrigation projects in the center of the country. In 1795 a levy of twenty thousand men to expand a lake south of the capital set off a wave of desperate refugees into British Bengal. It also began a strong Arakanese resistance movement, led by a local hereditary chief, Chin Byan. In 1811 a new levy, this time for forty thousand men, led to another exodus toward Chittagong. The resistance strengthened, overwhelming the local Burmese garrison and momentarily holding Mrauk-U. Chin Byan offered to rule Arakan as a vassal of the East India Company, and this aroused Ava’s suspicions of the British, especially as the Arakanese rebels were staging many of their attacks from bases inside Company territory. Soon the first clashes between British and Burmese forces took place as Burmese soldiers attempted to pursue Chin Byan’s men across the Naaf River border.

*

Manipur was another target of aggression. Alaungpaya had already ravaged that kingdom in 1758, and this brutal invasion was followed up by another in 1764. Thousands of people were deported, and the valley was left nearly empty for years. Many of the captives were smiths, weavers, and craftsmen of all sorts. They were formed into hereditary groups owing special service to the crown, and for generations they and their descendants labored as servants and agricultural workers for the Burmese nobility. They also formed the new Cassay Horse, an elite
cavalry regiment that supplied some of Ava’s best polo players. Two more invasions followed together, and a Burmese-educated puppet prince was installed.

Even farther to the north and west, from their most northern forts along the Hukawng River, the army pushed farther west to Assam. The kings of Assam had ruled over the Brahmaputra Valley from the descent of the great river in southeastern Tibet to its turn into the rice plains of Bengal. A narrow valley hemmed in by high mountains, Assam had for centuries been under the rule of the Ahoms, a Hindu royal house. The Ahoms had fought in a series of plucky defensive wars against the Mughal Empire, but by the late 1700s their power was on the wane. Intradynastic disputes came together with a widespread uprising to create more and more instability. Rival groups appealed to both Ava and Calcutta for assistance. In the winter of 1792–93 the East India Company moved in with a small force to help the king, or
swagadeo
, of Assam quell a popular rebellion. But the Burmese were also interested.
²

In 1817 a representative of a rival court faction appealed to the Burmese to intervene against the
swagadeo
Chandrakanta Singh. Bodawpaya had already been looking to send a force in support of the rebels and now decided to send a well-equipped army eight thousand strong. They began their march at Mogaung, marshaling along the way thousands of tribal levies. In an amazing logistical feat, they then crossed nine-thousand-foot-high Himalayan passes and entered the valley at its northern end, near Tibet. It was a punishing, many-week-long march past scenery unlike anything the men had ever seen. The officers rode horses and elephants; the ordinary foot soldiers hiked alongside in thick quilted cotton jackets, hardly enough to keep them warm in the subfreezing nighttime temperatures. They passed for weeks through dark leech-infested jungle, so dense that sunlight never touched the ground, and waded through frigid mountain streams in nothing but bare feet. In the higher elevations, oak trees and rhododendrons would suddenly give way to sheets of ice and snow leopards on the distant cliffs.

With the army still amazingly intact, the Assamese were decisively defeated at the battle of Kathalguri, and a pro-Burmese minister was placed in power. But several years of local princely intrigue followed, and in 1821 the Court of Ava became convinced of the need for tighter control. A new expedition crossed the snowy mountains and extinguished 
the Ahom court once and for all. Assam would become a Burmese province under a military governor-general. The Burmese then turned their guns to the little hill principality of Cachar to the south, and early in November 1823 assembled a sizable force of about five thousand troops on the Cachar frontier. An alarmed Calcutta sent its own troops in defense of the raja of Cachar, and bloody encounters with the Burmese almost immediately followed.