The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (24 page)

Two prisoners of the Burmese king, one English and one American, were released and sent as envoys to the British camp. They were told that the terms still held good. But the king objected to the money payments, and yet another levy was raised and placed under Minkyaw Zeya Thura. This new army had no chance. It was made up almost entirely of peasant conscripts, armed with little more than their own personal swords and with no real fighting experience, officered not by experienced army men, all of whom were now dead or wounded, but by courtiers and palace staff. All that was left was brought together and marshaled under the shadow of the Lokananda (“the Joy of the World”) Pagoda near Pagan for a final and desperate defense, but it was no good, and this army of last resort was soon swept away.

A confident Sir Archibald Campbell advanced on to Yandabo, four days’ march from Ava. There he was met by the same two Anglo-American envoys together with two Burmese ministers and all the British prisoners. The Burmese were authorized to sign a treaty meeting all British demands. The delegation then and there paid twenty-five lakhs of rupees in gold and silver bullion as the first installment of the indemnity.

Under the Treaty of Yandabo, the Court of Ava agreed to cease interference in the affairs of Jaintia, Cachar, and Assam and to cede to the British their provinces of Manipur, Arakan, and the Tenasserim. They also agreed to allow for an exchange of diplomatic representatives between Amarapura and Calcutta and to pay an indemnity, in installments, of ten million rupees or one million pounds sterling (then about 5 million U.S. dollars), an incredible sum for the time. The British would withdraw to Rangoon after the payment of the first installment and from Rangoon after the second. The Burmese Empire, for a brief moment the terror of Calcutta, was effectively undone, crippled and no longer a threat to the eastern frontier of British India. Success would bring Campbell fame and fortune and a governorship at New Brunswick in Canada. For the Burmese it was to be the very beginning of the end of their independence.

THE GLASS PALACE CHRONICLE

The
Lonely Planet
guide tells visitors to Mandalay that the surrounding countryside “has a number of attractions well worth visiting” and that four “ancient cities” are all within “easy day-tripping distance.”
¹⁰
One of these cities is Ava, the oldest of the four, built in the fourteenth century and the capital (apart from a few brief periods) for nearly four hundred years. Ava is an island. To the north the Lesser River (the Myit-ngè in Burmese) winds its way into the Irrawaddy, and a deep canal cuts the city off from the south. It was a place meant to be defended and once had high walls and moats, only traces of which remain.

The proper name in Burmese for Ava is Ratanapura, or the City of Gems, and Ava (meaning “the mouth of the fish pond”) was an older name. When General Campbell’s army reached Yandabo, it was within the city’s lacquered and antique walls that the king listened to the
counsel of his generals and ministers and wives and decided to accept a defeat unthinkable only a few years before. A despondent mood followed as the foreigners occupied the western and southernmost provinces, and nearly all the royal treasure, perhaps the equivalent of two billion dollars today, was emptied into the coffers of the English ships. Generations of success and celebration were at an end, and only bad fortune seemed to lie ahead.

Tourists are normally taken down a busy highway from Mandalay and then on a ferry, often together with a local farmer and his cow, across the river where a dozen or so oxcart drivers vie for their business. They will insist that Ava is much too big to explore on foot, and they are right (not to mention the danger of snakes lurking along the dusty roads). There are now only the ruins of brick buildings, and all that remains of the palace is a hundred-foot-high watchtower, shattered by a great earthquake in 1839 and now leaning precipitously to one side. There are long avenues of tamarinds and huge bombax trees with herds of cattle grazing nearby. There is also a gorgeous and happily unrenovated teak monastery, still in use, called the Bagaya Monastery. It’s now a private school for orphaned children, run mainly from funds donated by the occasional Western tourist and by Burmese villagers nearby. In the eighteenth century it was one of the great monastic colleges in the land and the training ground—in law, history, literature, and science—of generations of ministers and princes. Now it is set in what seems like a jungle clearing but what was once the center of the city of Ava.

Ava was a cosmopolitan city with a sizable Islamic community, both Sunni and Shia. Many were believed or believed themselves to be of Arab, Persian, or Turkish origin, but most had come directly from various parts of India, Arakan, and Manipur. English visitors had found them largely indistinguishable from other Burmese, remarking that “their women of all ranks go unveiled, and clothe as scantily as the rest of their countrywomen, they marry for love and women even pray in the same mosques as men.”
¹¹
In the middle years of the nineteenth century Muslims held high positions in government. The mayor of the royal city itself was a Muslim, as was the governor of Pagan. British visiting diplomat Sir Henry Yule noted the large number of Muslim eunuchs, courtiers, and members of the royal bodyguard.

In the years after the defeat at the hands of the English, the king
himself faded far into the background. He had been shocked by the immense bloodshed of the recent war and the fatal blow to the prestige of his family and his throne and stayed very much to himself, seeing few friends other than the Spanish merchant Don González de Lanciego. For others in the court, the war and the defeat had been no less traumatic. A whole generation of men had been wiped out on the battlefield. And the world the Burmese knew, of conquest and martial pride, had come crashing down. Patriotism at the Court of Ava had grown for more than half a century on the back of impressive military success; now to see the English in occupation of Arakan and the Tenasserim, and to have to hand over nearly the entire royal treasury, was something difficult to accept. This trauma, and what was to come over the next half century, would take Burmese nationalism in new directions.

*

From the southern gate of the city there is a long and spacious causeway, a beautifully weathered gray, now leading across fields surrounded by tamarinds, a low carved wall on either side. There is a little inscription, barely readable, which records that this bridge, called the Maha Zeya Pata (“the Great Victorious Path”) was built by “The Prince of Singu and his wife and two daughters,” and that “It was not for the love of praise and worldly fame that the Prince erected this grand bridge but simply to acquire merit towards the attainment of Nirvana.”
¹²

On the other side of the causeway is the very dusty town of Tada-U (“Head of the Bridge”), in colonial times the quiet administrative center of the area, with a wooden courthouse and bungalow and police post, but today the site of a huge concrete and glass (and barely used) international airport, a Thai-Italian joint venture and much-publicized showpiece for the military government. It was here that in 1656 Chinese soldiers loyal to the last Ming emperor, having plundered their way down from the eastern hills, were met by the king of Burma’s Muslim and Portuguese gunners. These days Air Mandalay and other private carriers swoop down and disgorge planeloads of well-heeled tourists from Rangoon, air-conditioned coaches and taxis waiting to whisk them away to their hotels in Mandalay.

My father’s family was originally from the area, from a collection of seven hamlets known as Dabessway just next to Tada-U, spread out over miles along the meandering Lesser River, a parched landscape of
eucalyptus and toddy palms, low denuded hills, and the white-painted masonary of crumbling pagodas. My ancestors must have lived there for centuries, living in little bamboo and thatch huts like many of the people there today, before making some money and emerging from the shadows of anonymous village life. My great-great-great-great-grandfather, named U Kyaw Zan, was born in Dabessway sometime in the mid-eighteenth century, was educated in a local monastery, and managed to find his way to Ava, where he made a fortune as a private banker to the king.

Though he was of fairly humble origins, his newfound wealth allowed him to marry a younger daughter of the lord of Mekkaya, a person of long pedigree and considerable station, who governed by hereditary right an old fortified town about half a day’s journey away. Kyaw Zan was a typical merchant-banker of his day, first making money from local and long-distance trade to China, in cotton, ivory, and precious stones, and then making more money by lending silver to the poor cash-strapped farmers of the rice-and cotton-growing lands east of Ava.

As his business prospered, he was invited to join the private court of Prince Singu, and when Singu became king in 1780, Kyaw Zan was appointed one of his several
thutays
, or royal brokers. This meant that he handled the king’s financial dealings. The Burmese kings in those days stood at the apex of a financial pyramid. At the very bottom were the ordinary farmers, who often needed to borrow money, in the form of silver, to pay their taxes, to pay for important celebrations, or to pay interest on old loans. They might borrow from a local moneylender but might also borrow from their local lord or village chief. At the very top was the king himself, who lent silver to his lords and tributary princes, and for this he depended upon his private bankers.

In January 2004 I traveled by car over bumpy roads, past bullock carts and bicycles, from Ava to Dabessway. In the dry weather several small canals had turned into billowing rivers of sand. There was a small but well-maintained Buddhist monastery and a local primary school, where the little children in white shirts and green sarongs were learning English by rote. A few very basic shops sold soap, plastic cups, and T-shirts, and a bamboo shack offered fresh-made toddy wine. Little groups of men and women sat around on wicker chairs in the shade of the tamarinds, smoking cheroots or local Duya cigarettes, and every
now and then a man and his oxcart ambled back from the fields. I had been there many times before and in the past had been content with visiting the center of the village, but this time I walked away from the center to the village’s Muslim neighborhood.

The Dabessway Muslims were preparing for a special celebration in honor of a Sufi saint associated with the place, and there was much activity. A big platform was being constructed, and there was a lot of painting and general cleaning. The head of the community was a man named Omar, dressed neatly in a stylish polo shirt and cotton
longyi
. He explained that Muslims, traders and soldiers of the king, had settled in Dabessway more than two hundred years ago, he didn’t know exactly when, from somewhere in India. He said he had studied, recently, for two years in Cairo and spoke some English as well as Burmese and Arabic. Omar seemed a confident man and a worldly man, and he was bigger than all the rest, with a Middle Eastern cast to his features. There are perhaps as many as two or three million Muslims in Burma, and almost every city and town has at least one mosque; but they are a largely hidden minority, not included in official government lists of minorities and seen always as something foreign in otherwise overwhelmingly Buddhist Burma.

Though my ancestor Kyaw Zan became rich and worked his way into the inner sanctuaries of the Court of Ava, he still retained his connections to his home village. It was where he wanted to leave his mark. Near where the mosque is today and close to a bend in the river on a small grassy knoll, he built a little eggshell-colored pagoda, as a work of merit to help him in his future incarnations. He wanted to be remembered as the
dayaka
, or donor, of the Dabessway Pagoda, and this must have been true for a long time, though now there is no trace of his memory or of any of the old ruling group (though the pagoda is still there). It seemed that the traditional distinctions of class and hereditary status had been washed entirely away and replaced only with a religious divide between the area’s Buddhists and Muslims. When I had visited a couple of years before, I had met the oldest person in Dabessway, ninety-five at the time, but this man pleaded ignorance of any history, saying that he was merely an unlettered woodcutter and had in any case moved to Dabessway from his own faraway village only in 1919. History was something very distant.

U Kyaw Zan fathered several children, some quite late in life, and
his second son, Mya Yit, joined government service around the time of the First Anglo-Burmese War in the 1820s, rising up through the ranks and becoming a senior secretary to the Council of State in the 1850s. He was a poet and late in life was granted the noble style Maha Mindin Thinkaya. He was also made the
myoza
, or lord, of the seven villages of Dabessway, the pundits and those adept in matters of royal appointment taking into proper account the family origins of this banker’s son.

My family was doing well. But these were the gloomy years after the war, when memories of Burmese imperial conquest met up against ever-fresher memories of humiliation at the hands of the English. The aristocracy and the grandees of the court were largely paralyzed, unwilling to accept the country’s new place in the world and move in fresh directions. Some turned to history. In the late 1820s, as the British were counting the boxes of silver being unloaded for them in Rangoon, a new royal commission, of scholars and Buddhist monks, met in the Glass Palace (named for the walls covered in glass mosaics) to pore over old palm-leaf manuscripts and even older inscriptions and arrive at a new rendering of Burma’s history,
The Glass Palace Chronicle of
the Kings of Burma.
It was a fitting thing to do, when the future seemed unclear, the present had become so painful, and the lessons of the past needed a more proper accounting.