The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (26 page)

While this turned some men to simply hate the enemy, Myawaddy instead became curious and more eager to learn about the outside world. He taught himself some Hindi and learned a few lines of a Latin hymn that he happily sang for visiting British envoys.
⁴
He encouraged new ideas and new thinking. He too died just after Mindon’s takeover at the old age of ninety-two.

The real doyen of European learning in the interwar years was a member of the royal family, the new king’s great-uncle, the prince of Mekkaya. The American Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson described him as “a great metaphysician, theologian and meddler in ecclesiastical affairs.” Born in 1792, he had learned to read and understand spoken English, taught by a mysterious English member of the court known only as Rodgers, and had obtained a copy of Dr. Abraham Rees’s recent
Cyclopaedia
, a massive multivolume work, keenly poring over thousands of articles on the recent Industrial and Scientific Revolution. Later he helped compile the very first English-Burmese dictionary, and at numerous meetings with the British envoy, Sir Henry Burney, Mekkaya would question him relentlessly on matters of geography, science, and mathematics. Burney noted that the prince had both a barometer and a thermometer hanging in his apartment and that his personal library included Dr. Samuel Johnson’s
Dictionary
,
the Holy Bible, and recently translated papers on the calculation of eclipses and the formation of hailstones. He concluded that “he had never met an individual with as great a thirst for knowledge as this Prince.”
⁵
Ahead of Siam, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, the Burmese court was opening itself up to the West, and with Mindon’s coming to power, the stage seemed set for reform.

THE PENULTIMATE KING

Mindon is remembered by many Burmese as their last great king and among the most devout patrons of Buddhism ever. He is remembered for his innumerable works of merit, the monasteries and pagodas he built, the thousands of monks he sponsored, and his convening of the Fifth Great Buddhist Synod in 1871. The synod was billed as the first of its kind in twenty centuries, bringing together twenty-four hundred monks, including several from overseas, in a grand attempt to review and purify the scriptures. The monks recited the new edition day and night for six months under the shadow of Mandalay Hill, while over seven hundred enormous stone slabs, each engraved with a page of the revised canon, were being chiseled away by master craftsmen, there to be read for all time.
⁶

That Mindon was a passionately religious man who took his religious beliefs to heart is not in doubt. He was passionate but not a fanatic in the sense of being intolerant of other faiths. He patronized the Islamic community in Mandalay, building a mosque and even a guesthouse at Mecca for the convenience of Burmese Muslim pilgrims. He was also happy to see the Anglican mission set up a new school just outside the palace walls, agreeing to send a number of his own sons there to be educated by the head of the mission, Dr. Marks.

But what is nearly never appreciated nor even remembered at all are Mindon’s political reforms, his attempt to refashion government and help his country modernize in the face of continuing British Indian expansion. They are not remembered largely because they failed in the end, lost with the conquest of General Prendergast and the titanic political and social changes that followed. But they were important nonetheless, deeply affecting the very fabric of Burmese society in the late nineteenth century and creating the context within which British colonial rule developed.

He worked closely with his half brother the Kanaung prince, and the two divided up between them the main areas of government, with Kanaung specializing in areas of military and administrative reform. It was almost a joint kingship, and Kanaung was designated heir apparent, to the deep chagrin of Mindon’s elder sons, with a lavish personal court rivaling that of the king himself. Mindon’s chief queen was also an important influence. She was his cousin, from a more senior branch of the royal family, and was well known for both her interest in science and astrology—learning to use an English nautical almanac for her calculations—and for her uncontested dominance over the hundreds of other royal women.

*

Burma was not alone in its realization that it had to adapt to an increasingly European-dominated and fast-changing world. In Egypt, Mehmet Ali and his successors had already set in motion a series of reforms, encouraging the learning of Western science and technology, modernizing the armed forces, overhauling administration, and making possible the development of a huge cotton export industry. Similar reforms would be enacted in Siam under Mindon’s contemporary, King Mongkut (the king from
The King and I
), and in Japan sweeping social and political changes would begin in 1868 with the end of the Tokugawa shogunate and the Meiji restoration. Other countries in North Africa and Asia that had survived colonization into the late nineteenth century followed suit. Burma was not at the very head of the pack, but it was certainly not behind.

As an important part of their reform drive, Mindon and Kanaung arranged for dozens of young Burmese men, mainly sons of court officials, to be sent abroad for their education. Some went nearby to schools and universities in India, but a good number went farther afield, to Italy, France, and Germany. By the late 1870s several in the upper echelons of the Court of Ava were foreign-trained, and they would all become part of the final and ill-fated push for modernization.
⁷

The army was also strengthened and reorganized.
⁸
Factories were set up and began producing rifles and ammunition to replace the antiquated muskets still in use. Steamships were also imported, ten in all, and though they were meant for regular transportation, they came to play a critical role in maintaining internal security. Much more important, the system by which families provided men and officers on a hereditary 
basis into the army was dismantled, and instead a proper standing force was set up. For centuries the same families, proud of their martial tradition, had supplied Ava’s troops, and this connection to the crown had been a pivotal source of their status in their own rural communities. This was now undone.

In 1870 a telegraph line was laid linking Mandalay to Rangoon as well as to other towns in Upper Burma, and a system of Burmese Morse code was invented. Western books on chemistry, physics, and biology were eagerly sought, and plans were made to translate the entire
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. Ambitious schemes and generous amounts of silver were poured into new industries, with factories producing everything from glassware to textiles, and though these were never economically viable, they were meant to show that a new Burma was being born just outside the ocher-colored ramparts of Mandalay.

At the same time, the business of government itself was refashioned, changing the workings of political power and, in the process, undermining (as with the ending of the crown service system) the very basis of social organization in the Irrawaddy Valley that had existed for hundreds of years. Administration was centralized and made more systematic, old royal agencies were abolished and new ones created, and an entirely new system for financing government was devised and implemented, replacing the traditional and often haphazard arrangements that had grown up organically over the centuries. The idea was that to be modern, there had to be uniformity, definite lines of authority, and clear boundaries of jurisdiction. These were things that had never existed before. The power of the hereditary gentry, the old clans whose influence over their townships had held sway since long before the present dynasty, was now diminished against the influence of Mandalay and its appointed agents. For as long as anyone could remember, members of the royal family and nobility had received towns or villages as their appanage, drawing their income from the income of these places (and thus known as the town’s
myozas
, or “eaters”). Now they would receive a salary instead, severing their links with the countryside. And a new tax was set up, meant to replace all existing (and again haphazard) taxes and fees. It was a revolution in the system of government and soon threw Upper Burma’s society into disarray.

Like Egypt’s, much of Burma’s modernization was to be financed by the cotton trade. Now without the fertile delta, the areas that made
up Mandalay’s reduced kingdom rarely had a rice surplus, and Mindon realized early on that cotton was the one cash crop that could be encouraged and sold abroad, both to China and overseas, and that this could keep his coffers full. For a while it worked, and in the 1860s as the American Civil War and the Union blockade of Confederate ports drove up world cotton prices, Mindon’s brokers were able to make a handsome profit. For a while times were good.

DIPLOMATS

For Mindon war with England was not an option. Unlike his father, who had tried saber rattling and may have entertained on more optimistic days dreams of driving the infidels into the sea; and unlike his great-grandfather, who actually believed that conquest in India was possible, Mindon had no similar illusions. But he did have an illusion of sorts, which was that friendship on equal terms was possible and that the British, convinced of his pacific intentions, might one day return to him the southern half of his kingdom.

Shortly after taking the throne, he had dispatched the lord of Magwe to Calcutta in a bid to negotiate a British withdrawal from Rangoon, but this had ended in total failure, temporarily strengthening the hand of hard-liners who wanted to fight on. But both the new king and Sir Arthur Phayre, recently appointed chief commissioner of British Burma, were committed to a peaceful resolution of relations, and their diplomacy, ably supported by the informal British agent at Amarapura, Sir Thomas Spears, slowly eased tensions. Through Spears, a Scottish merchant, Phayre even arranged for 250 durians, the foul-smelling “king of fruits,” native to the lost southern territories and a favorite of Mindon’s, to be shipped specially to the Burmese king as a gesture of goodwill.

Sir Arthur made a formal visit to the Court of Ava at the end of the rains in 1855. In the manner of the mid-Victorian imperialist-explorer, he was accompanied by geographers and scientists as well as an escort of over four hundred Indian infantry and cavalry, all traveling on two top-of-the-line steamships. But the Burmese had no desire to be outshone in the test of diplomatic wills, and Mindon ordered that the embassy be met at the frontier by his Armenian minister and confidant,
T. M. Makertich, a scion of a local Armenian trading family, and a flotilla of over a thousand teak war boats and gilded barges.

When Phayre and Mindon first met, Mindon began the interview by asking in the traditional Burmese manner, whether “in the English country … the rain and air were propitious so that all living creatures were happy.” They spoke amiably about such diverse topics as sailing and steamships, the size of the Russian Empire, America’s republican system of government, Anglo-American relations, recent developments in Persia, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire, and the relationship between the (soon-to-be-last) Mughal emperor and the British Empire.
⁹

The last topic was more than a passing interest. Mindon did not care as much about the substance of his relationship with Calcutta and London as about the form. It was a matter of personal and national pride that Burma be treated as a sovereign country even if in every way its actions were to be circumscribed by British power. Mindon was conscious of history. On the Burmese
Glass Palace Chronicle
, he said: “Read it carefully and let it enter your heart. The advantage will be two-fold. First, you will learn the events which have passed, and the kings who have succeeded each other; and secondly, as regards the future, you will fathom from them the instability of human affairs and the uselessness of strife and anger.”
¹⁰

They were wise words. He also said: “Our race once reigned in all the countries you hold in India. Now the
kala
have come close up to us.”
¹¹
By this he meant that the Burmese and kindred peoples were the original peoples of the subcontinent, pushed aside over the centuries by men from the West, Muslims and now Europeans. It hinted of better times long past and that history was not on the side of the Burmese.

All the same, for now the Civil War in America was keeping cotton prices high. But soon three things would come together to undercut the king’s reforms: The first was Britian’s insistence on liberal trade, something that would cripple the royal treasury. The second was the gathering crisis in China. The third was rebellion at home.

THE PRINCELY REBELLIONS OF 1866

At around noon on 2 August 1866 the princes of Myingun and Myinhkondaing, elder sons of the king, set fire to buildings within the palace walls as a signal that their rebellion had begun. They had been unhappy 
with their father’s appointment of Kanaung as heir apparent, and relations between uncle and nephews had worsened over time. The two princes had once been caught stealing into the palace in the middle of the night after an evening of frolicking outside (and, according to one story, killing the sacred royal cow for some late-night steaks), and on this and other occasions the king had, perhaps unwisely, left it to Kanaung to discipline the youths. Now they would have their revenge.

Kanaung had been chairing a meeting to examine recent changes in the tax system. About halfway through, Myingun and Myinhkondaing together with several dozen followers entered the small pavilion where the meeting was taking place, drew their machete-like
dahs
, and cut down the heir apparent as well as a number of other ministers and royal secretaries. My own great-great-great-grandfather Maha Mindin Thinkaya, the lord of Dabessway, who was at the time a royal secretary, would have normally been in the pavilion. But then in his seventies and complaining in the morning of a cold (caught, he believed, from washing his hair too late the night before), he had decided to take the day off and stay at home.