The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (29 page)

The deciding influence was that of the Middle Palace queen. Mindon’s chief queen had died some years before, and the Middle Palace queen was the highest-ranking of all the royal women. She was ambitious but had no sons, and so her ambition was to ensure that one of her daughters be the most senior wife of whoever next ascended the Konbaung throne. She too wanted a pliant prince, and her choice was the prince of Thibaw, the son of Mindon by a relatively inconsequential queen. Unknown to some, Thibaw was then already in love with the Middle Palace queen’s eighteen-year-old daughter, slight and with luminous brown eyes, the princess Supayalat. In the end it was a coalition between the Kinwun and his reformists, on the one hand, and the dying king’s ranking wife, on the other, that sealed the election. On 19 September 1878 the Council of State appointed Prince Thibaw as heir.
¹⁹

This was only phase one of the Kinwun’s plans. He and the Middle
Palace queen secured control over the palace complex with the help of the Household Guards and then ordered the arrest of many prominent members of the royal family, including all the elder princes, Mekkaya, Thonze, and the rest. Mindon on his deathbed heard what had happened and, after listening to the desperate pleas of the princes’ mothers and wives, had them released. But the old man knew that his days were numbered, and as his last edict he named each of the eldest princes viceroy of a distant region, a way of getting them to leave Mandalay and out of harm’s way at once. But it was no good. No one was afraid of the ailing king anymore, and his orders were rescinded by the Council of State and the princes rearrested. Soon Mindon was dead, believing to the last that his sons were safe.

On 8 October, Thibaw appeared at the Glass Palace and was proclaimed king of Burma.

REFORMERS IN CHARGE

Thibaw was then all of twenty years old, shy and little known even within the palace walls. For a few years he had been sent to school at Dr. Marks’ Anglican mission, just across the street from the southern ramparts, where he arrived every morning with three other princes on elephant back, with a retinue of gaily dressed attendants and golden parasols overhead.
²⁰
On occasion he was made to stand in the corner for bad behavior. He had also learned to play cricket and was remembered as tolerably good with a bat, “being something of a slogger” as well as using unprincely language when bowled. On leaving he entered the prestigious Bagaya monastic college, busying himself during his teenage years with his Pali grammar and arcane Burmese legal treatises and becoming an accomplished classical scholar. Just a year before, he had passed the next to highest
Patama-gyi
examination and had been feted by his proud father in a grand ceremony. It was around then that he fell under the spell of Supayalat, his strong-willed half sister, who was no scholar but was already adept at understanding how power really worked at the Court of Ava.

A month after Thibaw was formally appointed king, the Kinwun and the other senior officials met at a newly built pavilion in the South Royal Gardens and set in motion a series of sweeping reforms. Dozens
of princes and other members of the royal family were still in prison. To ensure that others in the conservative establishment could do no harm, they dismissed from office the heads of powerful ministerial factions, together with a host of other courtiers. In their place, ministers and army officers who had supported their coup were rewarded with new posts and attractive titles.
²¹

Government was reorganized around fourteen ministries, the old system of audiences with the king was abolished, and a cabinet-style regime was set up. A proper salary scale was also instituted with bureaucratic ranks, and even the new king and queen were now required to apply to the treasury secretary for funds. All this was done in deliberate imitation of Western administrations, and for a short while it looked as if there would be a fresh start. In an interview with the London
Times
in November 1885, Thibaw remarked that he had been, for his first year as king, virtually a prisoner of his own ministers.

On specific policy issues there was also quick action. A tentative agreement was reached with a British firm for the construction of a railway through Upper Burma (something the merchants of Glasgow had been impatiently demanding), restrictions on trade were relaxed, and as a friendly gesture, an armed guard was permitted to be stationed outside the British Residency. More traditionally, and reflecting the literary inclinations of many of the court’s grandees, the new king was also presented with thirty-six new works of orthography.

*

All this time the young king was practically powerless, but he was still the king, and the hopeful lord of Yaw took it upon himself to bring his new monarch into the reformist fold.
²²
Yaw, like nearly all others in the top echelons at court, came from a long line of courtiers and Guard officers, his father having been a chief minister in the 1830s and his father-in-law having been Mindon’s first foreign minister. He was also brilliant, authoring numerous and learned works on everything from law to chemistry and even becoming an accomplished architect. A beautiful brick monastery he helped design, called Itakarama, based on Italian Renaissance designs he had studied, still stands, abandoned, just behind the Mandalay Golf Club.

For Thibaw, the lord of Yaw wrote a collection of essays, including his now-famous
Rajadhammasangaha
, or “Treatise on Righteous Government.”
Deriving his ideas from classical Burmese and Pali sources, the minister argued for limits to royal authority and for the king to rule, through his cabinet, in the interest of all his subjects. It was an essay on constitutional monarchy and Yaw emerged as perhaps the most radical of the government’s thinkers. The treatise was also to be the very last of this scholar-administrator’s nearly two dozen books; he would not long survive the events to come.

LOVE, MARRIAGE, AND THE PRINCE OF YANAUNG

All the while, as the reformers energetically pressed ahead in the outer pavilions, within the dark and thickly carpeted inner apartments of the palace, very different patterns of influence and power were taking shape. Thibaw was after all a coalition candidate, of the Kinwun and his scholar-officials, on the one side, and the Middle Palace queen, her daughter, and their cohorts, on the other. In the final weeks of 1878 and in early 1879 both the Household Division and the royal suite were purged, and many high-level posts were handed out to childhood playmates and hangers-on of Thibaw. The most important of these was Maung Toke, the lord of Yanaung, who was an old companion of Thibaw’s from school. He now saw his quiet and malleable friend’s rise to the throne as a heaven-sent opportunity for personal aggrandizement.
²³

Yanaung came from an old military family, and his father was still a senior army officer. Yanaung himself was appointed colonel of the Tavoy Guards; more scandalously, he talked Thibaw into raising him to the status of prince, or
mintha
, even though he was not of royal blood. He would soon make his newfound influence known, using the king’s name and extending his tentacles all around the stuffy little halls of the inner palace. He had read his history books, and his favorite hero was the sixteenth-century king Bayinnaung, also a man of nonroyal blood, who first became the king’s chief lieutenant and then took the throne himself. Quite the ladies’ man, Yanaung enjoyed only one modernization. He had many wives and more concubines and was said to have installed an electric buzzer system through which he could call one to his bed without the knowledge of the others. The sound of the buzzer would be heard, but only the chosen wife or concubine would know exactly who had been summoned. Yanaung liked to believe this lessened jealousies.

Yanaung found a useful ally in the lord of Taingdar, a man later reviled in the British press. An army man and from a family that had long held office in the Arakanese occupation, he was forceful and quick-witted and was determined not to lose power to the group around the Kinwun. Ironically (or perhaps to cover his bases), he had married his daughter to one of the leading Sorbonne-educated reformers.

The first clash between the two sides came early on. A decade before, the Siamese king Mongkut had died and been succeeded by his eldest son, Chulalongkorn. The new king, destined to revolutionize Siamese government and society, was then only fifteen years old, and the chief minister acted as regent for several years. Like Thibaw, Chulalongkorn had a partly Western education, from Dr. Marks in Thibaw’s case and in Chulalongkorn’s from different European tutors, including most famously Anna Leonowens, of
The King and I
fame. The regent, seeing his opportunity to push through wide-ranging changes, had Chulalongkorn travel abroad for some time, to have him out of the way but also to open his eyes so he would see for himself how desperate was the need for modernization. The young king went to Singapore, Java, and India and later visited Europe twice.

The Kinwun may have had this example in mind when he proposed that Thibaw too take a trip around the world. Thibaw was at first enthusiastic, and in early 1879 a detailed plan was presented to the young king to visit London. Arrangements were made, and a list of accompanying courtiers and retainers was drawn up.
²⁴

But Yanaung and Supayalat were no fools and understood that with the king away, they would fall easy prey to the ministers in power. They worked to change Thibaw’s mind, telling him that this all was a ploy to undermine the king’s position and that once in London, he would be abandoned there, “like a dog left on a sandbank,” unable to get home and without anyone to help. Thibaw was scared and agreed to cancel the journey. The ministers were dismayed. Yanaung and Supayalat decided they were on a roll.

Up until this point dozens of princes and princesses, half brothers and sisters of Thibaw’s, as well as children of the assassinated Kanaung Prince, languished in a fetid prison north of the main palace complex. Only the prince of Nyaunggyan had escaped. Disguised as an ordinary laborer, he had sneaked into the British Residency and then, with British help, traveled on an armed steamship to Rangoon. He was now
in Calcutta, waiting for his chance. But the others were in the hands of the new regime. The Kinwun and the reformists were happy to keep them under lock and key, remembering the rebellion of 1866 and how troublesome the royals could be. But Yanaung and Supayalat wanted to go a step further. What if another escaped? Better to be safe than sorry.

On 13 February several top officials, including a number of ministers, were dismissed and imprisoned under Yanaung’s direction. Among those arrested was the lord of Yaw, the distinguished scholar and master who had written the treatise for Thibaw on constitutional government. Beginning the next day, Valentine’s Day 1879, the executions began. The North and South Tavoy Guards, under Yanaung’s command, herded the royals, many weakened from poor food and some in rags, in batches out of the royal city and to a dusty field about half a mile toward the Irrawaddy. There they were strangled or trampled by elephants (the accounts differ), and all together, over the next several days, no fewer than thirty-one of Mindon’s forty-eight sons and nine of his sixty-two daughters were killed. Others who opposed Supayalat and Yanaung, officials and rivals in the army, also met the same fate. At the end of it all, the so-called fourteen-department government was ended. Yanaung and Supayalat would be free to do and spend as they pleased.

Only now, months after the death of his father, did Thibaw formally mount the throne. He was consecrated king, with Supayalat by his side, in a ceremony modeled on that of his great-great-grandfather Bodawpaya. The pundits of the court also drew deep into their archives and gathered ideas from even older ceremonies, in particular the consecration of King Thalun in 1629 and King Dasaraja of Arakan in 1123. With this reaffirmation of tradition, the reformist movement was dead.

*

The British were shocked and appalled by the goings-on in Mandalay, and the British press in Rangoon, Calcutta, and even London reported gruesome accounts of massacres and demanded what we would today call a humanitarian intervention. Thibaw was depicted as a bloodsoaked ogre, and there was talk of war. Additional troops were placed along the frontier near Prome, and preparations were made to place the escaped prince of Nyaunggyan on the Konbaung throne. If this had happened, Burma would have been turned into a protectorate of British India’s, the Burmese monarchy would have been retained, and
the entire history of Burma in the twentieth century would have been different. But it didn’t happen.

Just a few weeks before, Zulu
impis
had overwhelmed and annihilated an entire battalion of the South Wales Borderers at the battle of Isandhlwana, a disastrous start to what would be Lord Chelmsford’s four-month South African campaign against King Cetshwayo. The same winter forty thousand British and Indian troops marched into the Afghan kingdom of Sher Ali and occupied much of that country with little problem until September, when the British Resident in Kabul, Sir Louis Cavagnari, and his staff were massacred by a huge mob. A new expeditionary force had to trudge back over the high mountain passes only to be bogged down for months fighting an unwinnable war against resolute Afghan tribesmen. Invading Burma because Thibaw had killed some of his relatives no longer seemed like a good idea.

*

Supayalat loved clowns and comedians. Dance troupes and traveling theater groups would perform for her in the Western Court, and the clever and go-getting among them would declare, “[T]here is only room for one drum in the orchestra.”
²⁵
This was what she liked to hear. For unlike every other king in Burmese history (and unlike most princes, noblemen, and chiefs), her husband, Thibaw, had decided to have only one wife. This was a sharp departure from precedence, unthinkable really, not simply because a king was meant to have many wives, but because many, if not all, of these marriages represented a connection with a tributary prince, chief, or high official, whose daughters or sisters were taken into the palace. The king was meant to be at the apex of a broad network of kinsmen, loyal by marriage as well as by blood. But Thibaw had only Supayalat and his mother-in-law.