The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (6 page)

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Lord Dufferin arrived in Burma on 3 February aboard the SS
Clive,
accompanied by his wife, Lady Harriot Dufferin, various aides and advisers, dozens of personal servants, and a very large numbers of horses, cows, calves, chickens, sheep, and quails. After his retirement he would be created a marquess by a grateful queen (he was now an earl) and was asked to take an Indian place name to include in his title. He thought that to be the marquess of Dufferin and Delhi or Dufferin and Lucknow would excite Indian sensibilities and was best avoided. He thought about Quebec instead, having served in Canada as governor-general, but Victoria disapproved. After first dismissing most Burmese names as sounding like “something out of the Mikado,” he settled on the name of the court he had just vanquished, Ava. Now he was to visit the Court of Ava for the first time.
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At Mandalay, in the sticky afternoon heat, the viceroy sat on Thibaw’s throne, dressed in a scarlet tunic and with the white plumed helmet of empire. The now-sobered officials of the old Burmese government remained standing throughout his address, a demonstration of considerable disrespect in a country where kneeling before superiors was customary. The subsequent discussions were not particularly useful for either side. The Kinwun and the others had lost any real hope for the future, and Dufferin saw the Burmese as tiresome and hardly worth engaging any longer.

He spoke to the British military officers and heard in disappointing detail of the growing insurgency and how the ex-royal agencies were unwilling or unable to be of much use. Dufferin later wrote that “a puppet king of the Burmese type would prove a very expensive, troublesome and contumacious fiction.” British troops were going to have to pacify the country in a violent campaign in any case. If the old hierarchies could not help now, they were not worth saving for the future. Lady Dufferin had an apparently successful afternoon with the women
of the palace, but for Lord Dufferin any second thoughts he might have on outright annexation pure and simple were now gone. The monarchy would be abolished. And the Court of Ava would become history. 

This is the ballad of Boh Da Thone,

Erst a Pretender to Theebaw’s throne …

And the Peacock Banner his henchmen bore

Was stiff with bullion, but stiffer with gore.

He shot at the strong and he slashed at the weak

From the Salween scrub to the Chindwin teak:

He crucified noble, he sacrificed mean,

He filled old ladies with kerosene:

While over the water the papers cried,

“The patriot fights for his countryside!”

      —Rudyard Kipling,
Barrack-Room Ballads

There would now be no turning back, only a big push to do whatever it took to gain control over the Burmese countryside. Sir Charles Haukes Todd Crosthwaite, a fifty-something Irish civil servant from Donnybrook, was appointed chief commissioner of all Burma, and he was determined to crush all opposition and introduce into the old royal domains an all-new administrative machine. By the end of 1886 a total of forty thousand British and Indian troops had poured into the country, three times more than was necessary for the actual invasion and more than had been deployed in either the Crimean War or in the occupation of Egypt just a few years before. The British knew they were fighting a popular guerrilla uprising and were determined to use all means to bring it to an end.
¹⁹

The commanders on the ground also realized that no concentration of troops, on its own, would change things, certainly not overnight. Instead the function of the troops was, in the words of one brigadier general, “to produce an effect upon the imagination and moral sense of the people, to make them feel that the inevitable had overtaken them.” In other words, to make clear to the Burmese that they had no
choice but to accept defeat and occupation. This was no easy task. The same officer lamented that “the in-born conceit, light-heartedness, and impulsiveness of the Burmese rendered them impervious to salutary impressions of that kind” and that “neither their religion nor their temperament permit them to suspect their inferiority.”

The insurgency reached a fever pitch in the searing heat of April and May 1886. During the evening of 15 April (the first day of the Burmese new year), twenty or so armed men loyal to the teenage prince of Myinzaing, a renegade half brother of Thibaw’s, scaled the walls of the palace, managing to set fire to several buildings and killing two Scottish physicians before being killed themselves. The next day every single British military post up and down the Irrawaddy Valley was attacked by rebel armies, sometimes in excess of two thousand men. If there had been any doubt before, it was clear now that opposition to the new colonial regime was being organized on a national scale.

But any opposition, however well organized, would have been hard pressed to stand up against what was to come. It started with a huge military deployment throughout the Irrawaddy Valley and continued with the large-scale and forced relocation of people. Crosthwaite was determined to cut off the rebels from the bases of support. Colonial magistrates were granted wide-ranging powers to move suspected rebel sympathizers, and dozens of villages were simply burned to the ground. Summary executions, sometimes by the half dozen or more, became routine, as did the public flogging of captured guerrillas. In at least one case a suspected resistance leader was tortured in public. And the occasional beheadings of prisoners were put to a stop only through the personal intervention of Lord Dufferin himself.

There was brutality on both sides, as embattled Burmese guerrilla fighters used any tactic they could to keep their hold over the villages, and as the British counterinsurgency campaign was more than willing to match terror with terror. A widespread famine, caused in large part by the war, then hit much of the country in late 1886. Starved, worn down, and eager for relief, more and more people resigned themselves to life under the occupation.
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In parts of the upper Irrawaddy Valley, pockets of resistance would carry on for years. One of the longest holdouts was the guerrilla leader
Bo Cho, a onetime provincial clerk who managed to evade British capture until 1896. This was in the badlands around the extinct volcano at Popa, and local legends credit him with killing over eighty of the enemy in the early years of the occupation. When he was finally caught, he was taken back to his home village, where all his friends and family were summoned by the British officer in charge to come and witness his execution. As he walked to the gallows, he told his nephew, “[W]e Burmese are finished and it would be better to be dead than be their slaves.” And with that he and his two sons were hanged, one of hundreds of hangings ushering in Burma’s modern age.

For the old aristocracy their world had come crashing down much faster. Intensely conservative, they had been trained to look to the past for examples and to see their lives and their vocations as part of a seamless heritage going back to the very introduction of Buddhism and monarchy well over a thousand years before. Their noble status had rested in part on their residence within the walled city. But by the end of 1886 the city had been turned into a military cantonment, renamed Fort Dufferin, and the hundreds of teak houses, meticulously set according to rank and lineage, were demolished to make way for parade grounds and a new prison. Their status had also rested on the genealogical records stored in the palace archives, but these and almost all the other papers of the Court of Ava had gone up in flames as drunken British soldiers set fire to the king’s library soon after Thibaw’s surrender. It was not until Lord Curzon visited as viceroy in 1901 that the wanton destruction of the old buildings was ended and what was left of the Mandalay palace was preserved.

A generation of young aristocrats were among those killed in the fighting of the late 1880s. Many others retired to the smaller towns and villages around the onetime capital. Into the 1920s there were still weddings and more often funerals at which the old members of Thibaw’s court would gather. The Kinwun died in 1908 a broken man. Some survived much longer, and it was not until the summer of 1963, the same week that the Beatles went on their first tour, that the prince of Pyinmana, Thibaw’s half brother and the boy Lord Dufferin had considered as a possible king, died at the age of ninety-three. By then a very new Burma had been born. 

Notes – 1: THE FALL OF THE KINGDOM

1
. Henry Yule, A
Narrative of the Mission to the Court of Ava in 1855
(Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1968), 139.

2
. A. T. Q. Stewart,
The Pagoda War: Lord Dufferin and the Fall of the Kingdom of
Ava,
1885–6 (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 76–79.

3
. H. Maxim,
My Life
(London: Methuen & Co., 1915).

4
. Archibald Colquhoun,
English Policy in the Far East: Being
The Times
Special
Correspondence
(London: Field & Tuer, The Leadenhall Press, 1885), and
Burma
and the Burmans:
Or
, “
The
Best
Unopened Market in the World”
(London: Field & Tuer, The Leadenhall Press, 1885).

5
. On Churchill and Burma, see Htin Aung,
Lord Randolph Churchill and the
Dancing Peacock: British Conquest of Burma 1885
(New Delhi: Manohar, 1990).

6
. Mike Davis,
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the
Third World
(New York: Verso, 2001).

7
. For a fictionalized version of the story, drawn in part from interviews in the early twentieth century, see F. Tennyson Jesse,
The Lacquer Lady
(London: W. Heinemann, 1929). See also Htin Aung,
Lord Randolph Churchill,
chapter 12.

8
. Htin Aung,
Lord Randolph Churchill
, 171–72.

9
. On the war, I have drawn largely on Stewart,
The Pagoda War; see
also Tin,
The
Royal Administration of Burma
, trans. L. E. Bagshawe (Bangkok: Ava Publishing House, 2001), 276; Tin,
Konbaungzet
Maha Yazawindaw-gyi
(repr., Rangoon, 1968), 707–27; as well as my own
The Making of Modern Burma
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

10
. Maung Maung Tin,
Kinwun Mingyi Thamaing
(Rangoon: Burma Research Society Text Series No. 38, n.d. [1930s?]), 123–39; I am grateful to L. E. Bagshawe for bringing this to my attention and providing me a copy.

11
. Stewart,
The Pagoda War
, 94–95.

12
. Ibid., 96.

13
. Ibid., 97.

14
. Secretary for Upper Burma to the Chief Commissioner to the Secretary to Government of India, Home Department, 19 October 1886, quoted in
History of the Third
Burmese War (1885, 1886, 1887), Period One
(Calcutta, 1887).

15
. Stewart,
The Pagoda War
, 21–22.

16
. Quoted in Ni Ni Myint,
Burma’s Struggle Against British Imperialism, 1885–1895
(Rangoon: Universities Press, 1983), 42.

17
. Ibid., 33–68.

18
. Stewart,
The Pagoda War
, 132–39.

19
. Charles Crosthwaite,
The Pacification of Burma
(London: E. Arnold, 1912).