The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (9 page)

B
urma is in many ways a country defined by its geography, at once isolated yet always with the possibility of connection, northward to China, westward to India, and overseas to the world, a country with a stubborn and sometimes unhelpful sense of difference and uniqueness. Much of the country (a little more than half) is the valley of the Irrawaddy River, which runs north to south, from the icy eastern curve of the Himalayas down over a thousand miles to the brackish tidal waters of the Andaman Sea. The upper portion of this valley—the heartland of successive Burmese kingdoms—is dry, almost a desert, not like the Sahara but approaching the aridity of Southern California or the Australian outback. Part of the year is intensely hot and cloudless, and the rains, when they do come in late summer, come in wild and sudden downpours, concentrated over less than fifteen days a year, drenching the sandy ground and turning gullies into raging torrents. The south, on the other hand, is entirely different. The lower portion of the valley, the Irrawaddy Delta, as well as the two adjacent coastal regions of Arakan and the Tenasserim, are warm and humid, with overcast skies and steady rains for weeks and months, lush and tropical with long stretches of picture-perfect beaches and little offshore islands.

Around this valley is a great horseshoe-shaped arc of highlands, of terrifying chasms and soaring snow-covered mountains set alongside gently sloping hills and meandering alpine streams. Taken together, the highlands prevent any easy overland access to the outside world.
This is not to say that Burma was ever sealed off, only that a constant effort was required to connect and to overcome a natural tendency to look inward and be content. And for the external world, in turn, the valley and the surrounding highlands, removed from the major highways of conquest and commerce, were readily forgotten, the rewards of association often outweighed by the risks and costs involved. There were times when Burma and the Burmese were a part of things, engaged, learning, and contributing, and there were times, like now, when the country stood nervously on the margins, looking from far away at growth and creativity elsewhere.

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Burma is also, at least in the minds of many of its people, an old country, with an often vivid feeling for its own history and with the relics of the past all around. All Burmese schoolchildren are taught that their history begins at Tagaung. Tagaung is today a dusty and palm-shaded village of enterprising shopkeepers and sugar mill workers, about a half day’s drive north of Mandalay, with a few seemingly old ruins and an occasional air of antiquated importance. And according to the chronicles of the Burmese kings, it was here that the Sakiyan prince Abhiraja and his followers had arrived from the Middle Country of India and founded the country’s very first kingdom.
¹

The story goes that thousands of years ago, long before the Buddha preached his first sermon at the deer park in Sarnath, the king of Panchala, wanting an alliance with the neighboring king of Kosala, asked Kosala for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Kosala, proud of his farnobler lineage, refused. War ensued, and the outcome was victory for the up-and-coming Panchala and defeat and disaster for Kosala’s entire royal family.

The Kosala royal family were part of the Sakiyan clan, which would later be celebrated across the Buddhist world as the clan of the Buddha himself. But that was in the future. For now the Sakiyans were in decline, and it was these bad times that led one of their princes, Abhiraja, to pack his belongings and head east, together with his personal army, across the Black Mountains and into the valley of the Irrawaddy.

Traveling to Burma from India in ancient times must have been no mean feat. Between the two countries are a series of mountain ranges with peaks over three thousand feet high and some of the
wettest and most pestilential jungles anywhere. And we must imagine a land of very few people. Even in the late nineteenth century the population of all Burma was only around five million (compared with over fifty million today), and in ancient times the number was certainly much less. The land would have been covered, nearly entirely, in scrublands and thick forests of teak and ironwood, birch and rhododendron higher up, and teeming with wild and dangerous animals. Tigers and rhinoceroses and herds of elephants roamed everywhere, with leopards in the tallgrass and man-eating pythons lurking behind every bush and every tree. Even the giant panda, now no longer in Burma, may have survived near the Irrawaddy into ancient times. What people there were would have lived here and there, in small pockets, perhaps mainly alongside the rivers and streams, eking out a precarious existence.

Whatever the challenges, Abhiraja, according to the chronicles, survived and prospered. There is no suggestion that he had arrived in an empty land, only that he was the first king. The chronicles also say that he had two sons. The elder son, in the inventive spirit of his father, ventured south and founded his own kingdom at Arakan. The younger son succeeded his father and was followed by a dynasty of thirty-one kings. Centuries later scions of this dynasty founded yet another kingdom much farther down the Irrawaddy, near the modern town of Prome, and this kingdom at Prome lasted five hundred years until succeeded in turn by the medieval kingdom of Pagan. Thibaw, the last king, would trace his descent to the rulers of this medieval kingdom and thus ultimately to Abhiraja and the Sakiyan clan as well. A failed marriage, class prejudice, and a desire to start anew had, it seems, led to the beginning of Burmese civilization. As for the Burmese of more modern times, the story provided a sense of a deep continuity, right down to the fall of Mandalay.

British scholars of the colonial period were fairly skeptical of all this and of the Burmese chronicles more generally, especially of the parts covering the earlier history of the country. Some took to the notion of an Indian origin to Burmese civilization and were inclined to accept the idea of colonizers from the West bringing enlightened and longlasting government. But they doubted the antiquity of the chronicle tradition and generally dismissed the possibility that any sort of civilization in Burma could be much older than, say,
A.D
. 500. Those who
were not historians were sometimes more dismissive. Aldous Huxley, who traveled for a while in Burma during a leisurely round-the-world tour in 1925, wrote about the last of the royal chronicles,
The Glass Palace Chronicle:

It is as though a committee of Scaligers and Bentleys had assembled to edit the tales of the nursery. Perrault’s chronicle of Red Riding Hood is collated with Grimm’s and variants recorded, the credibility of the two several versions discussed. And when that little matter has been satisfactorily dealt with, there follows a long and incredibly learned discussion of the obscure, the complex and difficult problems raised by Puss in Boots …
²

But more recent research suggests that civilization in the Irrawaddy Valley
is
in fact very old and that many of the places mentioned in the royal records have indeed been inhabited continuously for a very long time.
³
As early as thirty-five hundred years ago—the time of the Old Kingdom in Egypt—people across the region were already turning copper into bronze, growing rice, and domesticating chickens and pigs, and they were among the first people in the world to do so. By twenty-five hundred years ago ironworking settlements emerged in an area just south of what would later be Ava and Mandalay. Ironworking in turn led to more food and many other useful things, and these longago settlements, trading near and perhaps far in salt and glass and cowry shells as well as copper and iron, have left behind signs of their affluence, bronze-decorated coffins and burial sites filled with the earthenware remains of great feasting and drinking.

By the early centuries
A.D
. complex irrigation systems had begun to appear. As the climate in most of the valley was so dry and as the rains, when they came, were so sudden and short-lived, diverting and trapping rainwater were the key to expanding agriculture. Once this was possible, through elaborate systems of canals, weirs, and tanks, small and poor settlements became big and powerful. Walled cities, some of considerable size, emerged. There were kings and palaces, moats and massive wooden gates, and always twelve gates for each of the signs of the zodiac, one of the many enduring patterns that would continue until the British occupation.
⁴
There was yet no single kingdom, only citystates. And these city-states were already overcoming their geography
and linking up with the crossroads of the ancient world. Abhiraja, if he ever really existed, was not the only ancient traveler to Burma.

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A map of ancient times (say, two thousand years ago) would show four great empires, together encircling most of Europe and Asia, from the north of England to the Sea of Japan. Rome, Persia, the Mauryans in India, and the Han Empire in China ruled supreme over much of the civilized world. But there were breaks in the imperial maps, areas not controlled by any of these big states. Like the forests of Germania or the desert wastes of Arabia, a big region between Mauryan India and Han China belonged to no emperor. Part of this region was the high-up Tibetan Plateau. And below Tibet was a vast stretch of mountains and valleys, including the valley of the Irrawaddy. This was the world of the early Burmese and their cousins.
⁵

It’s a world that’s not well known and has been little studied. It included not only all of present-day Burma but also all of what is now the northeast of India and the southwest of China, an area as big as Western Europe with many diverse peoples and places, most lost to history, not just isolated tribes and obscure mountain chieftainships but cities and kingdoms with languages and cultures entirely distinct from the Chinese and Indian civilizations to the east and west.

Near Lake Dian, just north of Burma, there have been found striking pieces of art,
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figures of human sacrifice, as well as little representations of tigers, leopards, and bees, unlike any Chinese works but instead strongly reminiscent of the art of the distant Ordos Desert in Inner Mongolia. There are likely other cultures to be found. Only in 1986 did archaeologists, by chance, discover the hundreds of beautiful and mysterious bronze masks and vessels of an entirely unknown civilization, believed to have flourished more than three thousand years ago, dissimilar to anything Chinese, in what is now Sichuan. Perhaps people in Burma were already, even two or three thousand years ago, aware of the wider world, borrowing ideas and foreign styles, and buying and selling goods from far away.

Sometime in 139
B
.
C
. a Chinese official, Zhang Qian, set off from
the imperial capital of Changan, then the richest and most powerful place in the entire world, accompanied by his loyal slave Kanfu and over a hundred aides and retainers. They were headed toward the unknown and seemingly endless grasslands to the west, with a mission to find allies against China’s barbarian enemies beyond the Great Wall. Zhang was destined to become one of the greatest explorers of ancient times. After many grueling years of travel and barbarian captivity, he eventually found his way across the desert wastes of the Tarim Basin to what is now Afghanistan, before returning home a hero to the Han court.

He told his mesmerized compatriots about the kingdoms of the Fergana Valley and Bactria, of Persia and Mesopotamia and India, places the Chinese had known nothing about. He told them about Persian wine and the Persian merchants who traveled in ships to faraway places, about the heat and humidity of the lands along the Arabian Sea, and about the war elephants of India. And he told them something startling and unexpected: that in the markets of Bactria, he saw cloth made in the Chinese province of Shu. Shu (or modern Sichuan) is far to the south. Had other Chinese travelers gone west before him? No, he was told, the cloth and the bamboo had come from India. There existed a
southerly
route, to India and from India to the West.
⁶

What Zhang Qian and the Han court had stumbled on was what merchants had long known: that there was a profitable traffic in all sorts of goods, from China down through the Irrawaddy Valley across to India and beyond. And the products of the Irrawaddy Valley and surrounding highlands were also traded: ivory and precious stones, gold and silver, the small and sturdy horses of the region, and, perhaps most desired of all, the handsome horns of the rhinoceros, endowed with magical and medicinal properties.
⁷

Soon there would be more trade, more contact, as ever more urbane Burmese kingdoms profited rather than let themselves be constrained by the valley’s geography. When envoys from the Roman east, perhaps Alexandria, journeyed across the Irrawaddy en route to China in
A.D
. 97, they were treading well-worn paths.
⁸
Later, when sailors were able to venture across the high seas, a different route, through the Straits of Malacca, would be the preferred way to the East. But for a brief moment Burma was on the highway of the world. And it was this already sophisticated and well-connected Burma that would reach decisively westward, to India, for inspiration.

THE MIDDLE WAY

In the time of Zhang Qian, India was ruled by the Mauryans. Two hundred years before, Alexander the Great had seen his dreams of conquering the world shattered by the mutiny of his Macedonians near the banks of the Indus River. Though Alexander soon left India permanently, his incursion into India’s northwest profoundly shook existing political arrangements and allowed the prince Chandragupta Maurya to seize the throne at Magadha, then the most powerful of Indian kingdoms. Chandragupta went on to defeat Alexander’s general Seleucus Nicator, and in the peace treaty that followed, the Macedonians ceded most of the occupied territory in return for five hundred elephants. A new Mauryan Empire came into being, ruling the entire north of the subcontinent. Its capital at Pataliputra (in modern Bihar) was one of the great cities of the world, if not the greatest, dazzling even Nicator’s envoy Megasthenes, a man who had been to Babylon.