The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (13 page)

*
Pinyin spellings of Chinese proper names are used throughout the book, except where a different spelling (e.g., Chiang Kai-shek, Yangtze) might be better known.

*
Burmese and Yi (also known as Lolo and Norsu) are part of the same branch of the Tibeto-Burman language family, which includes Tibetan, Burmese, and dozens of other languages and dialects.

*
This is not a widely accepted derivation, but a good one and from a well-respected authority in the field, U Bokay, the late director of the Pagan Museum; from a personal communication at Pagan, 1987.

†
Sometimes spelled “Bagan” and with a stress on the second syllable.

FOUR

PIRATES AND PRINCES ALONG THE BAY OF BENGAL

Burma in early modern times—when China and the Islamic world loomed large and when the first Europeans arrived—and the Burmese image today of an all-conquering past

He hath not any army or power by sea, but in the land, for people, dominions, gold and silver, he farre exceeds the power of the Great Turke in treasure and strength.

—Caesar Frederick, a merchant of Venice
¹

K
ing Bayinnaung, who lived almost five hundred years ago, is the favorite king of Burma’s ruling generals. No one knows what he looked like, but big bronze statues of him, tall and imposing, with a broad-brimmed hat and a long ornamented sword, stare down impassively at passersby in airports, museums, and public parks all around the country. Whereas previous kings had unified the Irrawaddy Valley, Bayinnaung proved an even more ambitious conqueror, vanquishing an impressive array of neighboring kingdoms and even marching over the highlands and defeating Burma’s archrival Siam. At its height, his writ ran unchallenged from parts of modern-day northeastern India right across to the borders of Cambodia and Vietnam, an empire the size of Charlemagne’s with a striking imperial capital to match. European visitors were in awe of his wealth, the gilded palaces and jewelencrusted costumes, and marveled at the military might of his war elephants and Persian and Portuguese musketeers. For today’s generals, and others of a more belligerent nationalist persuasion, Bayinnaung represents a glorious past, something to be missed, and a sign, however distant, that Burma was not always so lowly in the eyes of the world. Far back enough in time not to be tainted by the colonial humiliations to
come, yet close enough that he and his heirs subjugated peoples and places still around today, he is an untarnished hero for these militaristic but lackluster times.
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And there is something else. For many Burmese today the stories of Bayinnaung and his contemporaries are the stories of a nation naturally inclined to fracture but which through heroic action can be welded together and made whole, of a country that will fall apart without the strong lead of soldier-kings, where greatness will only follow an iron fist. For some this was an exciting tradition, even if for others the past meant something altogether different.

In the early fourteenth century, after the last Mongol horsemen had quit the central plains, a number of little principalities and kingdoms cropped up: Ava, Prome, Mongmit, Pegu, Martaban, Toungoo, Bassein, and many others, in both the Irrawaddy Valley and the highlands toward China.
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Most were nothing particularly impressive, just a little walled town, with a wooden palace and wooden gates, a moat and a bridge, and a few Buddhist monasteries and nearby pagodas, holding sway over dozens of surrounding villages and pretending through their ceremonies and rituals to be successors to the great kings of Pagan. It was for a while a time of inwardness as well as cultural and intellectual creativity. There were fewer connections with the outside world, especially with Bengal and South India, and a replacement of foreign influence with more confident homegrown styles. This was true in literature as well as in the arts and architecture, and the Burmese language, once a new thing, grew into a widespread vernacular and the idiom of still-classic works of poetry and jurisprudence.

The richest and most powerful of these successor states was Pegu. Pegu is about an hour’s drive north of Rangoon, on the road to Mandalay. It’s now far from the ocean. But in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was a port of some significance, the silting up of the Sittang River in the meantime having cut off the town’s access to the Andaman Sea. The people of Pegu then spoke Mon, a language related to Cambodian, which had become the mother tongue of the Irrawaddy Delta. Under a line of especially gifted kings, the Mon people at Pegu enjoyed a long golden age, profiting from foreign commerce and defending themselves ably against all challengers. Peguers traveled overseas to make money, and traders from across the Indian Ocean—Bengalis and Tamils, Greeks, Venetians and Jews, Arabs, and Armenians—all came
to do business with the king of Pegu and his royal brokers, filling the city’s warehouses with gold and silver, silk and spices, and all the other stuff of early modern trade.
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The city also became a famous center of Theravada Buddhism. Its kings and queens were great patrons of the faith and gave their weight in gold to the Shwedagon Pagoda at Rangoon, today the emblem of Burmese Buddhism, raising the ancient stupa toward its present height and form. The kingdom established strong ties with Ceylon and encouraged fundamentalist reforms that later spread throughout the country.

But Bayinnaung, the generals’ favorite, didn’t come from Pegu. He came instead from a poorer kingdom to the north called Toungoo, nestled in the dark teak and bamboo forests along the foothills of the Shan Plateau. Whereas the people of Pegu spoke Mon, the people of Toungoo spoke Burmese. And they were envious of Pegu’s wealth and its easy access to the sea and were ready to make war and gain what they could of the outlandish luxuries hidden behind the city’s heavy walls. Tabinshweti was the king of Toungoo, and Bayinnaung was the king’s most trusted captain and loyal friend. Together they would bring fire and sword not only to Pegu but to every corner of Burma. And when Tabinshweti died his mysterious death, Bayinnaung went on to even greater victories and became to his people the universal monarch of legend.
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*

The empire building of Tabinshweti and Bayinnaung took place in the context of much grander empire building elsewhere. The Ottomans were then at the very peak of their vitality, reaching the gates of Vienna under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in the spring of 1532. Farther east, Ismail had recently become the shah of Persia and had launched the series of campaigns that would establish the formidable and elegant Shiite Safavid Empire. And closer to home, in 1526, the Central Asian warlord Babur, scion of the house of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, had defeated the sultan of Delhi and set up Mughal domination over almost the entire Indian subcontinent. The world of imperial Islam now marched close to Burma, separated now only by the tidal swamps and malarial marshes of eastern Bengal. But perhaps most important for Burma were developments in the near north.

More than the Ottomans, the Safavids, and even the Mughals, it
was Ming China that could best claim superpower status. With 150 million people, a huge military machine, and a colossal exam-based bureaucracy, there was simply nothing like it in the world, as it dwarfed neighboring Burma in population and economic size. The Ming dynasty had been founded by the tough peasant leader Zhu Yuanzhang, and he and his heirs presided over a long era of scientific progress, economic growth, and political stability. Military power was converted into an aggressive foreign policy, and the new Chinese army, the first anywhere to be equipped with firearms and cannons, was the deadliest ever seen, crushing domestic dissent and carving out huge expanses of the inner Asian steppe.
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The Ming also traveled overseas. A Muslim eunuch of Mongol descent named Zheng He, born in a border town not far from Burma, was one of China’s most distinguished admirals. Captured and castrated as a boy for service in the Forbidden City, he later studied at the Imperial Central University and proved himself both in battle and in the intrigues of the royal court. In 1405, Zheng He, who some say inspired the story of Sinbad the Sailor in
The Thousand and One Nights,
led a fleet around the Indian Ocean that inspires awe even today. More than thirty thousand men sailed in three hundred ships on the first expedition alone (compared with a mere three ships under Christopher Columbus), and these ships were the biggest wooden vessels ever, journeying as far from China as Egypt and the Red Sea and down the African coastline to Mozambique and perhaps beyond. Over the next quarter century there were seven expeditions in all, bolstering China’s political prestige while increasing the Middle Kingdom’s knowledge of the world. Many of these ships were laden with porcelain, lacquer, silk, and other desired goods, and these were freely distributed as a demonstration of Sino superiority. After one voyage Zheng returned to Peking with a giraffe and other exotics for the imperial menagerie, and after another with envoys from no less than thirty countries, including a king of Ceylon, who came to render homage to the emperor in person.
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The Burmese were no doubt impressed by the seaborne exploits of their Chinese neighbors. But they may have been even more impressed and alarmed by a more subtle change. Land reform, advancements in technology, and sustained political stability had come together in China to produce an enormous increase in the already giant country’s population. And this was no more true than in the southwest, along Burma’s
border, where Ming China now appeared in all its size and confidence, just on the other side of the eastern hills. The Middle Kingdom cast a huge shadow over the Irrawaddy Valley, then and ever since.

Against this backdrop of global empire building, Tabinshweti and Bayinnaung set off on their more modest dream of uniting Burma under the Toungoo banner.
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Slowly but surely, they managed to bring all the little principalities and kingdoms of the country to heel, one by one. Pegu itself was among the first to fall, by a devious ruse rather than mere force of arms, and next to go was Martaban, a famed entrepôt of comparable riches, defended by the able and cunning but in the end failed Portuguese mercenary Paolo Seixas. At Martaban, now an overlooked and seedy village but then a place of international repute, the local prince and all his family and retainers were murdered, drowned off the gorgeous sandy beaches, despite promises of good treatment. Many other brutal triumphs followed. But then, just as all Burma lay within their grasp, the Toungoo king, now king of Burma, Tabinshweti, ran into personal trouble. It was to be his undoing.

The troubles all began with the arrival at court of a young
feringhi
*
— a Westerner whose name is lost to history. Nothing much is known about the
feringhi’s
past, nothing to distinguish him from the score of other rough-and-ready Iberian fortune hunters who prowled around the Bay of Bengal, looking for action and loot. He was Portuguese, and this may have meant he was born in Portugal, but it may also have meant that he was born in Asia or was of mixed Luso-Asian background.

By this time the Burmese were very familiar with the men of Lisbon and their kinsmen in the East. It was in 1494, two years after Christopher Columbus’s ships landed in the Caribbean, that Pope Alexander VI issued a bull that divided the world between Iberia’s most Catholic monarchs, with Brazil, Africa, and Asia, Burma included, being granted to King Emmanuel of Portugal and his heirs. It was a license to make money. In 1510, intrepid Portuguese seamen seized Goa from the Bijapur sultan, and a year later Dom Alfonso de Albuquerque overwhelmed the fabulously wealthy trading center of Malacca in Malaya, a pivot of global exchange, and thereby brought under Portuguese control the greatest sea-lane in the world.  

The Portuguese were not coming into a world with no trade; rather they were intervening to break up or circumvent already lucrative intercontinental networks, many in the pockets of Persian and other Asian Islamic businessmen. They saw Islam as their implacable foe but were content to do deals with the Buddhist and Hindu princes of the Indian Ocean world and matched commercial acumen with an unmitigated willingness to kill. Soon maritime trade in pepper from the Malabar coast, spices, cloves, and nutmeg from the Moluccas, and cinnamon from Ceylon all fell into energetic Portuguese hands, displacing the older land routes from Beirut and Alexandria to Venice and taking goods around the Cape of Good Hope. Those lucky enough to be part of this wave of globalization became wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.
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