The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (17 page)

Prome was a stronger monarch, and he soon turned his attention to the increasingly nervous prince of Gui. He suspected the refugee emperor of conspiring with the Chinese bands all around them and summoned the prince’s followers, all seven hundred of them, to the Tupayon Pagoda at Sagaing. Prome said he wanted them to take an oath of allegiance. They refused until the lord, or
sawbwa,
of Mongsi, whom they trusted, agreed to be there as well. But it was a trick. At the pagoda the lord of Mongsi was taken away. And royal troops moved in to encircle the Chinese. The Chinese reached for their swords and then were shot down by the king’s musketeers. Those who survived the shooting were beheaded. The prince of Gui became even more nervous.

In 1662, four years after the prince had first entered Burma, the
great Chinese general and viceroy Wu Sangui marched into the kingdom at the head of an enormous imperial force, twenty thousand strong, coming straight down the mountains and halting only a few miles from Ava, and demanding the surrender of the Ming prince. Wu Sangui was then fifty years old. He had been a senior Ming commander but had switched sides and had opened the gates of the Great Wall of China to the Manchu armies of the north. In 1673 he would switch sides again and rebel against the new Qing dynasty. But for now he was on the side of the Manchus and had taken as his wife the sister of the new Manchu emperor.

It was said that Prome wanted to fight but that his ministers told him to get rid of their troublesome guest once and for all. And so the prince of Gui and his family were handed over as prisoners. The prince was now thirty-eight. His son was fourteen. They were taken to Kunming in Yunnan and strangled to death in the marketplace with a bowstring. Another son apparently died in Burma and is buried at Bhamo near the Chinese border. His wife and daughters were taken to Peking. During their days in Burma the whole family had converted to Roman Catholicism, under the influence of a Jesuit priest at Ava, and had taken the Christian names of the fallen Byzantine house: The prince of Gui’s son had become Constantine, his mother, the empress, was named Anne, and the other princesses were named Helen and Mary.

The upheavals weakened the now nearly two-centuries-old dynasty. But the kingdom stayed together, absorbing the blows of the Chinese incursions without breakup or revolt. This was in large part due to the reforms that had taken place. Like all societies in Southeast Asia at the time, the key to economic power was not so much land as people; there was always a dearth of people. Wars were waged to capture people as well as loot, and government was about the proper management of the king’s men. All this was improved and systematized.
³⁰
And the image of empire, of Bayinnaung’s exploits, and of more distant memories of Pagan and Prome remained. When the dynasty finally fell, the new royal clan would accept the old traditions, turning only later toward radical reform when confronted with disaster at the hands of an entirely new foe, the English East India Company. 

Notes – 4: PIRATES AND PRINCES ALONG THE BAY OF BENGAL

1
. Caesar Frederick of Venice,
Account of Venice
, trans. Master Thomas Hickock, reproduced in
SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research
2:2 (Autumn 2004). 

 
2
. For perspectives on Bayinnaung, see Sunait Chutinaranond, “King Bayinnaung as Historical Hero in Thai Perspective,”
Comparative Studies on Literature and History
of Thailand and Myanmar
(Bangkok: Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University, 1997); Kyaw Win, “King Bayinnaung as a Historical Hero in Myanmar Perspective,” ibid., 1–7.

3
. Than Tun, “History of Burma, a.d. 1300–1400,”
Journal of the Burma Research Society
42:2 (1959), 135–91; Than Hla Thaw, “History of Burma, a.d. 1400–1500,”
Journal of the Burma Research Society
42:2 (1959), 135–51.

4
. On the early modern trading world in the Bay of Bengal, see Om Prakash, “Coastal Burma and the Trading World of the Bay of Bengal, 1500–1680,” in Jos Gommans and Jacques Leider, eds.,
The Maritime Frontier of Burma: Exploring Political, Cultural, and Commercial Interaction in the Indian Ocean World, 1200–1800
(Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002).

5
. Jon Fernquist, “Min-gyi-nyo, the Shan Invasions of Ava (1524–27), and the Beginnings of Expansionary Warfare in Toungoo Burma: 1486–1539,”
SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research
3 (Autumn 2005).

6
. John King Fairbank,
China: A New History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 128–40.

7
. Louise Levathes,
When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

8
. On Bayinnaung’s conquests, see Htin Aung,
History of Burma,
102–27; Victor Lieberman,
Burmese Administrative
Cycles: Anarchy and Conquest, c. 1580–1760
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); see also Harvey,
History of Burma
, 162–79; and Lieberman,
Strange Parallels
, 123–67.

9
. Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
The Portugese Empire in Asia: A Political and Economic History
(London: Longman, 1993), chapter 4.

10
. Harvey,
History of Burma
, 160–62.

11
. On Arakan’s history, see Michael Charney, “Arakan, Min Yazagyi and the Portuguese: The Relationship Between the Growth of Arakanese Imperial Power and Portuguese Mercenaries on the Fringe of Southeast Asia,”
SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research
3:2 (2005); Richard Eaton, “Locating Arakan and Time, Space and Historical Scholarship,” in Gommans and Leider,
The Maritime Frontier of Burma;
Harvey,
History of Burma
, 137–49; Pamela Gutman,
Burma’s Lost Kingdoms: Splendours of Arakan
(Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2001); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “And a River Runs Through It: The Mrauk-U Kingdom and Its Bay of Bengal Context,” in Gommans and Leider,
The Maritime Frontier of Burma
.

12
. Father A. Farinha, “Journey of Father A. Farinha, S.J., from Diego to Arakan, 1639–40,” in Sebastião Manrique,
Travels of Fray Sebastien Manrique, 1629–1643
(Oxford: Printed for Hakluyt Society, 1927), 172–75.

13
. G. E. Harvey, “Bayinnaung’s Living Descendent: The Magh Bohmong,”
Journal of the Burma Research Society
44:1 (1961), 35–42.

14
. Duarte Barbosa,
A Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar in the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century
, trans. from an early Spanish manuscript by Henry E. J. Stanley (1866; repr., New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1995), 182–83.

15
. François Bernier,
Travels in the Mogul Empire
(London: W. Pickering, 1826), 175.

16
. D. G. E. Hall, “Studies in Dutch Relations with Arakan,”
Journal of the Burma Research Society
26 (1936), 1–31. 

17
. ARA, Letter from Governor-General Coen and Council at Batavia to Andries Soury and Abraham van Uffelen at Masulipatam, 8 May 1622, VOC 1076, ff. 76–78, quoted in Om Prakash, “Coastal Burma and the Trading World,” in Gommans and Leider,
The Maritime Frontier of Burma
, 98.

18
. Alexander Hamilton,
New Account of the East Indies
(Edinburgh: J. Mosman, 1727), quoted in Henry Yule,
Narrative of the Mission to the Court of Ava in 1855
(repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 110.

19
. On de Brito’s career, see Harvey,
History of Burma
, 185–89; Htin Aung,
A History of Burma
, 134–44.

20
. Harvey,
History of Burma
, 187.

21
. Htin Aung,
A History of Burma
, 137.

22
. Ibid., 140.

23
. Paul Ambroise Bigandet,
An Outline of the History of the Catholic Burmese Mission from the Year 1720 to 1887
(Rangoon: Hanthawaddy Press, 1887), 11.

24
. G. E. Harvey, “The Fate of Shah Shuja 1661,”
Journal of the Burma Research Society
12 (1922), 107–15.

25
. Harvey,
History of Burma
, 146–48.

26
. Jonathan D. Spence,
The Search for Modern China
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 26–48.

27
. Ibid., 37.

28
. Fernquist, “Min-gyi-nyo, the Shan Invasions of Ava.”

29
. Harvey,
History of Burma
, 196–201, 352–53.

30
. For a comprehensive account of Burmese state formation up to the early nineteenth century, see Lieberman,
Strange Parallels
, chapter 2.

*
From the Arabic
firanj
, or Frank.

FIVE

THE CONSEQUENCES OF PATRIOTISM

Burma’s last dynasty comes to power during the Seven Years’ War and then goes on to build an empire, fighting the Siamese and the Manchus and inspiring a new martial spirit

A
ung Zeyya was an unlikely savior of his people. For decades fierce Manipuri horsemen had been raiding up and down the valley of the nearby Mu River, torching villages all around, ransacking pagodas, and stealing away captives. Led by their rajas Jai Singh and Gharib Newaz and riding the stylish little ponies for which they would later be renowned, the Manipuris defeated again and again the soldiers dispatched to stop them. The Burmese court seemed powerless against the rising menace, and its frailty lost it support at home and even the nominal allegiance of its eastern tributaries. In the summer of 1739 Gharib Newaz’s cavalry reached the Irrawaddy itself, burning the monastic libraries on the north shore and halting, the Burmese believe, to bathe in the holy waters of the river. In 1743 the famed Manipuri teacher Maha Tharaphu arrived in person at Ava, intending to instruct the Burmese king in the ways of the Hindu faith. The dynasty founded two hundred years before by Bayinnaung was on its last legs. For Aung Zeyya, the
kyedaing
, or hereditary chief, of Moksobo, it would soon be time to take matters in his own hands.

The source of the immediate trouble was Manipur, a fertile and compact plain, about the size of Connecticut, enclosed by pine-clad mountains and set today along the Burmese-Indian border, a few hundred miles to the northwest of Aung Zeyya’s hometown. The area had once been the site of innumerable warring clans, but more recently Manipur had been united under a passionately neo-Hindu regime. Brahmin priests from Bengal, devotees of the god Vishnu, had converted 
the Manipuri ruling class, encouraging new ceremonies and caste rules. A fresh energy was instilled that was then channeled into a southward military advance. The first raids into Burma had taken place in the middle and late seventeenth century, but they were now increasing in frequency and destructiveness.