The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (4 page)

The vigor of the Burmese resistance had surprised Prendergast. He was determined to proceed step by step. Fortunately for him he could now rely on detailed drawings of Burmese forts and other defensive positions left behind at the captured forts by two Italians, Captain Camotto and Captain Molinari. These two erstwhile officers had been hired by the Burmese government, in a moment of panic and apparently less than astute judgment, as military advisers. During the heat of battle the duo had ignominiously taken flight, leaving behind all their papers, including the drawings.

For the British the remainder of the war was, to use a more recent expression, a cakewalk. The Burmese had concentrated their forces about a hundred miles to the north of the frontier, just beyond the vast medieval ruins at Pagan. On 23 November two companies of the Liverpool Regiment and four companies of Bengal infantry landed along the eastern banks of the Irrawaddy and pushed toward the fort at Myingyan. But there was to be no real resistance, only a few small skirmishes. In the distance the British could see the mounted Burmese general, the lord of Salay, peering down at them from an escarpment,
surrounded by his men in their red, white, and magenta coats. Many of the officers among them had vermilion umbrellas, a mark of minor nobility, held over their heads. Salay had decided not to fight, and instead he and his army withdrew, away from the river and into the low forests to the east. He telegraphed Mandalay later that day to say that Myingyan had fallen and only the great fortifications near Ava lay between the British and Mandalay.

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The Kinwun Mingyi was a survivor. Now in his sixties, slight and grayhaired and with a thick, bushy mustache, he had spent the last thirty years at the Court of Ava, surviving two reigns and many rebellions. A scholar of law and jurisprudence, the Kinwun
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had risen through the ranks of the palace establishment through his cunning and fine drafting skills, finally making his name as a diplomat and as the head of the Burmese king’s mission to Queen Victoria in 1872. His trip was only a qualified success, but his diary of the long travel to London and back, written for the entertainment of the court ladies, was a literary hit. For the mission he was raised to the rank of secretary of state and on his return showered with new titles and noble styles.

What was difficult for him to convey in his diary was the extent to which his experiences in the world outside Burma, and especially in late Victorian England, had changed forever his assessment of what was possible and what was not in his country’s relations with the greatest industrial and military power of the day. He had been taken up and down the length and breadth of the British Isles and had seen firsthand the sources of the empire’s strength and skill.

When the last king, Mindon, had died, in 1878, the Kinwun formed a coalition with various factions at court and placed the twenty-oneyear-old Thibaw on the throne. He hoped that Thibaw would be a weak king or at least one open to his ideas for change. The Kinwun and other reform-minded grandees, many of whom had been schooled in Europe in the 1860s and 1870s, knew that time was running against them. Only radical reform would save their kingdom. But he had not
counted on the rigor of the royalist reaction, and most of their plans had come to nothing. The last few years had been ones of intense disappointment.

But what to do now that the English were almost at the gates of the palace? Military resistance seemed out of the question. For the Kinwun, that which was utterly unthinkable to many at court—accepting a British protectorate—was far from unacceptable. He had tried hard as a diplomat to win British recognition for Burma as an independent state and failed. But perhaps a protectorate would in the end bring stability and then progress, and this was all that Prendergast and his ships and his machine guns had come to do. The Kinwun knew the exiled princes well. If the British had come to place one on the throne, that was not the worst scenario. But would Thibaw give up without a fight?

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When the telegram reached the palace saying that the English had sailed past Pagan, the king had begun to assume the worst. The governor of the Mandalay area, the lord of Yindaw, suggested that Thibaw retreat into the Shan hills, to the town later known as Maymyo. The minister in charge of relations with China suggested an escape by road, to the southeast and across the border into Yunnan. Thibaw weighed these options but thought that if he had to leave, he would prefer to retire to Shwebo, his ancestral home. If things went badly, he could flee even farther north and eventually reach Chinese territory through the mountain chieftainships of Wuntho and Mogaung.

He ordered his minister for war, the lord of Taingdar, to ready fifty elephants, fitted out with the king’s howdahs. Everyone was told to be prepared to leave: government officials of all ranks, the ladies of the court, his elite Natshin-yway bodyguard, made up of specially chosen men over six feet in height, the hundreds of servants and retainers, royal sword bearers and umbrella carriers, as well as his two little daughters (his only son had died of smallpox as a baby) and his wife and queen, Supayalat.
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But others told him that running away would do no good. They reminded him of the lessons of history. As soon as he was away from the palace, they warned, his prestige would diminish, and once a king lost his prestige, “he is left with nothing but his umbrella.” What about the French? They had signed a treaty of friendship. So had the Germans and the Italians. Were these good for nothing? His ambassador in Paris
could not be reached, as the British had severed their communications via Rangoon. But on 23 November the Kinwun submitted a report stating that the French agent at Mandalay, M. Frédéric Haas, had come to tell him that the English would soon arrive and that His Majesty must grant them whatever they demanded. The Kinwun tried to reassure the nervous king, promising Thibaw that he would stay with him and protect him “from whatever grief or danger might come near him, not waiting in anxiety, but in brave acceptance of what was to come.”

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Prendergast’s Field Force pushed on and within two days reached the great bend in the Irrawaddy River, here over a mile wide, where the Burmese had constructed three fortifications, one by the old royal city of Ava and two others on the opposite bank. The garrison at Ava was commanded by the lord of Myothit, a minister in the government and the diplomat who had led the embassy to France and signed a treaty at the Palais de l’Élysée only a couple of years before.

In the dark wooden halls of the palace, those who counseled surrender rather than flight or resistance finally gained the upper hand. Within a day Prendergast’s guns would be within firing range of Mandalay town. A robust defense could be organized, but it seemed unlikely that anything other than a British victory was possible at this point. Perhaps the British would agree to a conditional surrender. The grandees at court must have known that their king’s fate was sealed, but perhaps their own interests and the interests of their class and their country could still be protected.

By late November the weather in Upper Burma is nearly always perfect, with cool nights and warm days of cloudless blue skies. Brigadier White, standing on deck as the
Kathleen
came within sight of Ava, wrote that “the sun was pouring a flood of golden light on the last hours of Burman independence.”

That afternoon the Burmese steamer
Yadana Yimun
appeared, flying the peacock flag of the Court of Ava as well as the white flag of surrender. In tow was a gilded royal barge with forty-four rowers, carrying two emissaries of the king, the lords of Kyauk-myaung and Wetmasut. The emissaries, both wearing enormous floppy sun hats, asked for an armistice and time to satisfy London’s demands. Prendergast, though giving them a friendly welcome, rejected the possibility of any armistice
but said that if Thibaw surrendered himself, his army, and Mandalay, and if the Europeans in Mandalay were found “unharmed in person and in property,” then the king’s life would be spared. No other guarantees could be given. He gave the envoys a deadline of 4:00 a.m. on 27 November, about a day and a half away.
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The early-morning deadline came and went, but at 10:00 a.m. the envoys finally reappeared with word of surrender from Thibaw. The British noticed that the Burmese had blocked the river just above Ava by sinking a steamer and various smaller boats, filling them with sand and stones. The Burmese forces in the area were ordered to lay down their arms, but the lord of Myothit (the fort commander) refused to accept the authenticity of Kyauk-myaung’s message and insisted on a direct order from his king. Kyauk-myaung was a Sorbonne-educated reformist and known to have long advised accommodation with London. Only when a telegraph in Burmese Morse code was received at Ava, signed by Thibaw himself, did Myothit agree to stand down. His men then melted away into the surrounding villages, leaving behind piles of Martini rifles. Myothit himself stayed and wept as he saw the steamships slowly make their way the ten miles to the royal city itself.

The Burmese remember that the entire evening, from around seven o’clock until dawn the next day, the sky was filled with thousands of shooting stars and meteors, falling in all directions, appearing and disappearing as people wondered what these clear omens could mean. These were actually the Andromedids in one of the greatest meteor storms of recent times, seen all over the world. Those learned in astrology prophesied that the country and the Buddhist religion would soon meet hard times.

General Prendergast landed at Mandalay at one in the afternoon on 28 November. This was to be a day famous in Burmese history and in the Burmese calendar is remembered as the eighth day of the waning moon of Tasaungmon or Sagittarius. At three o’clock his political officer, Sir Edward Sladen, on horseback, approached the southern gates together with a small armed escort. Crowds had begun to gather along the avenues leading from the river to the city walls. Sladen was a former British Resident at Mandalay and spoke Burmese. Just then a minister came charging up on a caparisoned elephant and pleaded that troops not yet be sent into the palace precincts. Sladen left a note for Prendergast at the gate asking to give him some time and then went in alone.
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Edward Sladen climbed up the whitewashed stone steps and into the dark and thickly carpeted inner rooms of the palace. Escorted by the Kinwun, he walked quickly to where the king was sitting, together with his wife and his mother-in-law, the queen mother. Thibaw received him and at first spoke nervously, asking the Englishman if he remembered their earlier meetings. And then, mustering up as much courage as possible, he looked at the Englishman and said, “in a very formal and impressive manner: ‘I surrender myself and my country to you.’” Thibaw asked for a day or two to prepare for leaving and said that in the meantime he would stay not in the main palace but in the summerhouse nearby. He told the political officer of his worries for Supayalat, now over seven months pregnant. But Sladen would not agree and gave him only until the morning, promising that until then the British troops would not enter the palace. With this Sladen turned and left.

Soon it was dark, and in the dark the palace descended into chaos. The old certainties of palace life and discipline dissolved with the knowledge of the coming foreign occupation. Some reacted with shock. For most the haziness of what lay ahead meant that they had to grab what they could and position themselves as best as possible for what was to come. A new king? Or rule by the English, something few could imagine? Prendergast had ordered that no men were to enter or leave the palace, but he did not mention women, and overnight dozens, perhaps hundreds of ordinary women came through the western gates and seized anything of value they could find. The king’s bodyguards deserted him. And all but seventeen of the three hundred maids of honor fled, also carrying all the valuables they could.

Thibaw was by now beside himself with fear, certain that at any minute soldiers would break into his apartment and kill him on the spot. When Sladen arrived the next morning, he saw that the king and queen were practically alone and unattended and that overnight Thibaw had collected what he could of the gold vessels used by Burmese sovereigns on state occasions, the heirlooms of his family and dynasty, and these were in a little pile on one side of the room. Sladen had come with a guard of the Sixty-seventh South Hampshire Regiment. Thibaw wasn’t frightened of the English soldiers, but when one of the officers’ servants, a black man, came in carrying something for the
officer, “Thibaw was much disturbed, and asked if he was the executioner.”
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General Prendergast himself appeared at noon, and Sladen informed him that the king was ready to receive him. The great wooden gates flung open, and the pith-helmeted marched in, halting at the steps to the main hall and forming a line with ranks facing inward and with fixed bayonets. The Burmese ministers of state came next, led by the Kinwun and the lord of Taingdar. All walked past the teak-pillared throne rooms and the smaller salons and halls, rooms filled with French mirrors, Persian rugs, and glass mosaics, finally descending a flight of wooden stairs and into a back garden. Here under the shade of tall palm trees was the summerhouse, with a paved walkway and gas lamps in the front and a little artificial pond to the side.