The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (5 page)

Thibaw sat petrified on the verandah, the royal women behind him also clearly frightened, their eyes wandering back and forth from Sladen to Prendergast to the bayonets of the black-booted soldiers. An unseasonable drizzle had just ended, and the sun shone only intermittently through the clouds. Prendergast bowed once, and Thibaw’s ministers, in their long dark velvet coats, prostrated themselves before their sovereign for the last time on the cold wet earth.

There was to be no ceremonial procession. Instead Thibaw and his young family, together with a train of servants, were led toward a few ordinary bullock carts waiting just outside the palace enclosure. They then left through the southern Kyaw Moe (Conspicuous Sky) gate, over the lily-filled moat, escorted by the men of the Sixty-seventh Foot. The captain of the king’s artillery, the lord of Mabai, and the privy treasurer, the lord of Paukmyaing, followed behind, bringing with them the royal insignia. The lords of Wetmasut and Pindalay, ministers of the inner court, placed two white umbrellas, symbols of royalty, over Thibaw’s ramshackle wooden carriage.

By now large crowds of ordinary people had gathered along the avenues leading from the walled city and to the Govinda wharf, some three miles away. As their king passed them by, men, women, and children instinctively knelt on the ground. Many were weeping. Some cried out at the uniformed Englishmen surrounding the captive family, and a few stones and clumps of earth were thrown as the party slowly wound its way through the progressively denser crowds. Thibaw remained silent throughout the journey, but Supayalat nervously called

on the young soldiers, several of whom rushed forward to light her proffered cigar.

It was dusk by the time they reached the river. A small wooden plank connected the bank to the
Thooreah
steamer. With his attendants holding a tall white umbrella over his head, and a crush of English, Burmese, and Indian onlookers all around, the twenty-eight-year-old Thibaw walked onto the ship, never to see Mandalay or Burma again.

THE DAY AFTER

The people of this country have not, as was by some expected, welcomed us as deliverers from tyranny.

—Secretary for Upper Burma to the Chief Commissioner
¹⁴

In the end the Burma War was neither necessary nor particularly helpful to Randolph Churchill and the Conservative Party. On 21 November, as Prendergast’s fleet was sailing north toward the temples at Pagan, Charles Parnell had issued a statement denouncing Gladstone and calling on all Irishmen in England to vote for the Tories. The result was a close election, with a large Irish bloc holding the balance. The polls had opened on 25 November, when Prendergast was still moored near Ava. Mandalay’s actual surrender took place not on the eve of the polls, as Churchill had hoped, but in the days of helter-skelter party politics that followed. Parnell joined a Conservative government under Salisbury and then later changed his mind and helped bring Gladstone back to power. Churchill himself became Chancellor of the Exchequer before leaving the political scene altogether a year later. No one really cared about Burma by that point. An interview with Thibaw on the morning of his departure appeared in
The Times,
and a few colorful descriptions of Burma and the war appeared in
The Illustrated London News,
but not much else. Few sensed the bloodshed that was to come.

The war had started without a plan in place for its aftermath. Much like what would happen in the Iraq War 120 years later (and several colonial ventures in between), Churchill and others who had advocated a policy of “regime change” had assumed only the best: that with the removal of the top leadership, there would remain in place an administration
with which the victors could work and that it would be on the whole a cheap war, a decapitation that would lead to a new and more pliable government and little need for an elaborate strategy of occupation. But also like the Iraq War of the twenty-first century, the bestcase scenario never materialized.

The most obvious plan was to place another prince of the same Konbaung dynasty on the vacant throne as a sort of British puppet. What was left of the Burmese kingdom, Upper Burma, would have become either a protectorate, like Nepal, or an Indian princely state, like Hyderabad or Kashmir. The new “prince of Upper Burma” would have lived and ruled under the guidance of a British Resident, and the ways and aesthetics of the court may have been reformed to better fit English notions of a proper Oriental monarchy. Thibaw’s successors may even have become fabulously rich and joined their Indian peers at the racetracks of Ascot or the gaming tables of Monte Carlo.

The government of India had been keeping one of Thibaw’s half brothers, the prince of Nyaunggyan, on standby for several years in Calcutta for just such an eventuality. Many had assumed that he was the figure seen on the prow of one of Prendergast’s ships, and this may have led to the easy surrender. But he had actually died just weeks before, something kept top secret so as not to undermine the ruse. But there were other options, including the young prince of Pyinmana, a teenager who could easily have been shaped into the sort of ruler the later Victorian empire wanted and expected.

The second option was simple annexation. No more king and no more royal family. All of Thibaw’s possessions would have come ultimately under the authority of a British chief commissioner or governor. Under both schemes, some or all of the old administration could have remained, both the institutions of the Court of Ava and more than a few of its turbaned and helmeted officialdom. Either way, there would have been no more external interference, from the French or anyone else, and stability and trade would have been ensured under a British Raj.

But it soon dawned on even the most optimistic empire builders that in invading Burma, the British had waded into a very messy situation. The central assumption of Whitehall’s Burma policy, to the extent that there was one, was that a swift and simple change at the top would lead to quick submission and the rapid return of normal government. This was now proven horribly wrong.

Things didn’t start off too badly. Heat, bugs, and unfamiliar foods took their toll, but Mandalay was far from an inhospitable place to live. There were the familiar rituals and practices of a late-nineteenth-century colonial victory. Photographs were taken of British officers and their Indian subordinates against new and exotic backgrounds. Medals and promotions were discussed. A prize committee decided which treasures and artworks to send to whom in England and Ireland and what to sell for the government of India. Queen Victoria received Thibaw’s best crown, and the prince and princess of Wales two carved ivory tusks and a gold figure of the Buddha. The larger rooms of the palace were converted with little redecoration into an Anglican chapel and a somewhat makeshift Upper Burma Club, complete with billiard table and a passable bar.

There were also some early attempts to address Burmese sensitivities, to win hearts and minds, but these were often inadequate or wrongly conceived. Within days of Thibaw’s departure, his white elephant, symbol of the country’s sovereignty, appropriately gave up the ghost. Though a proper cremation with court Brahmins was permitted, the dead animal was then unceremoniously dragged, in full view of a shocked public, out of the palace gates. For the Burmese the elephant had been something extraordinary, bordering on the divine, and was treated with extreme respect and care. Dragging the king’s own corpse along the street would probably not have provoked any greater ill feeling.

By Christmas initial luck and good cheer had turned to worry bordering on panic. Within the defunct Court of Ava the British faced growing resentment and outright hostility, while in the countryside roving bands of armed men more directly challenged the new order. Thibaw’s army had scurried away, many carrying their swords and rifles. Parts of the valley had long been plagued by gangs of bandits, and these now seemed to find common cause with the ex-soldiers returning to their home villages and hamlets. British patrols were ambushed and attacked by a largely invisible army with no apparent leadership. Again, as in Iraq much later, the questions were asked: Were they remnants of the old regime? Extremists of some sort? Or criminals taking advantage of the change in government? No one had any idea.

There were a few officials of the old government willing to help the British, but only in the most cursory manner. Many gathered their belongings and left Mandalay altogether. Harry Prendergast’s political
officers had hoped to work with Thibaw’s most senior minister, the Kinwun. But he had chosen, perhaps in part out of a guilty conscience, to accompany the former king part of the way to his exile in India. The next most senior minister was the lord of Taingdar. He was known as a committed Anglophobe, and the British eventually found reason to arrest him and pack him off to India as well. For a few weeks the royal officers who were left were reorganized and placed under the overall supervision of a British civilian, Sir Charles Bernard. But the orders they sent up and down the Irrawaddy to the king’s governors and garrison commanders seemed to have little effect as a full-fledged insurgency began to take shape.

Left to deal with the growing mess was the not particularly imaginative Irishman Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, the earl of Dufferin and baron of Clandeboye, the owner of large estates in the north of County Down and more recently the viceroy of India. Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Dufferin had a long and distinguished record of imperial and diplomatic service. He was governor-general of Canada and ambassador, first to Russia and then to the Ottoman Empire. He was a Whig but also an aristocrat and landowner.
¹⁵
After his predecessor Lord Ripon’s exciting and controversial tenure, the queen told Dufferin not to be too independent in his thinking, and Dufferin was happy to comply.

And Dufferin, despite any misgivings he may have had (and despite the more articulate misgivings of his senior officials), had acquiesced to Churchill’s strong lead and not stood in the way of a war with Burma. But now that Churchill had moved on to bigger things, it was Lord Dufferin who was left responsible for determining Burma’s postwar future.

No more the Royal Umbrella.

No more the Royal Palace,

And the Royal City, no more

This is indeed an Age of Nothingness

It would be better if we were dead

    —The abbot of Zibani Monastery
¹⁶

For the people of Mandalay the days and weeks after the king’s departure would remain etched in their minds forever. Fifty years later, on the eve of the Second World War, the nationalist leader Thakin Kodaw
Hmaing remembered how as a child he had witnessed the British soldiers escorting Thibaw and his family through the dusty streets of the city. For the ten thousand Buddhist monks who lived in and around the capital, occupation by a non-Buddhist power was almost impossible to comprehend. Mandalay was the center of religious life in Burma, and the king acted as patron to dozens of monasteries and monastic colleges around the city and in nearby towns. All of a sudden their patron was gone, and an entire system of higher education and religious training collapsed almost overnight.

For the officials of the Court of Ava, their hopes of a light occupation and the installation of a new prince were quickly fading. When it became clear that the British had no intention of leaving and were instead inclined to abolish the monarchy altogether, many of Thibaw’s senior officials, led by the Kinwun, banded together and made a formal request to the viceroy: establish a constitutional monarchy or relieve us entirely of our remaining responsibilities. They wanted full authority, under the guidance of a British political officer and with a figurehead prince. This, they said, could work, and order could be quickly reestablished. But they couldn’t be expected to function as things were, with no say over the administration of the capital and only limited authority in the countryside. They were neither here nor there. They wanted a decision.

Outside Mandalay the nobility and the gentry class, which had governed the countryside for centuries, responded in different ways. Some chose submission. They included senior military officers, like the colonel of the Yandana Theinga cavalry, a man of much influence in the north, who sided with the conquerors and was appointed in charge of his township.

Others, like the lord of Yamethin, were less willing to give in. He had been an officer in the household guards and had been posted as a garrison commander in the Shan uplands. He now led his Kindah regiment down from the hills and into the forests around Yamethin to harass British positions. His distant relative the
sawbwa,
or prince, of Wuntho in the far north also decided to resist, gathering around him the chiefs of Katha and Kyatpyin for the coming fight. Just to the south of Mandalay, the chief of Mekkaya, head of one of the oldest aristocratic lineages in the country, organized his men against the occupiers, ambushing the young men from Tyneside and South Wales as they
ambled through the tall elephant grass and across fields of cotton and paddy. Other rebels included notorious bandits of long standing, like Hla-U in the lower Chindwin Valley and Yan Nyun in the badlands of the middle Irrawaddy. Now wearing a patriotic guise, they enjoyed a new lease on their popularity and made common cause with their erstwhile royalist foes.
¹⁷