No More Learning

Several of Alaungpaya's court poets were also field officers, such
as Letwethondara (p. 513), who served under the walls of Pegu;
Letwethondara had been a writer to the Hluttaw council under the
last king of Ava, and was one of the staff taken over by Alaungpaya.
About 1750 the Sonta sayadaw (abbot) of Hsinbyugyun, Minbu
district, compiled the Manu Ring dhammathat (law book), which
1 Sayadaw Athwa, 10, 148.


## p. 509 (#549) ############################################

NEGRAIS MASSACRE
509
started the fashion of attributing the decisions of Kaingsa Manu
(p. 497) to the ancient sage Manu. By Alaungpaya's order, his
minister, the soldier Mahasiri-uttamajaya, compiled the Manu Kye
dhammathat, a compilation of existing laws and customs which passed
into general use owing to its encyclopaedic nature and to its being
written in simple Burmese with very little Pali; one of its provisions
is that no debt can be demanded when human victims are being
offered at the foundation of a city (p. 499); and when in 1751 Tavoy
was rebuilt, a condemned criminal was crushed in each post-hole of
the city gates. "
In 1755 Alaungpaya sent an expedition to instil respect into the
Manipuris, who significantly call this, the first of his dynasty's in-
roads, “The First Devastation"; the Manipuris found the Burmese
on this occasion using firearms for the first time, their weapons, like
those of the Manipuris, having previously been only swords, spears,
bows and arrows. In 1758–59 he himself led a force over the hills
by the Khumbat route; at Pulel in the Imole pass the Manipuris
gave him battle and fled after a stubborn conflict; he entered Imphal,
the capital, only to find it empty, as the inhabitants lay hiding in
the woods; he left garrisons in permanent stockades at Tamu and
Thaungdut, and returned home; in his capacity as a divine incar-
nation he promoted religion among the Kathe (Cassay, Manipur)
Shans along his line of march; in his capacity as a king he massacred?
more than four thousand of his Manipuri prisoners because they
stubbornly refused to march away in his slave gangs. These incur-
sions, lasting down to 1819, ended by depopulating the country and
stamping out Manipuri civilisation so completely that we can no
longer tell what their social and political conditions were like. The
Burmese valued Manipuri captives highly and settled them near the
capital; they served the court as silversmiths; as silk-workers they
introduced the acheik pattern;" they gave the Burmese army its best
cavalry (the Cassay horse) and they supplied the bulk of the court
astrologers, who stood robed in white, intoning benedictions, as the
king took his seat on the throne.
Alaungpaya tried to dam the Mu river, and built the Mahananda
lake to supply Shwebo town with water. The Mu canals were not
successful and the work decayed after his death.
In May, 1759, the English, hard pressed in India, withdrew thirty-
five Europeans and seventy Indians, almost the entire staff, from
Negrais (p. 505). In October they sent a skeleton staff to retain a
lien on the island. The governor of Bassein with Lavine, one of
Bruno's men who was in high favour, and sixty followers, met the
new staff on arrival saying they had a letter from the king to show,
1 Mason, Burmah, its people and Productions, p. 106.
2 Konbaungset, p. 303.
3 Hodson, The Meitheis, pp. 4, 29, 58.
* Parlett, Sagaing Settlement Report, p. 4.


## p. 510 (#550) ############################################

610
BURMA (1531-1782)
and the senior officers messed with the English in the fort. A day
later, 6 October, 1759, at nine in the morning when they were sitting
down to breakfast together, the senior guest, the governor of Bassein,
gave a sign and some of the 2000 Burmans concealed in the woods
rushed in, killed eight English and about a hundred Indians, turned
the cannon of the fort on the two ships at anchor, and finally with-
drew with all cannon, stores, and four English. A midshipman and
sixty-four Indians escaped on board. What had happened was that
the Armenians at court, jealous of the English, had told Alaungpaya
that the English were fortifying their stations, supplying the Talaings
with arms, and spoiling his revenue by preventing other traders from
coming up the Bassein river. Alaungpaya sent the governor of
Rangoon, brother to his queen, to extirpate Negrais. The governor
returned saying there must be some mistake, he had found the English
there to be innocuous. Alaungpaya regarded him as a traitor, flogged
all his men, sent a second party which actually did the work, and
before letting him return to his high office flung him into irons and
pegged him out in the sun for days with three beams across his body
so that a year later he was still suffering from the effects. The governor
of Bassein subsequently admitted that the English had not intrigued
with the Talaings, but had fed a few refugees, just as they fed
Burmese refugees, and had made presents of four or five muskets
which the Armenians represented to Alaungpaya as 500. The English
had not prevented ships coming up the river, because they regarded
Alaungpaya as too strong a raja to offend. Under the treaty (p. 505)
he had expressly permitted them to erect fortifications.
After the fall of Pegu, envoys from Chiengmai visited Alaungpaya.
He told them they must make complete submission. They looked at
those blackened ruins and went home; and before long Martaban,
Tavoy, Chiengmai, Anan and other states in north-west Siam sent
tribute.
Many Talaings had taken refuge in Siam; there were endemic
slave raids on the border; and the Siamese had detained the captain
of a Burma-owned ship which had been driven by weather into their
port of Tenasserim. Moreover, seeing that after the conquest of the
Delta he reigned over nothing but ruins, Alaungpaya wished to
populate his realm with prisoners obtained in Siam. Early in 1760
he advanced with 40,000 men through Martaban and Tavoy. Captu-
ring Tenasserim (which thereafter remained a Burmese possession)
with the aid of some small ships managed by European captives, he
went east over the hills to the shore of the Gulf of Siam and turned
1 Hall, “The Tragedy of Negrais", in Journal Burma Research Society, 1931,
part II. The statement, sometimes made in recent English works, that the mas-
sacre was a dastardly deed, perpetrated by Alaungpaya's subordinates without
his authorisation, disregards the standard Burmese account, Konbaungset, pages
144-7, which shows that Alaungpaya regarded the operation as high strategy
and personally insisted on it throughout.


## p. 511 (#551) ############################################

1
ALAUNGPAYA'S DEATH
511
north. The Siamese came out to meet him but were driven back.
Approaching Ayuthia, he burnt some Dutch ships, massacred the
defenceless population regardless of sex or age, and covered the sur-
face of the rivers with their corpses. Under the walls of Ayuthia
he released prominent prisoners with this message to the king of
Siam : “His Burman Majesty comes as a divine incarnation to spread
true religion in your country. Come forth with respect and present
him with elephants and a daughter. " ? But the Siamese had among
them Talaing refugees who knew the story of Pegu (p. 508). Their
feringhis and Muslims manned the war-canoes with cannon in the
maze of canals which surrounded the city; the glacis and fords were
strewn with caltrops; cannon frowned from the battlements, with
thousands of resolute men behind. Alaungpaya had started much too
late in the cold weather. The rains were at hand, when the whole
country would be several feet under water. Half his men were down
with dysentery, and he himself was far from well. It looked as if the
ever victorious army was not going to be victorious. He sent another
message to the king of Siam that he had no wish to dethrone him if
only he would submit to religious reform. There was no reply, and
Alaungpaya saw that the play was over; within a week of arrival the
hosts were in full retreat, abandoning forty guns of three-inch calibre.
He selected the comrade of his youth, Minhkaungnawrahta, to
command the rear-guard. These were the pick of the army—500
Manipur horse and 6000 foot, every man of whom had a musket.
Minhkaungnawrahta spread them out, and it was some time before
the Siamese realised that the main body had left; then they swept
out upon him; his men, fearing to be cut off, watched the ring closing
round them and begged him to let them fight farther back; but he
said : “Friends, the safety of our Lord the King lies in our keeping.
Let us not fight farther back, lest the sound of the guns should break
his sleep. ” When they could stand they stood, and when they had
to run they ran; they were defeated but never broken, and they
withdrew in good order, collecting Alaungpaya's stragglers on the
way.
Meanwhile Alaungpaya had gone ahead by forced marches.
Perhaps, as he lay in pain jolting along in his litter, he longed for
the sights and sounds of home; but he was destined never to see them,
for whether he knew it or not the hand of death was upon him.
Early in May, 1760, he reached Kinyua in Bilin township, Thaton
district, and there at dawn he died (11 May, 1760).
The commanders, watching by his bedside, fearing to dishearten
the troops, kept the death a close secret and sent their swiftest horse-
men to Shwebo, so that the heir might be the first to know and secure
the throne. The body, bound in sheets, was hidden in the curtained
1 S. Smith, History of Siam, 1657-1767, p. 108.
> Konbaungset, pp. 315-18.


## p. 512 (#552) ############################################

612
BURMA (1531_1782)
litter; and thus in death Alaungpaya still rode with his armies and
the daily orders issued in his name. At Rangoon his death was made
public and his body, placed on a state barge, was taken upstream.
At Kyaukmyaung landing stage in Shwebo district the whole court
came out to meet it, and bore it solemnly in through the Hlaingtha
Gate of Shwebo. So he was buried with the ritual of the kings in
the palace city which once had been his village, amid the mourning
of a people. His grave, with an inscription in misspelt English,
perhaps by some Negrais captive, is near the Shwebo Deputy Com-
missioner's court.
Naungdawgyi (1760–63) executed some of his father Alaungpaya's
best officers on suspicion and drove Minhkaungnawrahta to rebel so
that he had to be killed.
The East India Company sent Captain Alves to demand com-
pensation for the Negrais murders, but were in no position to enforce
it as their hands were full in India. The king told Alves that the
Negrais victims were innocent, but they had to suffer for their
predecessors who, he had no doubt, supplied arms to the Talaings,
since, according to the law of nature, the innocent suffer with the
guilty, just as, when a farmer clears the ground by burning the rank
grass, the wheat burns along with the tares. He refused compensa-
tion but permitted the Company to return provided they did not
go to Negrais. He probably never saw the treaty by which Negrais
had been ceded in perpetuity (p. 505) and had he seen it he would
have regarded it as a grant revocable at pleasure : Burmese kings
were not acquainted with the nature of treaties. Living inland, they
could not understand what made the English prefer an island on their
base, the sea, and they were firmly convinced that some deep plot
was being hatched there. The Company had to come to Rangoon.
Talaban (p. 508) was able to maintain himself for years in the
Kawgun caves, Thaton district, but finally his family was captured
and, knowing what their fate would be, he gave himself up and
when brought before the king claimed their lives in exchange for
his own. Struck by his chivalry, the king released them all and took
Talaban into his service.
Hsinbyushin (1763–76) himself raided Manipur in December, 1764,
carrying away its people into captivity, for he wished to increase
the population of his new capital, Ava, into which he moved in
April, 1765. The gates of restored Ava were named after conquered
states, some of them being-on the east side, Chiengmai, Martaban,
Mogaung; on the south, Kaingma, Hanthawaddy, Myede, Onbaung
(Hsipaw); on the west, Gandhalarit (Yünnan), Sandapuri (Vieng-
chang, Linzin), Kenghung; on the north, Tenasserim, Yodaya (Siam).
The various wards were, according to precedent, allotted on racial
lines; thus the Indian traders lived in one, the Chinese in another,
1 Dalrymple, Oriental Repertory, I, 373.


## p. 513 (#553) ############################################

OBSCURANTIST AVA
513
Christians in another, and in others were the Siamese and Manipur
captives; such captives were often a source of suspicion, as in 1774
when the leading families of the Manipur colony were extirpated for
alleged plotting. The wall, sixteen feet high, backed by earthwork,
was of indifferent quality, but adequate to the only style of warfare
it would have to meet. As was usual in Burmese capitals, the palace
was an inner city, with its own moat, wall, and a massive teak
stockade outside. 1
To transfer to Ava was a wise step so far as it went, for it placed
the king in direct communication along the Myitnge river with the
Kyaukse granary, and it was on the great river, whereas Shwebo
was landlocked. But the step did not go far enough. From the day
that Vasco da Gama opened the sea route in 1498, the centre of
gravity had shifted to the delta. The kings from Bayinnaung (1551-
81) to Anaukpetlun (1605--28) acted as if they realised this, making
Pegu their headquarters. But none of their successors realised it, and
their failure to do so sealed the fate of the monarchy. Rangoon
might have let a little fresh air from the outer world into the court.
The delta was a foreign country to the Burmese and they did not
feel safe among the Talaings. Hence there was some excuse for the
earlier kings. But there was none for the Alaungpaya dynasty which
exterminated the Talaings; their remnant continued to rebel for
some time, but these rebellions were crushed with ease, and need
not have occurred had the kings, instead of wasting their energy
on wars in Siam and Assam, used half of it in giving the delta a
good administration. As they would not move to the delta, the
atmosphere of their palace was that of the upper Burma villages
among which it lay. Their ideas remained in the nineteenth century
what they had been in the ninth. To build pagodas, to collect
daughters from tributary chiefs, to sally forth on slave raids, to make
wars for white elephants—these conceptions had had their day, and
a monarchy which failed to get beyond them was doomed. It is
probably more than coincidence that Siam, which had its capital
in a seaport, developed a more enlightened government than the
Burmese kingship, and is independent to-day.
Nine Brahmans whom the king obtained from Benares frequently
assisted him with advice, and with their help the Maungdaung
sayadaw (abbot) translated into Burmese various Sanskrit works on
astrology, medicine, grammar, etc. , known as Vyakarana. Letwe.
thondara, whom the king exiled to Meza hill, Katha district, earned
his recall by writing a poem, the well-known Mezataungche; in a
subsequent reign he became one of the judges in the king's court
nor did he die till the second decade of the next century.
The main armies spent 1764-67 against Siam. Starting from
1 Konbaungset, p. 377; Crawfurd, Embassy to Ava, 1, 1; Enriquez, "Capitals
of the Alaungpaya Dynasty", in Journal Burma Research Society, 1915.
83


## p. 514 (#554) ############################################

614
BURMA (1531-1782)
Kengtung with 20,000 men, mostly Shans, Thihapate slowly fought
his way down from Chiengmai through Viengchang (Linzin), while
another army of the same size under Mahanawrahta fought its way
south-east from Tavoy to Petchaburi. Thihapate had to storm town
after town, and found the villages stockaded against him. When
roused, the men fought with spirit, vying among themselves as to
who should mount the wall. They died like flies from preventible
disease, and suffered ghastly wounds for which they got few thanks
from the king, as the loss of a limb, even in honourable service,
disqualified a man from entering the palace. They kept the field all
the year round, a rare thing for Burmese levies, spending the rains
in the towns they had won. At Chiengmai they had to resort to
mining, with movable shelters under the wall; finally they captured
part of the wall with its guns and turned them all night down into
the terror-stricken population, who sent their monks to surrender
in the morning. The prettiest girls and choicest loot were sent to the
king at Ava.
Gradually they swept over the whole country, burning the towns
and making the chiefs drink the water of allegiance. Such of the
population as had not stampeded eastward ran a risk of having to
contribute to the heads which the Burmese hacked off and piled
up in great heaps under the walls of the towns they besieged, in order
to terrify the defenders. They were sometimes besieged themselves,
for the Ayuthia armies came out and pressed them, trying hard to
prevent their effecting a junction.
But finally the two commanders joined hands under the walls of
Ayuthia. Mahanawrahta fixed his headquarters there at a pagoda
built by Bayinnaung. In spite of wastage their hosts were as numerous
as ever, as they had exacted contingents from the states which they
had conquered, and according to Burmese custom their prisoners
were made to fight for them. They were to spend fourteen months
before Ayuthia. The rains came and flooded them out: they stood
their ground. Their commanders died of hardship : they did not lose
heart. Imperial armies from China invaded upper Burma : they
were not recalled. During the first open season they could not get
near the walls because of the numerous stockades outside the city;
sometimes the whole plain was alive with swarms of Siamese working
under the supervision of grandees who were carried about in sedan
chairs; both sides used bamboo matting between two uprights con-
taining earth for temporary defence while they constructed permanent
works. The Siamese had foreign adventurers fighting for them, one
of their outworks containing four hundred Chinese. When the rains
began to lay the whole country several feet under water, the com-
manders urged Mahanawrahta to withdraw, but he refused, and
1 Konbaungset, pp. 210-13, 381; cf. Alaungpaya Ayedawpon, p. 64; Laurie,
Pegu, p. 461; Crawfurd, Embassy to Ava 0, 41.


## p. 515 (#555) ############################################

SIXTH SIEGE OF AYUTHIA
515
Thihapate supported him. The men stayed on knolls of rising ground
or built dykes to keep out the water. The Siamese seeing them
scattered in isolated groups attacked them in boats. In one of these
attacks a Siamese leader, while waving his sword and hurling defiance
in the bows of his boat, was brought down by a musket shot and fell
into the water, and the whole flotilla fled. Ayuthia prided itself on
its great guns, some of them 30 feet long with 30 viss (100 lb. ) ball;
one of these burst with an overcharge, but the shot killed several
men on two Burmese boats. The Burmese had war-canoes in plenty,
constructed by their lieges up the rivers, and so they were able to
prevent provisions entering the city. When the dry season returned
they reconstructed their earthworks. Some of these were higher than
the walls, and the cannon were also mounted aloft on pagodas so as
to fire down into the palace. Often the palace guns ceased fire,
because the king yielded to the entreaties of his harem, who werd
terrified at the noise. 1
The city starved. Shan states tributary to Siam sent an army
which came down from the north and tried to raise the siege; they
were swept away. The king and princes tried to cut their way out
and escape; they were driven back. They asked what they had done
to merit these horrors and were curtly told they were rebels and
traitors and deserved all they were going to get. The commander-
in-chief Mahanawratha died; and by royal decree was buried with
extraordinary honour : he deserved them. Thihapate had to finish
the siege alone. The end was now near. At four in the afternoon
on 28 March, 1767, the French guns opened for the last time. The
wall had been mined; by nightfall the breach was practicable and
the stormers effected an entry. The slaughter was indiscriminate.
.
The king's body was identified next day among a heap of slain near
the west gate. The houses, the temples, the great palace itself, went
up in flames; the wall was razed to the ground; the city was never
restored as a capital. The princes, the harem, the clergy, foreigners
including a French Catholic bishop, and thousands of the population
were carried away into captivity, so that many a private could boast
of four slaves. There was gold, silver and jewels in abundance, for
the royal treasure was immense. This is the secret of these continued
Burmese attacks on Ayuthia : it was at once a thriving seaport and
a king's palace, one of the wealthiest cities in Indo-China, so that
its treasures were a standing temptation to the Burmese hordes.
The Lao and Shan levies were allowed to return home, probably
because the long absence was rendering them unreliable, and many
of them were prisoners serving under compulsion. But there was no
rest for the weary Burmans. If Ayuthia had not fallen when it did,
the siege would have had to be abandoned, as royal despatches now
came urgently recalling the armies to take their place in the line
Siamese palace tradition:


## p. 516 (#556) ############################################

516
BURMA (1531_1782)
against the Chinese, whose attacks on Ava looked like breaking
through; for the years 1765-69 saw a series of Chinese inroads.
The sawbwas (Shan chiefs) on the Yünnan border usually paid
nominal tribute to both China and Burma. Some now ceased paying
it to Burma, which therefore marched against them; one fled to
Yünnan, and the Kengtung sawbwa made a foray there at the instiga-
tion of the Gwe (p. 505) in the course of their wanderings. Moreover,
the Chinese were dissatisfied at the treatment their merchants
received in Burma. At Bhamo a Chinese caravaneer, angry at delay
in getting sanction to build a bridge, insulted the Burmese governor,
who therefore arrested him; and when released he found that the
Burmese officers had looted his caravan. At Kengtung a Chinaman
was killed in a dispute about payment; the Burmese resident offered
blood-money and even talked of executing the slayer, but would not
hand him over, and the Chinese would not take less. These trivial
incidents should not have caused a war, but the Burmese had no
embassy system to arrange things peaceably, and China happened
to be under an aggressive emperor.
The Chinese invaded in great strength with the active or passive
co-operation of Hsenwi, Bhamo, Mogaung and Kengtung. The
fighting was in the triangle Mogaung, Kenghung on the Mekong
river, and down the Myitnge valley to within three marches of Ava.
The Chinese had bases at Bhamo and Lashio and their line of advance
was usually down the Shweli and Myitnge valleys. But the principal
theatre was in Bhamo district, where Balamindin won fame by his
great defence of Kaungton, twelve miles to the east of which, at
Shwenyaungbin, the Chinese also had a gigantic stockade, “as big
as a city".
The Burmese had better war-canoes than the Chinese, they
received invaluable help from their captive French gunners, and
they won most of the dozen major actions which were spread over
four campaigns; but the suspense was terrible; as soon as one Chinese
army was driven back, another came on in greater numbers than
ever. The earth quaked, rending the national shrines; to placate
the unseen powers, the king flung thousands of gold and silver images
into the Shwezigon at Pagan and the Shwedagon.
The Chinese proved useless as soldiers, but the Manchu contingents
were good troops who, with ladders, axes, hooks and ropes, would
rush up to the stockades against the withering fire, while boiling lead
poured down on them and their bodies were crushed by great beams
of which the lashings were cut as soon as the stormers were under-
neath. The Chinese would have quickly disposed of the Burmese
.
in the open, but the Burmese never allowed themselves to be caught
there, giving battle only in their deadly stockades amid the jungle;
and the Chinese, who described the climate as impossible, suffered
severely from disease. Even so, they ought to have won; but whereas


## p. 517 (#557) ############################################

CHINESE WAR
617
the Burmese commanders worked together hand in hand, the
Chinese lacked co-ordination, and threw away the advantage of
superior numbers by allowing themselves to be overwhelmed in
detail. Moreover, they were handicapped by lack of topographical
information; one of their armies spent two months wandering blindly
through Mogaung and Mohnyin when it was urgently needed else-
where : they did indeed study their staff record of the 1277–87
invasions, but found it useless as the place-names had changed. The
best of their generals, Mingjui, son-in-law to the emperor, who had
won distinction in Turkestan, fought his way from Lashio, smashing
a Burmese army and driving it past the Gokteik gorge to Singaung
three marches from Ava. The court in panic urged the king to flee
but he scornfully refused, saying he and his brother princes, the sons
of Alaungpaya, would face the Chinese single-handed if necessary.
Mingjui's colleagues failed to support him, Burmese armies in his
rear cut off his supplies, and he had to retreat beset by overwhelming
odds; such was the slaughter that the Burmese could hardly grip
their swords as the hilts were slippery with enemy blood. Mingjui
fought in the rear-guard till he saw his men were safe and then,
obeying the tradition of the Manchu officer corps, he cut off his
plaited hair, sent it as a token to his emperor, and hanged himself
on a tree; his servants hid his body with leaves lest the Burmese
should desecrate it according to their wont.
At length in 1769, after losing, from first to last, 20,000 men and
great stores of arms and ammunition which went to equip Burmese
levies, the Chinese were driven out of their great stockade at Shwe-
nyaungbin and their generals asked for terms.
The Burmese staff was
adverse to granting terms, saying that the Chinese were surrounded
like cattle in a pen, they were starving and in a few days they could
be wiped out to a man. Luckily the Burmese commander-in-chief,
Mahathihathura, saw that the loss of a few armies so far from
breaking China would only stiffen her resolution. He sent back the
messenger with a conciliatory reply. At Kaungton the Burmese and
Chinese officers met and drew up a written agreement whereby the
Chinese were allowed to withdraw, trade was to be restored, and to
prevent misunderstanding decennial missions were to pass between
the sovereigns. The Chinese melted down their cannon and then,
while the Burmese stood to arms and looked down, their columns
marched sullenly away up the Taping valley, to perish by thousands
of hunger in the passes.
1 Konbaungset, pp. 425-92; Symes, Embassy to Ava, p. 69; Crawfurd, Embassy
to Ava, II, p. 284; Burney, “Wars between Burma and China", in Journal
Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1837; McLeod, Journal, p. 60; Cordier, Histoire
générale de la Chine, III, 353; Huber, “Fin de la dynastie de Pagan", in Bulletin
de l'Ecole Française d'Extrême Orient, 1909, p. 669; Warry, Précis; Parker,
Précis, and Burma, Relations with China, pp. 83-94; Report of the Superin-
tendent, Archaeological Survey, Burma, 1918, p. 22.


## p. 518 (#558) ############################################

518
BURMA (1531-1782)
When he heard that the Chinese had been allowed to depart, the
king was angry; he thought they should all have been killed. So
the armies, afraid to return home, went off to Manipur in January,
1770.
Under a good raja, Manipur was recovering from the last
devastation, and the commanders scented a fresh harvest of slavus
and cattle with which to appease the king. The men of Manipur
fought gallantly, but were overwhelmed in a three days' battle near
Langthabal. The raja fled to Assam. The Burmese raised their own -
nominee to the throne and returned taking with them such of the
population as were not hiding in the woods. The king's anger had
subsided, and as after all they had won victories and preserved his
throne, he was merciful; he sent Mahathihathura a woman's dress
to wear, and exiled him and the commanders to the Shan States;
he would not allow them to see him, and he also exiled the ministers
who dared to speak on their behalf. Their wives, including the sister
of his queen, were exposed in the sun at the western gate of the
palace, with the Chinese presents of silk on their heads, a public
mock for three days.
By granting honourable terms the Burmese gave the Chinese
emperor a loophole to withdraw from a costly adventure in a country
the trade of which was, as he minuted on the file, negligible, and what
little there was went round by sea. Although pride prevented him
from acknowledging the treaty, his silence gave consent, and soon
the caravans of 400 oxen or 2000 ponies started coming down from
Yünnan as of old, and the Burmese once more found a market for
their raw cotton, of which China always bought appreciable quanti-
ties. Burma remained in possession of Koshanpye, the nine Shan
towns above Bhamo. The Chinese prisoners taken in the war,
numbering 2500, were settled in the capital as gardeners, and were
given Burmese wives. But the material was as nothing to the moral
gain. Their other victories were won over states on their own level,
such as Siam; this was won over an empire. Alaungpaya's crusade
against the Talaings was stained with treachery; the great siege of
Ayuthia (1766–67) was a magnificent dacoity; but in the Chinese war
the Burmese were waging a righteous war of defence against the
invader.
The victory, coming as it did on top of a generation of continuous
warfare which might well have exhausted the race, shows that the
exploits of Alaungpaya were no mere flash in the pan but were
broad-based on the energy of the race as a whole. His tradition
was not only maintained, it was eclipsed. The chronicles for the
period are verbose and pompous, but it is impossible to read them
without being struck with their fierce pride. The Burman of those
days knew that to the north lay a big country called China; to the
east, Shans of various sorts some of whom had a kingdom called
Siam; to the west a place called India and, further west still, a


## p. 519 (#559) ############################################

THE AGE OF TRIUMPH
619
country of white people, which some people said was an island.
All these countries, except China, were uncivilised and not worth
studying. The white people called themselves various names, such
as Portuguese, Dutch, French and English, but they were all much
the same just as the various Shans were much the same; and in any
case they were not a numerous race and were usually crushed with
ease. The Indians were more important, but even they could not
count for much judging by the way the Manipuris had been exter-
minated. The Siamese and Chinese on the other hand were really
great powers, but they had been defeated. Thus the whole world
was accounted for, and the Burmese felt equal to anything. They
had reason for their pride. They had no commissariat, and on the
march they perished of underfeeding and disease. They were the
ordinary people you can see in any village to-day, led by their
myothugyis (major village headman), who ranked as lords. Yet their
spirit carried their bare feet from Bhamo to Bangkok, they fought
and died by hundreds and thousands, leaving their bones to bleach
from Junkceylon to the banks of the Brahmaputra. They had bought
those lands with their blood. Doubtless it was a small world, but it
was the only world they knew, and a Burmese minister could say'
with truth to his English suitor : “You do not realise. We have never
yet met the race that can withstand us. "
In 1773 Talaing levies, mustered for an expedition to Siam,
mutinied. The Burmese commanders and guards fled, first to Marta-
ban, and then to Rangoon. The mutineers failed to take the Rangoon
stockade but fired the town and burst several foreign ships which
were building on the stocks. A week later the Burmese brought up
reinforcements, seized a Dutch ship, and retook the town with the
aid of her gunfire; they then robbed her of all guns and munitions
and sent her to sea, where she foundered. The mutineers made off, ,
collected their families and migrated to Siam, numbering three
thousand. The general population could not flee, and on them
though not implicated, the Burmese wreaked vengeance, massacring
both sexes.
In 1774 the king made a royal progress down the river to Rangoon
in splendid barges with the queens, court, and captive Talaing princes,
holding high festival at every halt, and worshipping at the pagodas
on the way, especially the Shwezigon at Pagan and the Shwehsandaw
at Prome 2 He came to Rangoon to impress the Talaings in two ways
because they continued rebelling and migrating to Siam. Firstly, he
raised the Shwedagon to its present height, 327 feet, regilded it with
his own weight in gold, and erected a golden spire, studded with
gems, to replace the one thrown down in the 1769 earthquake.
1 Gouger, Two Years Imprisonment in Burmah,
2 Taw Sein Ko, “The Po-u-daung Inscription", in Indian Antiquary, 1893.
p. 104.


## p. 520 (#560) ############################################

620
BURMA (1531-1782)
1
The king's prayers were for victory to his arms.
Those prayers
were needed, as the situation in Siam was serious. His supremacy
there had begun to collapse almost before the ruins of Ayuthia
ceased to smoulder, When the Burmese armies were sweeping down
upon Ayuthia in 1765, there was a governor of a northern province
who would not drink the water of allegiance. He was the son of a
Chinese father and a Siamese mother, and his name was Paya Tak.
He collected a few hundred determined men like himself and with-
drew to the hills. The Burmese repeatedly tried to dislodge him but
he flung them back. He went east and gained Cambodia, vastly
increasing his resources. The men of Siam, sick of oppression, rose
and called on him to lead them, for their lawful princes were in
captivity. In 1768 he destroyed several Burmese garrisons, reoccupied
Ayuthia, and founded the present capital, Bangkok. He was now
king, but his palace never saw him, as he lived in the field. The
Burmese sent expeditions. He harried them in ambushes, cut them
off, starved them out. He and his people were united in a just cause.
Whether the Burmese could in any case have held Siam for long is
doubtful, but whatever chances they had were ruined by the dis-
union which now became the curse of their armies in the field. For
the spoilers fell out over their prey, and though captains like Mahathi-
hathura, the hero of the Chinese war, and Thihapate, the conqueror
of Ayuthia, continued to win occasional victories, they could achieve
nothing permanent in the face of rampant insubordination. If a
commander disapproved the plan of campaign, he showed his dis-
approval by simply withdrawing his levies and marching off else-
where. Some of them were executed, but the harm had been donc;
the Burmese were driven across the frontier, and even at Chiengmai
they were ill at ease, when the king died. He was succecded by his son.
Singu (1776–82) at once finished the Siamese escapade by with-
drawing the armies. His only wars were in Manipur. The rightful
raja who fled from the Burmese in 1770 made four attempts to oust
their nominee between 1775 and 1782; his base was in Cachar and
they drove him back each time, but after 1782 they left him in pos-
session, perhaps because the country was now so thoroughly deva-
stated that nothing more could be wrung out of it. In the first two
years, for which Singu was not responsible, the army was absent con-
tinuously, losing 20,000 men, partly by fever, and gaining barren
victories in Cachar and Jaintia. These states had to present daughters
and pay tribute of a tree with the earth still clinging to its roots
in token that the king had seisin of the land; and henceforth he
claimed these countries, although his suzerainty was, as usual,
nominal.
The people liked Singu because he was peaceful. Except com-
manders who wanted titles and village ruffians who wanted loot,
1 Pallegoix, Description du Royaume Thai ou Siam, 11, 94-8.


## p. 521 (#561) ############################################

MAUNG MAUNG, KING FOR SEVEN DAYS 621
everyone was made miserable by these everlasting wars, which indeed
led to migrations. Thus, the Yaw folk fled from their original home
to the remote Mu valley in Katha district in order to get out of the
king's reach and escape conscription. If a town was depopulated by
rebellion or by the slaughter of its levy on foreign service, a few
hundred households would be transferred to it from another charge,
sometimes a week's journey away, whether they wanted to go or not.
The people did not know that Singu was seldom sober; ali they
knew was that he left them alone, and they were deeply grateful.
He built many pagodas, for he spent much of his time in prayer;
he was an angler too, and had an eye for scenery, to judge from some
of his favourite haunts, where the gleam of a golden spire is reflected
in the green depths of the stream below. His chief queen had a
talent for verse, and the tutor of his youth was the poet Nga Hpyaw,
who now received the title Minyeyaza. Sleep, prayer, fishing, drink,
the laughter of the palace ladies in some sequestered woodland-it
was all very pleasant, far pleasanter than the hard life of the soldier
in foreign fields.
He exiled Mahathihathura as soon as he arrived from Siam, and he
executed great personages at court, including his queens, especially
when he was angry as well as drunk. Had he been a man of ordinary
character, such acts might have been accepted. But his habits
deprived him and the ministers and swordbearers, most of whom
followed his example, of respect. His fondness for making pilgrimages
with only a small court, leaving the palace vacant for weeks at a
time, and returning in slipshod fashion at any hour of night, gave
conspirators their opportunity. While he was absent at Thihadaw
pagoda on the Irrawaddy Island in Shwebo district, a party came to
the palace at midnight. With them was a puppet of eighteen, Maung
Maung, lord of Paungga in Sagaing district, dressed up so as to
resemble the king his cousin. The guard passed them in, thinking
it was the king; Mahathihathura returned from retirement and took
command of the guard in Maung Maung's behalf.
When the news reached king Singu, his followers fled and he
thought of taking refuge in Manipur; but his mother, the queen
dowager, indignantly insisted on his playing the man. He went alone
at dawn to the palace gate, and when challenged by the guard
answered : "It is I, Singu, lawful lord of the palace. " They fell back
respectfully, and he entered the courtyard. There he saw a minister,
father to one of the queens he had murdered. He made for him
exclaiming : "Traitor, I am come to take possession of my right. ":
The minister seized a sword and cut him down. At least he died
royally.
Maung Maung was placed on the throne. Having spent most of
has life in a monastery, he was terrified at his elevation and offered
each of his seniors the crown, recalling them from the villages to


## p. 522 (#562) ############################################

522
BURMA (1531_1782)
which they had been exiled in the interests of his predecessor's safety.
They all refused, suspecting some deep device. Soon, however, his
impotence became apparent, and after seven days on his unhappy
throne he was executed by one who had many faults but was no
puppet. This was Bodawpaya (1782-1819), the eldest of Alaungpaya's
surviving sons. The palace plots which were the bane of Burma
proceeded in part from the lack of a clearly observed law of suc-
cession. Alaungpaya had expressed the wish that he should be
succeeded by his sons in order of seniority, and this appears to have
been in accordance with a recognised theory of succession by the
eldest agnate, but Hsinbyushin had disregarded it by nominating
Singu.
1 Temple, "Order of succession in the Alompra dynasty", in Indian Antiquary,
1892.


## p. 523 (#563) ############################################

CHAPTER XVIII
MONUMENTS OF THE
OF THE MUGHUL PERIOD
To
O Babur, fresh from the flourishing cities of his fatherland em-
bellished with the magnificent buildings of the Timurids, the state
of the cities and towns of Hindustan must have afforded a striking
contrast. Conditions in northern India for a long period had bee:?
such as to give little encouragement to the building art, few edifices
of any importance had been constructed, and those monuments which
told of the splendour of an earlier age had been suffered to fall into
decay. Compared with the living culture that he had left, he found
himself traversing a wilderness of neglect. Most of the towns through
which he passed seem to have consisted of nothing more than mud
forts. And the capital cities were but little better. Lahore, once
adorned by the palatial residences of the Ghazni and Ghori sultans,
was almost in ruins. Agra, to which the Lodis had moved their court,
contained only a brick citadal in a state of disrepair. At Delhi it is
true, there remained substantial records of ancient architectural
grandeur, “but now worn out and disfigured to the last degree".
Babur, from his camp near the river, made a tour of this historical
site, much as a visitor would do the round of its various relics at the
present day. He was compelled to pitch his tents here because the
most recent city built by Firuz Tughluq had been abandoned some
time before, and, except for its mosque, lay derelict. Everywhere in
northern India it was much the same, and to complete the scene of
desolation the severe earthquake of a few years previously had taken
its toll. “Large and substantial buildings were utterly destroyed.
The living thought the day of judgment had arrived; the dead the
day of resurrection. ”i One place only seems to have moved Babur
to any degree of enthusiasm, and that was at Gwalior, where he "went
over all the palaces of Man Singh and Vikramajit”, and remarked
that "they were singularly beautiful, though built in different patches
and without regular plan”. These buildings, however, illustrated
the prevailing type of secular architecture as practised by the Hindus
early in the sixteenth century, and it was to such structures
that the Mughuls turned when they began to build palaces of their
own.
Babur was a shrewd, but perhaps prejudiced, critic of the art of
building in Hindustan, as his Memoirs repeatedly indicate. Although
he praises the remarkable dexterity of the Indian workman, especially
the stonemasons, he complains of the slipshod manner in which they
1 Tarikh-i-Khan-Jahan Lodi (Elliot, v, 99).


## p. 524 (#564) ############################################

624
MONUMENTS OF THE MUGHUL PERIOD
designed their structures, without "regularity or symmetry", faults
which would readily offend the inherent taste of the Mughuls for
strict formality and balance. In spite of this he embarked on several
building projects of a fairly ambitious order, for he states that "680
men worked daily on my buildings in Agra,. . . while 1491 stone-cutters
worked daily on my buildings in Agra, Sikri, Biana, Dholpur,
Gwalior and Kiul". Most of these craftsmen, however, appear to
have been engaged on the construction of pleasaunces, pavilions,
baths, wells, tanks and fountains, for as an out-of-doors man, such
extemporary amenities appealed to him more than palaces or public
buildings, and, having no religious or sentimental character, they
were allowed to fall into decay and have entirely disappeared. Three
mosques attributed to Babur have survived. One of these in the
Kabuli Bagh at Panipat, and another, the Jami Masjid at Sambhal,
were both built in 1526. Although fairly large structures, neither
of them possesses any special architectural significance, while of
another mosque which he built about the same time within the old
Lodi fort at Agra, he himself complains that it “is not well done,
it is in the Hindustani fashion". 1 Some of Babur's dissatisfaction at
the state of the building art may be traced to his having acquired
in the course of his varied career a certain knowledge of the manner
in which such things were done in Europe, as on one occasion he
fortified his camp "in the Rumi way”, meaning no doubt in the
western, or Byzantine, fashion. According therefore to one authority,
in view of his frequently expressed dislike of the indigenous methods
of building, he is said to have sent to Constantinople, for the pupils
of the celebrated Albanian architect, Sinan, to advise him on his
building schemes. It is, however, very unlikely that this proposal
ever came to anything, because had any member of this famous
school taken service under the Mughuls, traces of the influence of
the Byzantine style would be observable. But there is none; in no
building of the dynasty is there any sign of the low segmental dome
flanked by the slender pointed minaret which characterised the
compositions of Sinan and his followers.
Had circumstances permitted, Babur's son and successor, Humayun,
would have left more than one monument as a record of his inter-
mittent rule. But the political situation was unfavourable. As it was,
one of his earliest undertakings was to build at Delhi a new city
to “be the asylum of wise and intelligent persons, and be called
Dinpanah (World-refuge)". It was to contain "a magnificent palace
of seven storeys, surrounded by delightful gardens and orchards, nf
such elegance and beauty that its fame might draw people from the
remotest corners of the world". The laying of the foundation stone
1 Memoirs, 11, 533. The third surviving mosque is at Ajodhya.
2 Saladin, Manuel d'art Musulman, pp. 509, 561, quoting from Montani,
Architecture Ottomane.
|


## p. 525 (#565) ############################################

THE FIRST MUGHUL CAPITAL
525
of this, the first Mughul capital, is thus described by one who was
present.
At an hour which was prescribed by the most clever astrologers and the
greatest astronomers, all the great mushaikhs (religious men), the respectable
sayyids, the learned persons, and all the elders, accompanied the King to the
sacred spot, and prayed the Almighty God to finish the happy foundation of
that city. First, His Majesty with his holy hand put a brick on the earth, and
then each person from that concourse of great men placed a stone on the ground,
and they all made such a crowd there that the army, people, and the artists,
masons, and labourers found no room or time to carry stones and mud to the
spot. 1
As it is also related that "the walls, bastions, ramparts, and the gates
of the city” were all nearly finished within the same year, it seems
not unlikely that the work was pushed on with undue haste, without
much consideration of its quality. In any case Humayun's capital
is hardly traceable among the ruins of old Delhi, although its final
demoſition seems to have been one of the first acts of the Afghan
usurper, Sher Shah. Two mosques remain of those built during
Humayun's reign, one in a ruinous condition at Agra, and the other
at Fathabad, Hissar, which indicate the methods of building in vogue
at this period. They show no original features, being constructed of
ashlar masonry covered with a coating of stucco, the only attempt at
ornamentation consisting of geometrical patterns sunk in the surface
of the plaster. It is probable that the city of Dinpanah was of the
same simple unassuming character, rapidly "run up" to supply an
immediate need.
The material records which have survived of both Babur's and
Humayun's contributions to the building art of the country are there-
fore almost negligible. On the other hand the indirect influence of
their personalities and experiences on the subsequent art of the
dynasty cannot be overlooked. Babur's marked aesthetic sense, com-
municated to his successors, inspired them under more favourable
conditions to the production of their finest achievements, while
Humayun's forced contact with the culture of the Safavids is reflected
in that Persian influence noticeable in many of the Mughul buildings
which followed.
Although owing to the unsettled conditions of the country but
little encouragement to architecture was possible during the early
years of the Mughul dynasty, a few buildings of a private character
which were erected in the neighbourhood of Delhi show that the
style of the Sayyids and Afghans as produced in the previous century
still continued. A tomb, with its adjoining mosque, known as the
Janiali, built about 1530, illustrates the demand that was then
arising for a richer and more decorative treatment of these rather
sombre structures. The Jamali mosque will be referred to later, as its
connection with a phase of building which succeeded it is important.
But the Sayyid-Afghan style was more suitable for tombs than for
1 Humayun-nama of Khondamir, Elliot, v, 124-6.


## p. 526 (#566) ############################################

526
MONUMENTS OF THE MUGHUL PERIOD
any other purpose, as several mausoleums built near Delhi about this
time testify. That of 'Isa Khan, erected in 1547, is a well-balanced
composition, standing within its own walled enclosure, and including
a mosque on its western side. Enclosure, terrace, platform and
mausoleum are all designed on an octagonal plan, with eight kiosks
of the same shape rising above its crenellated parapet. Each angle
of its pillared verandah is strengthened by a sloping buttress, the
final instance of the use of this "batter", which, introduced by Firuz
Tughluq, had now persisted for two centuries. In another large
tomb in much the same style, that of Adham Khan, constructed some
twenty years later, there is no sign of this characteristic slope, which
evidently ceased with the tomb of 'Isa Khan. Adham Khan's tomb
is the last building of this type, and although it can hardly be descri-
bed as decadent, its trite and uninspiring elevation conveys the im-
pression that the potential growth of the style was at an end.
During the period, however, that the Sayyid-Afghan mode was
approaching its logical conclusion at Delhi, it is significant of the
unexpected course that events not infrequently take in Indian history,
that in another and distant part of the country a group of buildings
in this same style was being produced which are undeniably the
finest of their kind. At Sasaram in Bihar, and in its neighbourhood,
a series of tombs was erected, all probably within the decade before
1550, commemorative of the house of Sher Shah Sur and its associa-
tion with the government of the lower Provinces. They are all
buildings of noble proportions, the largest of them, that of Sher Shah
himself, being one of the most admirable monuments in the whole
of India, and thoroughly expressive of the Indian genius. Much of
this excellence is undoubtedly a tribute to the cultural intuition of
Sher Shah, which not only shows itself here, but, at a slightly later
date, at Delhi also. From the imperial capital this Afghan governor
obtained his ideas of what a royal mausoleum should be like, and
from somewhat the same source he secured the services of the master-
builder who was to put his plans into effect. The designer of these
edifices was one Aliwal Khan (whose tomb is one of the group),
from his name apparently a native of the Punjab, a skilled mason and
evidently well acquainted with the art of tomb building as ordained
by the court at Delhi. His first commission at Sasaram was the
erection of a mausoleum for Hasan Khan Sur, the father of Sher Shah,
a solid structure in much the same style as several of the royal or
official tombs of the Sayyid or Lodi period. Viewed, however, as
a whole this initial effort is not a complete success (Fig. 4). The
uninteresting octagonal wall forming its middle story, unbroken by
any opening, is a definite fault, and it seems not improbable that this
tomb was of an experimental nature in view of what was to follow'.
Aliwal Khan's next work, destined to be his magnum opus, was the
mausoleum of his patron, a conception which, apart from its sur-


## p. 527 (#567) ############################################

SHER SHAH'S TOMB AT SASARAM
527
passing architectural merit, reveals an imagination of more than
ordinary power. Standing in the midst of a spacious artificial lake,
it forms an ideal funerary monument to such a remarkable soldier
adventurer as Sher Shah, a magnificent grey pile emblematic of
masculine strength, and at the same time the embodiment of eternal
repose.
The plan of isolating one's burial place from the outer world by
means of a sheet of water had already occurred to Ghiyas-ud-din
Tughluq some two centuries earlier, when he designed his tomb like
a barbican thrown out from the fortress at Tughluqabad and sur-
rounded it with a lake. Inspired no doubt by the originality and
significance of this, by now, historical monument, Sher Shah's
mausoleum was designed on somewhat similar lines, except that
instead of the irregular lake, it rises from a large rectangular tank,
the cemented sides of which measure each approximately fourteen
hundred feet in length. The tomb building itself occupies the centre
of this body of water, forming a grand pyramidal mass of diminishing
tiers, mounting up from a stepped plinth of over three hundred feet
wide, and crowned by a semi-spherical dome. The plinth and the
high terrace above it, which comprise the foundations of the com-
position, are square in plan, while the tomb building above is an
octagonal structure in three storeys, a slightly elaborated form of the
Lodi tombs at Delhi, but made vastly more imposing by its size,
situation, and particularly by the massive and spacious character
of its stepped and terraced basement. Much skill has been expended
on the design and disposition of the architectural details, which
break up the mass of the building with admirable effect. Flights of
steps with entrance archways relieve the middle of each side of the
terrace, and domed octagonal pavilions ornament each corner, with
projecting oriel-balconies carried on heavy brackets in between. The
upper surface of this immense sub-structure forms a courtyard, within
which stands the mausoleum proper. This building is enclosed within
an aisle of pointed arches, three to each of its octagonal sides, and
shaded all round by a wide eave surmounted by a crenellated parapet.
This constitutes the lower storey. Above, the two upper storeys are
decorated by means of pillared kiosks, one at each angle and alter-
nating with oriel windows, while the dome crowning the whole is
crested by a solid lotus finial.