No More Learning

2 Dinnyawadi Yazawinthit, pp. 230-4.
8 Sayadaw Athwa, II, 139.
· Wood, Précis.


## p. 504 (#544) ############################################

501
BURMA (1531-1782)
did not penetrate north of Ava, as they had not enough men; they
had overthrown the dynasty which, founded by Tabinshwehti, and
known as the Toungoo dynasty, had lasted 221 years, but they had
not subjected the Burmese people.
>
THE ALAUNGPAYA DYNASTY (1752-1885)
Alaungpaya (1752-60) was born in 1714 at Shwebo (Moksobomyo,
"Town of the Hunter Chief''), a village of 300 houses. Many of his
followers were hunters, but he himself belonged to a better class, the
landed gentry as it were; for generations his family had been
myothugyis (major village headmen), and in later days he even
claimed descent from the fifteenth-century Ava chiefs. The anarchy
of the last few years led him and many another jungle chief to
stockade their villages. Forty-six villages joined him, and between
them they raised a few rusty muskets.
When Ava fell he was ready. The Talaings sent small detachments
to administer thissa-ye, the holy water of allegiance. One of these
came towards Shwebo. Alaungpaya's father made ready to pay
homage and offer half his property, saying: "We can do nothing.
The Talaing army is too strong. We shall simply be overwhelmed.
We may as well give in. ” “No,” said Alaungpaya, “when fighting
for your country it matters little whether you are few or many. What
does matter is that your comrades have true hearts and strong arms. "
He went out and met those Talaings in the scrub jungle south of
Halin. They got no homage; only such as were lucky got away with
their lives.
They came back in a large detachment with orders to spare not
even infants in the cradle. Alaungpaya built a state hut and sent
ten horsemen to conduct them respectfully to it. But they were
conducted along a hollow road and in the bushes on each side lay
his musket men. The Talaings never reached that hut. A bare half
dozen reached Ava alive to tell the tale.
Again they came back, several thousand strong this time, to extir-
pate Shwebo once and for all; but as they came without cannon the
assault naturally failed and they had to undertake a siege. One night
Alaungpaya burst out at the head of a general sortie. It was not a
defeat but a rout. Word passed along the Burmese pursuers that men
had seen Myinbyushin Nat, the spirit rider of the White Horse,?
fighting on their side. The Talaings jumped into boats and, without
stopping to report at Ava, fled straight home down the river.
The news spread. A dozen legends gathered round his name.
Officers and men from the disbanded palace guard joined him with
1 For thissa-ye, see Harvey, History of Burma, p. 339.
2 Grant Brown, “Lady of the Weir", in Journal Royal Asiatic Society, 1916,
pp. 492-3; Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States, part a, vol. I, p. 518.
2


## p. 505 (#545) ############################################

THE GREAT PRETENDER
505
such muskets as they had managed to keep. From half the villages
of upper Burma lads of spirit came trooping in to take service under
the new leader. Even the greater men, some of whom could trace
royal blood and themselves had hopes as minlaungs (pretenders),
decided to serve under him.
By the end of 1753 he had massacred the Gwes of Madaya-Okpo
(p. 503), the survivors fleeing into the Shan States, and so harried
the Talaings that they evacuated Ava. In 1754 the Talaings, having
discovered a plot at Pegu, executed the captive Ava king; this so
infuriated the Burmese deportees in the delta that they rose wholesale
and seized Prome. Alaungpaya wrote telling them to hold out and
promising the governorship of a district to any Burman who could
make that district revolt against the Talaings. Finally he drove the
Talaing besiegers away from Prome, and by 1755 he had annexed
the country down to Lunhse (Kudut) in Henzada district, and to
Rangoon; Lunhse he named Myanaung, "Speedy Victory”, and Dagon
Rangoon, "End of Strife”. He went in procession with his great officers
and returned solemn thanks at the Shwedagon for his victories.
In the fighting of a decade previously, when the Talaings were
expelling the Burmese from the delta, the East India Company's
buildings at Rangoon had been burnt to the ground. Thereupon the
English avoided the mainland and in 1753 occupied Negrais Island,
which was uninhabited save by fishermen, erecting a factory, with
moat, glacis, walls and cannon. The French remained at Syriam and
declared for the Talaings. The English were inclining towards the
Burmese when Alaungpaya captured Rangoon; finding three English
ships in the port, he seized their cannon as a matter of course but,
hoping to enter into an agrement with them and thus secure more
numerous cannon, he allowed the protest of Jackson, the captain of
the ships, H. E. I. CE's snow Arcot, and released the cannon. He then
left for Shwebo, and the Talaings tried to recapture Rangoon. They
bombarded it with the help of French ships, and finding Jackson ill
ashore they put a prize crew on the Arcot and made her take part
in the bombardment. Their attack failed and they would not let
Jackson sail away till he had surrendered five of his cannon, pro-
bably nine pounders. The news of this reached Alaungpaya just
when he was receiving the Company's envoy, Captain Baker, at
Shwebo; he accepted Baker's repudiation, without believing it, and
continued the negotiations, which ended in 1757 with an agreement
whereby, in return for 700 lb. of powder, and one twelve pounder,
annually, he ceded Negrais and a site at Bassein, in perpetuity, with
the right to erect fortifications. 1
Alaungpaya's advances in the delta involved heavy fighting not
only on land but also on water; both sides had hundreds of great
1 Dalrymple, Oriental Repertory, I, 133-226.


## p. 506 (#546) ############################################

506
BURMA (1531-1782)
war-canoes, and these, driven by sixty paddles, would ram with
terrific effect. On land his hardest task was yet to come, for his men
were only a semi-armed mass levy, and so far he had not been con-
fronted with a walled town. Moreover, Dupleix had regarded Syriam
as his chief shipbuilding depot, and French ships lay in the river,
defending the town. Alaungpaya invested it in 1755 but had to wait
a year for starvation to do its work. In July, 1756, finding the de-
fenders weak with hunger, he called for volunteers, fed them for
days in his presence, and gave them leather helmets and lacquer
armour. They numbered ninety-three and are known as the Golden
Company. On the appointed night, the Burmese camp held a festival
with drums and music. The sound, floating up to the Talaing city
on the hill, induced the watchers to relax their vigilance. The Golden
Company found their way over the walls, cut down the guards, and
opened the gates. The Burmese poured in, and the town was theirs.
To Alaungpaya's men from upper Burma it was a veritable Eldorado,
and they glutted themselves with mirrors, candlesticks, lamps, chairs,
clocks, and other European wonders. He made a heap of silver and
let the survivors of the Golden Company take away as much as they
could carry.
Bruno, the French agent at Syriam, had written to Pondicherry
for help. Two ships, Fleury and Galathée, came. They arrived after
the town had fallen and, knowing nothing, came up the river under
a Burmese pilot who, under Alaungpaya's orders, stranded them;
fire-rafts sealed their fate. Bruno was roasted alive; the ships' officers,
numbering twelve and being gentlemen of quality, were beheaded.
The French were under no obligations to Alaungpaya, and as the
Talaing state which they were helping was actually in existence they
were entitled to treatment as prisoners of war. But it was customary
among the races of Indo-China to give no quarter save to those they
carried off into slavery, and Alaungpaya had to issue special orders 1
to prevent the killing, after capture, of Burmans and Shans whom
the Talaings had taken and compelled to fight for them. Beheading
was a merciful death, granted as a favour to officer prisoners.
The two ships contained thirty-five cannon (twenty-four pounders),
five field guns, 1300 muskets, and ammunition. These were a godsend
to Alaungpaya, and it was largely on their account that he gave the
crews, over 200 men, their lives : white gunners were too valuable to
execute. They were reasonably treated and given Burmese wives,
some of them became captains of the guard; the rest were a corps
d'élite who played no small part in major actions, and when too old
to follow the armies they were allowed to retire in the feringhi
villages of Shwebo district (p. 495): their descendants are indistin-
guishable from the surrounding population save by their religion
and occasionally by the colour of their eyes.
1 Konbaungset, p. 185.


## p. 507 (#547) ############################################

TALAINGS ANNIHILATED
507
Thus, until the gunners lost their man-of-war smartness, the Bur-
mese had some good artillery. Alaungpaya had indeed already a
number of cannon, mostly taken from the Talaings, but some of them
were two hundred years old and the best of them was the gun used
at Prome in 1754. This was a three pounder and it was the pride
of the day, because when fired it went off, and when it went off it
was the enemy that it hit, and the enemy whom it hit died; because
of these things, it was coated with gold leaf, and men made offerings
of spirit to it, reverently perfuming it with scents and wrapping it in
fine raiment. Alaungpaya was head of the church, but when he
came to possess French gunners, he was not responsible for their
souls, as they were unbelievers and it was their own concern if they
chose to drink damnation. Besides, theologically speaking he did
not countenance their use of intoxicants; he merely permitted the
offering of spirits to the Gun Spirit, and the slaves of the Gun Spirit
happened to consume the offering.
Alaungpaya burnt Syriam to the ground and henceforward its
importance ceases. He made Rangoon the port of Burma, enlarging
the stockade and appointing a senior governor. In 1756-57 he
advanced on Pegu by land and water while a second army, mainly
of Shan levies, moved towards it from Toungoo. His advance was
slow, with grim losses, for the Talaings were now fighting literally
with their backs to the wall and they were still superior in firearms,
mainly jingals, a rough iron tube mounted on a bamboo tripod and
throwing a one-pound ball. He left pots of poisoned intoxicants
where the Talaings would find them, and so killed many. They
made desperate stands in forty stockades south of the city, especially
near Mokkainggyi, at Kyaikpadaing and Zenyaungbin (Nyaungbin).
At Zenyaungbin they captured many of Alaungpaya's jingals and
turned them against him; it was a hornet's nest which he captured
only by flinging in the Golden Company of Syriam, increased to three
hundred; these pressed on through a hail of lead shouting "Shwe.
botha! ”, forced an entrance, and flung open the gate to their comrades.
Finally the Burmese, devastating the country and deporting the
population, closed around. A monastery at Sidi still shows a bell
cast by Alaungpaya; he resided there, at the little fort of Zetuwadi,
and was nearly driven out one night by some picked Talaings under
the famous Talaban. But such efforts were vain. The Burmese,
aided by their French artillery, and by war-boats which flung off the
Talaings' fire-rafts, completed their lines round the doomed city.
The city starved. The Talaings sent monks asking for terms, and
their king offered to become Alaungpaya's vassal. Alaungpaya re-
plied that they had nothing to fear, for-it is the ambition of every
great Buddhist king to become a Buddha-he was a divine incarna-
>
1 Konbaungset, pp. 110-12.
2 Konbaungset, p. 198.


## p. 508 (#548) ############################################

508
BURMA (1531–1782)
tion; and he gave the envoys two bunches of orchids, saying one was
for offering, the other for adornment. The Talaings breathed more
freeiy. They offered one to the Shwemawdaw pagoda, the other they
twined in the tresses of their king's daughter, as for the bride of
Alaungpaya. But she was beloved of Talaban, the soul of the defence;
he was furious and, finding his advice, to sally forth and die like men,
rejected, he collected his family and with some best troops broke
through the Burmese lines and maintained himself at Sittaung in
Thaton district. The trembling king sent his daughter to Alaung-
paya's camp, borne in a gorgeous palanquin, and surrounded by a
bevy of handmaidens and princes. After kneeling some time in
homage, she was conducted into Alaungpaya's harem. Many of the
Talaing captains and troops came to pay homage, and lived in
Alaungpaya's camp, for they believed him.
Then, in May, 1757, Alaungpaya proceeded to storm the city and
massacre the people. When the sack had subsided he made a state
entry, gleaming aloft on his elephant, through the Mohnyin gate in
the south wall, surrounded by ministers, his Guards and his French
gunners. He returned solemn thanks at the Shwemawdaw pagoda
and appointed governors to the conquered districts. He granted
reasonable treatment to the fallen royal family; he sold the surviving
population as slaves; and saying it was they who had led the city's
resistance, he flung hundreds of Talaing monks to the elephants.
He burnt the palace and razed the city wall. He made a desert
and called it peace. For the Talaings it was the peace of the grave,
and this is the end of them in Burma. Such as were not enslaved
periodically migrated to Siam, where they rose to high office and
furnished some of the best troops. Such as remained in Burma were
prone to rebel, and whenever they dared to raise a head it was at
once chopped off; they grew fewer and subsided, and their land
relapsed into jungle.
Th Burmese owed their civilisation to the Talaings : it was an
older and apparently a gentler civilisation. Alaungpaya destroyed
their manuscripts and we know too little to say with confidence why
they went under. Probably it was because they received no reinforce-
ments by immigration, unlike the Burmese who, lying to the north,
were open to a constant trickle of immigration; moreover, Alaung-
paya had Shan, Kachin and Kadu levies, whereas the Talaings had
only their own little corner of Burma to draw on for men.
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.