The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (14 page)

And this was what the young, nameless
feringhi
wanted as well, to be rich beyond his wildest dreams. But his initial plan—to attack the sultan of Aceh from the Portuguese base at Malacca—was a stupid one. He had set off in many ships and with three hundred men. But this would have been a reckless gamble even in the best of circumstances. As it was, Aceh was then under the most powerful of its sixteenth-century rulers, Ala’ad-din Ri’ayat Shah al-Kahar. The
feringhi
and his band were easily routed, and he was forced to flee to Martaban and from there was taken to the court of the new Burmese king.

Tabinshweti was at the height of his authority and decided to allow the
feringhi
to be part of his retinue, and with his charming ways, the young man soon enjoyed considerable royal favor, to no one’s initial worry. He was skilled in using the most modern firearms, and this skill impressed Tabinshweti. He went hunting with the king, and the king, in friendship, gave him as his wife a lady of the court. The young man taught his new bride Portuguese cooking, and before long she was preparing dishes from Lisbon and Goa. He also introduced the king to wine and then to stronger spirits, arak, mixed with honey.

This is when the trouble began. Tabinshweti, it turned out, had a weakness for wine and spirits, and soon the Burmese ruler cared about little else but drinking, “respecting not other men’s wives, listening to malicious tales, and sending men to the executioners.” His actions grew increasingly violent and unrestrained. Discontent grew, and distant provinces plotted rebellion. Tabinshweti, who had achieved so much, was leading his government into chao.

It was Bayinnaung who first warned him of his growing addiction and where it would soon lead. But it was no use. He told Bayinnaung to leave him alone. The executions continued, and the king slowly lost his mind. Ministers and courtiers pleaded with Bayinnaung to take action; Bayinnaung said that he could not be so disloyal. Instead he packed off the young Portuguese who had caused such a disaster and dispatched the king to Pantanaw, in the Irrawaddy Delta. Soon after, Tabinshweti was killed by his own courtiers some way, after he was lured into the wet jungle to search for a white elephant.
¹⁰

*

With Tabinshweti dead, Bayinnaung finally came to the fore. He was made king. And just in time, as the empire he fought to create was quickly falling to pieces, every town taking the opportunity to declare its independence and shut its gates to the new monarch. Bayinnaung was left with little more than his immediate following. And so for the next twenty years Bayinnaung conquered Burma again, making relentless war, unleashing campaigns of great brutality and destruction until one day all of western mainland Southeast Asia acknowledged his sovereignty.

He depended throughout his career on his Portuguese mercenaries, with their heavy beards and baggy trousers, men who brought with them not only the latest in military hardware (the Chinese had this as well) but tested fighting ability and martial know-how. They were headed by Bayinnaung’s good friend and comrade Diego Soarez de Mello, known as the Galician. Soarez de Mello had first come east many years earlier, making a name as a pirate in the waters around Mozambique in the early 1540s and then serving many different kings, from Arakan to Malaya, before becoming rich as Bayinnaung’s loyal captain.

The great seaport of Pegu had first to be recaptured, and the city fell to the combined force of Bayinnaung’s feared elephant corps and the tough Iberian musketeers of the Galician. The proud nobility of Pegu tried in vain to make a last stand, and in desperation the king of Pegu himself, Smim Htaw, emerged and challenged Bayinnaung to single combat, both on their war elephants. Bayinnaung, never one to pass up a fight, was victorious, charging his foe and driving him off after breaking the tusk of Smim Htaw’s elephant. The Burmese say that he “paid
him no more heed than a lion does to jackals.” The Burmese and the Portuguese then sacked Pegu, killing men, women, and children. Smim Htaw fled into the jungle, hiding there for months until he was finally captured, paraded through the streets, and executed.

Having forced the Irrawaddy Delta for a second time to submission, Bayinnaung then headed north in a vast armada. His teak warships were crafted into the shapes of animals—horses, crocodiles, and elephants— and the king himself rode in a gilded barge shaped like a Brahminy duck, the symbol of the vanquished Pegu monarchy. The north of Burma was unprepared for the violence to come. Ava quickly gave way. And over the next four years Bayinnaung fought and defeated one by one the highland principalities, stretching from Manipur in the west (in what is now India), across to Chiangmai (in what is now Thailand) and the Lao states of the middle Mekong River.

This was a never-ending war. Month after month, year after year, Bayinnaung and his men did what they loved best, returning prisoners and loot to their new home at Pegu, the tattooed and turbaned Burmese chiefs on their ponies and elephants fighting shoulder to shoulder with their Iberian harquebusiers and musketeers, in their conquistador-style helmets. They were vicious, though perhaps no more than was the norm in those times. Against the resilient principality of Mogaung, Bayinnaung campaigned several times from 1562 to 1576. When the prince of Mogaung, heir to a long lineage, was finally defeated, he was placed for a week in chains at the gates of Pegu before being sold, together with his chiefs, in the slave markets of eastern Bengal.

Bayinnaung’s was a winning team. And after a while the tide turned, and resistance ended. Tribute poured in. No one wanted to fight Bayinnaung anymore. The king of Chiangmai, one of the most formidable of the upland states, sent elephants, horses, and silks. He also sent the lacquerware for which his city was famous, and to this day the Burmese word for lacquer,
yun
, is the same as the word for the people of Chiangmai.

But this man of such relentless drive and ambition would not be satisfied with just the Irrawaddy Valley and the surrounding hills. He looked east and saw the richest and most cultured city in the region, Ayutthaya, the capital of Siam. Bayinnaung first demanded the tribute of a white elephant, and when this was denied, he prepared his invasion. The outcome was never in real doubt, as the aggressor army
tramped across the plains of the Chao Phraya Valley, then laid siege to the capital itself.

The Siamese surrendered to prevent complete destruction, and the Burmese took not one but four white elephants, together with the king of Siam himself and several princes as hostages. A princess was presented to Bayinnaung as a new concubine. The entire Tenasserim coastline was permanently annexed, and a garrison of three thousand was left to ensure good behavior. Thousands of ordinary people were deported together with court entertainers, dancers, actors, and actresses. The king returned to Pegu in triumph, caparisoned elephants before him. He would soon make his capital a spectacle to rival Pagan, with golden palaces and gilded gates, each named for one of twenty subordinate kingdoms, a multiethnic city with peoples from across the country and beyond. He had established the most far-flung Burmese empire ever.

*

For the Burmese today the chronicles of Bayinnaung’s victories read like tales of Roman conquest to schoolboys in the West. Except that the Burmese army still sees itself, in a way, as fighting the same enemies and in the same places, subjugating the Shan hills or crushing Mon resistance in the south, their soldiers slugging their way through the same thick jungle, preparing to torch a town or press-gang villagers. The past closer, more comparable, a way to justify present action. His statues are there because the ordeal of welding a nation together by force is not just history. It’s as if the Italian Army were today guarding Hadrian’s Wall, defending Syria against the Persians, and quelling German resistance the brutality seemingly inevitable.

Bayinnaung died in 1581 at age sixty-six, leaving behind nearly one hundred children. He had dominated a region that encompassed nearly all of today’s Burma, Thailand, and Laos. His life, according to one historian, was “the greatest explosion of human energy ever seen in Burma.” And he died planning an expedition to the west, to the one neighboring kingdom that never accepted his sovereignty, the kingdom of Arakan.

THE CITY OF THE MONKEY-DGG

Arakan is today a state within Burma, largely cut off from the rest of the country, the only land route being a couple of treacherous and barely paved mountain roads. Decrepit buses make the twenty-hour journey from Prome on the Irrawaddy River through thick jungle to Sandoway at Arakan’s southern end. Akyab, the state capital, is sleepy and rundown, even by contemporary Burmese standards, with electricity only a few hours a day (and sometimes not at all) and no real outward signs of any kind of progress or vitality. With its ramshackle restaurants and open-air markets, it has the look of a large village, and the few Western tourists seem like the first outside visitors ever to a remote and isolated corner of a remote and isolated country.

But even the most casual observer would probably realize that this conclusion—that Arakan has always been removed from the world— was a wrong one, as Arakan is set right on the Bay of Bengal, with the bright blue waters of the Indian Ocean pressing gently up its picture-perfect beaches. For centuries it prospered on international trade and readily took in people and ideas from across the Asian continent and beyond, a flourishing civilization with the most cosmopolitan court in modern Burmese history. Arakan’s isolation is a very new thing. And its lost cosmopolitanism is a part of Burma’s present-day poverty.

Arakan is essentially a long and narrow slice of coastline, shut off from the Irrawaddy Valley by a long chain of mountains, some with peaks three thousand feet high, about eight hundred miles from north to south and about sixty miles from the hills to the sea. It’s a luxuriant, wet landscape, everywhere clumps of mango, guava, and citrus trees, and several rivers winding across the rich alluvial plains. In the short dry season, thirsty elephants come down from the jungles to enjoy the salty waters of the mangrove swamps. The long summers are drenched in endless rain.

In ancient times, Arakan was very much an extension of northern India.
¹¹
The Chandra dynasty that ruled over the principalities of Vesali and Dhanyawaddy claimed descent from the Hindu god Shiva while also patronizing the Mahayana schools of Tibet and Bengal. But in medieval times there was a reorientation eastward; the area fell under Pagan’s dominance, and the Arakanese people began to speak a dialect of Burmese, something that continues to this day. With Burmese
 influence came ties to Ceylon and the gradual prominence of Theravada Buddhism.

As Pagan’s authority waned, Arakan quickly emerged from the shadows and became independent once again, engaging in the petty wars of the time. When in 1404 the kingdom of Ava invaded Arakan, the then king, Naramithla, fled west to the Bengali royal city of Gaur. He lived there for many years, absorbing the polished world of eastern Islam, before going home and retaking his throne. It was to be a fateful exile.

Here the history of Arakan intersects with the history of India and especially with Bengal. Two hundred years before, the first Islamic armies—bands of Turkish and Afghan cavalry—had galloped their way across the rich Ganges plain. They were led by Muhammad Bakhtiyar, and they were merciless as they overran the towns and Buddhist universities of Bihar and sacked the holy city of Benares. When they reached Nudiya in Bengal, they disguised themselves as horse traders and sneaked their way inside the city walls. Once safely in, they cut down the unsuspecting garrison and then fought their way to the king himself, who was about to sit down to dinner. The king took flight, managing to escape through a back door but then disappearing forever into the jungles of the eastern delta. This was the beginning of Islamic Turkish-Afghan rule in Bengal, and it continued for over five hundred years.

Naramithla, the fateful Arakanese king, had thus fled to Bengal when the Turkish-Afghan sultanate in Bengal was already two centuries old. In 1430, after nearly three decades in exile, he returned at the head of a formidable force, largely made up of Afghan adventurers, who swiftly overcame local opposition. This was the start of a new golden age for this country—a period of power and prosperity—and the creation of a remarkably hybrid Buddhist-Islamic court, fusing traditions from Persia and India as well as the Buddhist worlds to the east. He abandoned his old capital and established a new one, which he called Mrauk-U, or the Monkey-Egg (no one knows why). His astrologers had warned him that although all the omens for Mrauk-U were good, he himself would die if he moved there. But he was willing to tempt fate. The capital was moved with lavish ceremony in 1433. The king died the following year.

Mrauk-U grew to be an international center of over 160,000 people. Its inhabitants were a mix of Arakanese, Bengalis, Afghans, Burmese, Dutch, Portuguese, Abyssinians, Persians, even Japanese Christians from
Nagasaki escaping the persecution of the dictator Hideyoshi Toyotomi. Some of these Japanese Christians were
ronin
, masterless samurai, and they formed a special bodyguard to the Arakanese king. This cosmopolitan court became great patrons of Bengali as well as Arakanese literature. Courtiers like Daulat Qazi, author of the first Bengali romance, composed distinguished and original works in verse, while others like Alaol, considered the greatest of seventeenth-century Bengali poets, also translated works from Persian and Hindi. Several of the kings took Islamic as well as Pali titles, patronizing Buddhist monasteries and erecting Buddhist pagodas while also appearing in Persian-inspired dress and the conical hats of Isfahan and Mughal Delhi, and minting coins with the
kalima
, Islamic declaration of faith.

The city was set inland, and a massive defense system of earthen ramparts, moats, and citadels supplemented the ring of hills and rivers nearby. The Portuguese Jesuit Father A. Farinha, S.J., called the city, with its numerous intersecting rivers, “a second Venice,”
¹²
and other writers of the time compared Mrauk-U with Amsterdam and London. The ruins of this city, abandoned when the British annexed Arakan in 1826, are still there, the smoke of village fires rising from where there once stood the genteel homes of soldiers, scholars, and merchants from across Eurasia.