EARLY BURMESE IMPERIALISM

EARLY BURMESE IMPERIALISM

Burmese school children are taught that their country’s history begins in the town of Tagaung in the centre of Myanmar. It was here, the royal chronicles parport, that the first ever Kingdom of Myanmar was founded by the Sakiyan prince Abhiraja, who arrived from India millenia ago with his family and a motley band of followers. After his death, one of Abhiraja’s sons went on to found the Kingdom of Arakan, while the other succeeded his father and was followed in turn by 31 more kings. Descendants from this dynasty, the chronicles go on to state, founded the Kingdom of Prome to the south of the country, which lasted for 500 years before the succession of the medieval Bagan Empire.

Colonial scholars in British Burma and their successors today have taken a sceptical stance towards the story of Abhiraja. What is agreed upon, is that if thousands of years ago there ever was an Abhiraja, he would not have found the Burmese plains empty. Archeologists estimate that humans were likely to have lived in the region since 75,000 BC. In 2003 the BBC reported the discovery in Myanmar of a 45 million year old fossil, believed to be an ankle bone, that could suggest that our primate ancestors may have come out of not Africa but Asia, perhaps even Myanmar itself. Naturally there are many in the country who are more than happy to embrace this line of thought.

What is believed to have happened in the land we now call Myanmar between then and the Bagan Empire is mainly conjecture. It is estimated that by 1500 BC the inhabitants of Myanmar had moved along the Ayeyarwaddy and Chindwin Rivers. Bronze was being smelted in the Shan Hills to the East, and those in the Ayeyarwaddy Delta were some of the first in the world to domesticate the chicken.

In the years when Rome, Persia, the Mauryans in India and the Han Empire in China reigned from the north of England to the Sea of Japan, the valleys around the Ayeyarwaddy Delta were one of the rare patches left in peace. Not only made up of obscure and disparate tribes, around the Ayeyarwady there would also have been city states with cultures and languages quite distinct from their larger neighbours to either the east or west.

One of the largest (and possibly oldest) of these would have been the Pyu city of Hanlin (in today's Saging District), the oldest known place of civilisation in Myanmar. It is believed that the people of Hanlin later migrated south towards Sri Ksetra (near present-day Pyay or 'Prome') where much of the ancient city and stupas can be seen. Chinese travellers to the city reported that the citizens of Sri Ksetra were marked for their piety and lived by the custom to ‘love life and hate killing.’ The people of Sri Ksetra appeared to have existed largely untroubled until the 8th Century when hordes of the war-loving Nanzhao from the limestone hills around Lake Dali in West China raged through the land. Though bloody, Nanzhao supremacy was relatively short-lived. By the 10th Century they have faded from history, with their entire royal family being murdered in 902.

However, with the city-states of Myanmar in disarray, others from the north came where the Nanzhao had led, attracted by the fertile land and warm climate. Amongst these were the ‘Strong Horseman’, or in their own language, the ‘Myanma’.

The Burmese Chronicles claim that one of these Myanma, Pyusawthi, founded the Bagan Empire after vanquishing a great boar, a great bird, a great tiger and a flying squirrel, all of which had been terrorizing the local population. It is believed that Pyusawthi was in fact a descendant of the Nanzhao family, and with the lifestyle and customs he found on the banks of the Ayeyarwaddy, created a fusion of the two that was to be the foundation of modern Burmese culture. From this point on, Burma history becomes a little clearer.

It was a couple of centuries later that the city of Bagan became the Bagan Empire. Anawrahta, a descendant of Pyusawthi’s and Myanmar’s first ‘Great King’ (ie. a Bamar unifer and nation-builder), had seized the throne when still a teenager after killing his cousin in single combat, “his mother’s milk still wet upon his lips.” Anawrahta was to subjugate the surrounding principalities and unify a kingdom which well reflects the borders of modern-day Myanmar. The great scalp for Anawrahta came in 1057 when Thaton, capital of the Mon Empire to the South, was conquered, and the king Manuha was brought back to Bagan as captive. Alongside Manuha were 30,000 other Mon slaves, amongst them crafstmen and artists who would be instrumental in designing and building the many flamboyant temples of Bagan.

At the height of the Empire, Bagan became a centre of commerce, learning and spiritualism, with students, scholars and monks travelling from as far away as Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and the Khmer Empire (Cambodia.) Over the next couple of centuries the people of Bagan underwent a mind-boggling spree of pagoda and temple construction, up to almost 10,000, the ruins of which continue to draw scores of pilgrims and tourists today, almost a millennium later. The Bagan Empire also established Theravada Buddhism as the dominant strain in the country. Additionally, the earliest examples of Burmese script in its present form are dated back to Bagan.

Anawrahta's sucessors Sawlu, Kyansittha, Alaungsittha and Narapatisithu continued to push out the borders of Bagan. The Empire reached its greatest geographical extent under the reign of Narapatisithu (1174-1211) stretching down south to the Malay peninsula. However in 1273 King Narathihapate made the crucial error of executing the envoys of Kublai Khan. The Mongols eventually saw to the fall of the great Bagan Empire in 1287 (Narathihapate fled south to Pyay where he committed suicide.) Shan tribes from the hills to the east rushed in to take control of the low country, while the Mon from the south re-established their own kingdom around Hanthawaddy (modern-day Bago), as did the Arakanese in modern-day Rakhine State.

In the 16th Century, with Portuguese assistance, the country was united once more under the Toungoo Dynasty. After having subjugated the entirety of the land, King Tabinshweti picked up an insatiable thirst for alcohol, first introduced to him by a Portuguese courtier. With no longer an appetite for ruling, Tabinshweti began to lose the territories he had conquered, while his conduct in court became more manic and erratic. Matters were eventually taken in hand. The king was killed when out in the woods searching for a White Elephant, the Portuguese courtier was dismissed, and Tabinshweti’s general and old friend Bayinnaung took the throne.

Bayinnaung was the son of a lowly toddy-tapper but had risen through the ranks due to his force of character and millitary prowess. He was the second Great King of Myanmar and upon coming to power set about reconquering the land Tabinshweti had lost. Bayinnaung brought fire and sword to every renegade city, town and village, wielding the country together by force, and reaching deep into Laos and the Kingdom of Siam (Thailand), creating the largest empire in Southeast Asia of the time. One historian described Bayinnaung’s life as ‘the greatest explosion of human energy ever seen in Burma.’ Schoolboys in Myanmar read of his conquests as those in the West do of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. The legend of Bayinnaung feeds into the ensuing belief that a strong unified Myanmar requires iron fisted rule.

Two centuries later, Bayinnaung’s descendants were unable to quell a Mon rebellion from the south. Having overthrown the dynasty, the Mon themselves were then faced with their own uprising, and were soon meshed into war with the Burmese north, led by one Aung Zeyya, from modern day Shwebo. In May 1755 Aung Zeyya took the fishing village of Dagon and renamed it ‘Rangoon’, meaning ‘end of strife.’ Shortly afterwards Bago, the Mon capital, was also taken and Aung Zeyya rechristened himself Alangpaya, meaning ‘the future Buddha.’ He is the founder of the last ever Burmese Kingdom, the Konbaung Dynasty, and the third Great King of Myanmar.

For the Mon, their long held dreams of their own empire were sundered forever. The destruction of Mon-speaking society in the south not only doused the chances of another uprising but also led to a more compact ethnic nationalism throughout the Ayeyarwady Delta.

Alangpaya continued fighting his way south, eventually sacking the great Siam city of Aythaya in 1766. The Siamese retreated back to form a new base, which was later to be known as Bangkok.