The Hidden History of Burma Read online

  During the middle years of the 18th century, a new dynasty of Burmese-speaking warrior kings emerged from the arid interior, marched south toward the sea, defeated their French-backed and Mon-speaking rivals, and united the valley of the Irrawaddy River. Along the conquered coast they founded a new port and named it Rangoon, meaning “the enemy is vanquished.” The elephant-mounted kings then pushed east into the adjacent uplands before taking nearly all of present-day Laos and Thailand, utterly destroying the Siamese capital of Ayutthaya in 1767. Over the next decade their armies repelled no fewer than four Manchu Chinese invasions from the north, defeating elite divisions of Manchu and Mongol cavalry drawn from the distant Russian frontier.

  In 1783, at the apex of this newly minted empire, King Bodawpaya, who boasted fifty-three (official) queens and concubines and more than 120 children, founded a new capital, Amarapura, or “the Immortal City.” He and the rest of his dynasty saw themselves as at the head of an all-vanquishing race. They called themselves Myanma.

  A YEAR LATER, these same Burmese kings conquered the kingdom of Arakan. Arakan is part of a long Indian Ocean coastline, separated from the Irrawaddy valley by a range of low mountains, an incredibly fertile place that’s also one of the least hospitable on the planet, prone to earthquakes and devastating cyclones and deluged by up to three feet a month of torrential rain. Arakan today—the state of Rakhine—is the southern two-thirds of this coastline. The northern third, across the Naf River, is today part of Bangladesh.

  The area’s earliest farmers, perhaps just a handful of people here and there, likely spoke Austroasiatic languages related to Munda (which is now spoken in pockets of central and eastern India). But over the last two thousand years, what’s now eastern Bangladesh and Arakan became a kind of frontier. For ancient Indians, speaking an Indo-Aryan tongue, the lands beyond the Meghna River (now in Bangladesh) were a pandava barjita desh, a place of utter barbarism where no self-respecting Hindu would go. By medieval times, the Buddhist, Hindu, and later Muslim kingdoms of Bengal had reached the upper end of the coastline. And in the centuries that followed, both Islam and Indo-Aryan languages moved gradually south. These languages are ancestral both to the Bengali of modern Calcutta and Dacca and to the similar dialects of present-day Chittagong and the people who have come to be known as the Rohingya.1

  Also over the past two millennia, people speaking entirely different Tibeto-Burman languages, some ancestral to both modern Burmese and Arakanese dialects, arrived from the other direction. Burmese chronicles relate long-ago encounters in the region between humans and bilus, or ogres.

  The region was a frontier between Bengali and Burmese cultures and polities. It was also a civilizational center in its own right. The earliest inscriptions, dating from the first millennium AD, are written in Indo-Aryan Pali and Sanskrit. But by the 15th century, there had developed at Mrauk-U, near today’s Sittwe, an impressive kingdom that not only dominated this entire coastline but threatened both their Mughal neighbors to the north and the Burmese to the east.

  The kings of this Arakan kingdom spoke an archaic form of Burmese and were Buddhists, but were also cosmopolitans who saw themselves as part of a dynamic Indian Ocean world, taking Bengali–Muslim as well as Burmese–Pali titles, welcoming traders from Lisbon and Amsterdam, recruiting Afghan archers and renegade ronin samurai from Nagasaki as their bodyguards, and patronizing at court some of the finest Bengali and Persian poets. They were slavers, too, and together with the Dutch East India Company and Portuguese pirates terrorized the Ganges delta in the 16th and 17th centuries. Many slaves, including Muslims from Bengal, were settled in what is today northern Arakan.

  In 1666, invading Mughal armies captured Chittagong, seizing the coastline as far as the Naf River. The British took this territory from the Mughals in 1767.

  In 1785, Burmese armies coming from the Irrawaddy valley finished off the rest of this kingdom, setting fire to the capital and carting away the great Mahamuni image, which was believed by the Arakanese to be the most sacred Buddha image of all and a symbol of their sovereignty. Arakan was annexed outright, its centuries-old monarchy destroyed. It had been a cosmopolitan hub. It became Burma’s anauk-taga, its “western gate.”

  WITH THIS ANNEXATION of Arakan, the Burmese empire had taken a step toward the Ganges basin—what the Burmese called Mizzima-desa, the “Middle Country,” the holy land and birthplace of Buddhism. For millennia other parts of modern India, especially Bengal, Orissa, and South India, were also sources of higher learning, regions from which the Burmese derived their ideals of kingship, art and architecture, mathematics, science, and astronomy. Pali, as the ancient language of the Mizzima-desa, was Burma’s prestige language, understood by all educated people, as Latin was in pre-20th-century Europe.

  Before colonial times, the people to the west were known collectively as kala. The word is today portrayed, in foreign media, as a pejorative term for the Rohingya Muslims, but its early use was very different. Its etymology is unclear: it’s actually spelled kula in Burmese and may be related to the Sanskrit word of the same spelling which means “clan” or “community.” The word appears in medieval inscriptions and seems to denote anyone who came from overseas, from India—and “India” in the Burmese imagination was an expansive and somewhat vague place, like “the Indies” of Christopher Columbus.

  The Burmese saw the kala as a race, a lu-myo or “type of person.” Indians, Arabs, and Persians, then Portuguese, Armenians, and Dutch, all arrived to trade or offer their services as mercenaries. All appeared similar to Burmese eyes: bearded men (and they were almost all men) from the west. They shared certain ways. To this day, kala is part of many Burmese compound words, such as kala-taing (“kala-seat”) or chair, kala-ka (“kala-partition”) or curtain, and kala-pe (“kala-bean”) or chickpea. Europeans generally were bayingyi-kala, bayingyi being a Burmese corruption of firangi, the Persian version of “Franks,” which also often referred to all Europeans.

  Then came the British. The Burmese viewed the British as another kind of kala. England was called Bilat, a Burmese pronunciation of wilayati, the Arabic–Mughal word for “province,” which first meant Afghanistan, then referred to all lands of the far northwest. It’s the same word as “Blighty.” The British were the Bilat-kala. They were also the thosaung-kala, the “sheep-wearing kala,” after their affinity for woolen clothes. They brought with them their own eccentricities, such as Bilat-ye (“British water”) or soda.

  AT THE TURN of the 19th century, the Burmese began to hear news that the British, through their East India Company, were fast establishing dominion over India. They sent spies who returned with intelligence that the flag of St. George alone now flew along the entire coast from Madras to Calcutta. They sent envoys to the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab, to Nepal, the Marathas in Pune and the Mughals in Delhi, in hopes of an anti-British alliance. It was an offensive strategy. The Burmese had their sights set on Bengal.

  By the 1810s, there was a second wave of conquest. This was likely due to a need for people as well as to dreams of fresh imperial glory. The Irrawaddy valley, like most of Southeast Asia, was sparsely populated. Much of the land was forested, filled with tigers, elephants, and pythons. Deadly diseases were a relentless challenge. Land unused became forest very quickly. Human population, rather than land, was the scarce factor of production; people were needed to fight as well as to farm and to manage the irrigation systems on which rice growing depended. There were never enough people. Getting, keeping, and organizing people (to pay taxes or provide military and other services) was a major function of government. Foreign traders were welcomed and encouraged to take local wives, with the strict stipulation that the wife and any children stay behind when they left. When the Siamese capital Ayutthaya was overrun, thousands, including the entire royal court, were deported to the Irrawaddy valley.

  The need for manpower may have been particularly acute in the late 1810s and early 1820s. In 1815 Mount Tambora in what is today Indonesia erupted
with a force equivalent to 33 billion tons of TNT (about two million times the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima).2 The ash propelled into the stratosphere led to a year of dramatic climate change around the world. In America, the weather in May 1816 turned “backward,” with summer frost striking as far south as Virginia. In Europe, as many as 200,000 people died from famine in what became known as the “Year Without Summer.”3 Vacationing near Lake Geneva, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin had little choice but to stay indoors, sheltering from the cold and incessant rain. They entertained themselves by reading and writing horror stories. Those stories inspired Mary, later Mary Shelley, to begin work on her first novel, Frankenstein.

  The same year, unseasonably cold weather led to widespread hunger in China and Tibet. China’s Yunnan province, next to Burma, suffered its worst famine in recorded history.4 At exactly the same time, the first cholera pandemic, originating in Bengal, spread across Eurasia, killing hundreds of thousands of people, including a recorded 30,000 in Bangkok alone.5 The Irrawaddy valley had already suffered from famine in the early 19th century. The combination of the cholera epidemic and the impact of the Tambora eruption almost certainly placed dramatic new pressure on an already strained demography.

  Over the following years, Burmese armies marched westward, seizing first the old kingdom of Manipur, a state in today’s India. They then crossed the hills and descended into the valley of the Brahmaputra River, extinguishing another old kingdom, Assam, and depopulating entire regions. Tens of thousands were captured and brought back to the Irrawaddy valley to farm royal lands. The Manipuris remember this period as the “Seven Years of Devastation.”

  From Arakan, too, the Burmese forced entire communities over the hills to build irrigation works near the capital. Others were corralled into crown service units, which provided other forms of labor to the king. This oppression sent tens of thousands of Arakanese in flight across the border into British-controlled Bengal. A British army officer and diplomat named Hiram Cox was tasked with looking after the refugees. The area, which became known as Cox’s Bazar, is exactly where the multitude of Muslim refugees from Arakan are camped today, two hundred years later.

  The Burmese soon laid claim to all of southeast Bengal. In official correspondence to the East India Company, they said they understood how the English could have right of possession over all the British Isles but couldn’t possibly see how London could have legitimate claims to Dacca and Chittagong.6 The Burmese court proclaimed itself the heir of the Arakanese kings who were once sovereign over these same lands. They pursued Arakanese rebels across the Naf River, leading to clashes between British Indian and Burmese forces. In 1823, Burmese forces began moving south from Assam, threatening the little hill principalities of Jaintia and Cachar. Bengal, the richest province of British India, was now in danger of being attacked from two directions.

  On February 24, 1824, Lord Amherst, the Governor-General of India, declared war “to humble the overweening pride and arrogance of the Burmese monarch.”7 The war would be the longest and most expensive in British Indian history, costing the equivalent of nearly $30 billion today. Fifteen thousand British and Indian troops died, along with an unknown but almost certainly higher number of Burmese.

  After first repelling Burmese forces in Assam and Arakan, the British made a daring and successful amphibious assault on the port city of Rangoon. Two years of ferocious fighting followed, first around Rangoon and then up the Irrawaddy valley. The same Congreve rockets employed at Fort McHenry in Baltimore in 1812 (“the rockets’ red glare”) pulverized entrenched Burmese positions, while the first steamship ever used in combat, the Diana, destroyed the teak war-boats of the local navy. The Burmese aristocracy was decimated in the attempt to stem the enemy advance, as they led troops on horseback in battle after battle. In May 1826, when the British were within striking distance of the capital, King Bagyidaw sued for peace.

  Under the terms of the treaty that followed, the Burmese gave up the kingdoms of Assam, Jaintia, Cachar, Manipur, and Arakan, as well as the eastern shore of the Bay of Bengal near Siam. In the decades to come, the British would turn Assam into the world’s tea garden. Assam, Manipur, Jaintia, and Cachar would become part of independent India. The eastern shore, known as the Tenasserim, and Arakan were kept separate and became the first pieces of a new British Burma.

  For the once all-conquering Burmese race, defeat was a shock. All subsequent nationalist thinking harks back to this moment, when the empire was brought to its knees by invaders from the west, as the beginning of an alien interregnum. The late 20th-century military regime would make 1824 the cut-off date in determining who belonged in Burma and who did not, whose ancestors were “natives” and whose came as a result of foreign occupation and therefore were, at best, “guests.”

  The first Anglo-Burmese war was followed by a second in 1852–53, a relatively short affair that led to the annexation of the Irrawaddy delta and Rangoon. All of Lower Burma was now British, with Rangoon the capital. In the two decades that followed, the Burmese king Mindon tried frantically to modernize what was left of his Upper Burma domain. He built a new city, Mandalay; sent dozens of students to France, Germany, and Italy to study science and engineering; set up the country’s first factories; imported steamships; laid telegraph lines; and even invented a Burmese Morse code. And he tried to refashion what was still a kind of feudal system into a proper bureaucracy. Under his son and successor, Thibaw, a faction at the royal court, which included scholars returned from Europe, attempted to go a step further and introduce the beginnings of constitutional government. What they wanted most of all was recognition, from Queen Victoria herself, of Burma’s independence.

  The British, however, had other plans. In November 1885, secretary of state for India Lord Randolph Churchill (father of Winston) launched a third Burmese war, in the belief that a successful Far Eastern campaign might help the Conservative Party win the upcoming elections. He promised voters in Birmingham, a major manufacturing city near his rural constituency of Woodstock, that free access to markets in Burma, and through Burma to China, would create jobs.

  Mandalay was taken easily enough and the king overthrown. But the fierce popular opposition that soon followed, in villages and towns across the Irrawaddy valley, stunned the British. “The people of this country have not, as was by some expected, welcomed us as deliverers from tyranny,” wrote one colonial official to another.8 Years of bloody fighting, summary executions including the crucifixion of Burmese fighters, and a famine caused by Brtitish military operations that left 40,000 dead were needed to break the back of the resistance.

  When the dust cleared, there was very little left of the old order. The new overlords abolished Burma’s thousand-year monarchy together with all the other storied institutions of state. They exiled the royal family to India. And they smashed the power of the ruling families in the countryside, many with pedigrees extending back centuries. Mandalay was razed to the ground, all except the great city walls and the main palace structures (saved just in time by an intervention in 1905 by Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, who wanted to keep intact venues for oriental pomp and circumstance). The British even destroyed memories of the past: just after taking the city, drunken soldiers set fire to the royal library, which contained all official records as well as the genealogies of the ruling class.

  In the place of the old order, the British erected entirely new governing structures, ready-made and imported from India. There was no accommodation with Burmese tradition or culture. The modern state of Burma was born as a military occupation.

  THE FOCUS OF the new state was essentially to keep the Burmese in check, providing the minimum of services necessary while extracting as much money as possible through taxes and corporate profits. Burma was made a part of India, like Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, and unlike Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, which were all ruled separately, as Crown Colonies. The result was a state di
vorced from society and a crisis of identity that continues to this day.

  This “province of Burma” was divided into three parts. The first part comprised the Irrawaddy basin, the areas ruled by the old kings, plus (important for our later story) Arakan. These districts were ruled directly by British civil servants reporting to a pith-helmeted governor in Rangoon. The second part comprised the upland valleys and surrounding hills, which were ruled indirectly through local princes and chiefs. The mother tongue of these princes and chiefs was not Burmese. In most upland valleys the principal language was Shan, a close cousin of the Thai spoken in today’s central Thailand (the word “Shan” is a cognate of “Siam”). The third part comprised the remote mountain regions, which were claimed as part of British Burma but were generally left to themselves. On maps they were labeled “unadministered.”

  Burmese nationalists would blame the British for following a divide-and-rule policy. The truth was that the British took over a mixed and ever-changing political landscape and fixed boundaries to suit themselves. But by administering areas differently, they set up the fault lines around memory, identity, and aspiration that have vexed all attempts so far at nation-building.

  The British stumbled into the Irrawaddy valley to counter and break the power of the Burmese kings. But once ensconced, capitalism dictated policy. Lord Randolph Churchill had suggested that Burma might serve as a back door to China’s fabled markets, but China remained largely closed for the time being. The Taiping Rebellion and smaller related rebellions (such as the Muslim Panthay Rebellion in Yunnan, next door) were followed by decades of imperial decline and chaos. The back door would have to wait. So attention turned to the country’s natural resources, in particular timber and oil. Burmah Oil, the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, the Bombay–Burmah Trading Co., Steel Brothers, and other Rangoon-based firms delivered sky-high returns to their shareholders in London and Glasgow. Ports and railways were built to make the export trade as efficient as possible. By the early 20th century, Burma had also become the world’s top exporter of rice. Its farming villages, home to the vast majority of the population and never before part of the world economy, were for the first time tightly linked to global markets.