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The Cambridge History of India, Vol. IV: The Mughul Period v4.c23.s4: The Alaungpaya Dynasty (1752–1885)

The Cambridge History of India, Vol. IV: The Mughul Period v4.c23.s4

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English

Contents

The Alaungpaya Dynasty (1752–1885)

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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 Āva 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.

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When Āva fell he was ready. The Talaings sent small detachments to administer *thissa-ye*, the holy water of allegiance.¹ 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.

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¹ For *thissa-ye*, see Harvey, *History of Burma*, p. 339.

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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 Āva alive to tell the tale.

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Again they came back, several thousand strong this time, to extirpate 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,² fighting on their side. The Talaings jumped into boats and, without stopping to report at Āva, fled straight home down the river.

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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 II, vol. I, p. 518.

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The news spread. A dozen legends gathered round his name. Officers and men from the disbanded palace guard joined him with 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.

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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 Āva. In 1754 the Talaings, having discovered a plot at Pegū, executed the captive Āva 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.

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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 agreement with them and thus secure more numerous cannon, he allowed the protest of Jackson, the captain of the ships, H.E.I.C.'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, probably 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

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¹ Dalrymple, *Oriental Repertory*, I, 133–226.

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Alaungpaya's advances in the delta involved heavy fighting not only on land but also on water; both sides had hundreds of great 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 confronted 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 defenders 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.

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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.

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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 orders¹ 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.

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¹ Konbaungset, p. 185.

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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 indistinguishable from the surrounding population save by their religion and occasionally by the colour of their eyes.

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Thus, until the gunners lost their man-of-war smartness, the Burmese 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.¹ 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.

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¹ *Konbaungset*, pp. 110–12.

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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 Pegū 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.² 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 “*Shwebotha!*”, 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.

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² *Konbaungset*, p. 198.

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The city starved. The Talaings sent monks asking for terms, and their king offered to become Alaungpaya’s vassal. Alaungpaya replied that they had nothing to fear, for—it is the ambition of every great Buddhist king to become a Buddha—he was a divine incarnation; and he gave the envoys two bunches of orchids, saying one was for offering, the other for adornment. The Talaings breathed more freely. 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 Alaungpaya'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.

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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 monks¹ to the elephants.

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¹ Sayadaw Athwa, III, 148.

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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.

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The 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 reinforcements by immigration, unlike the Burmese who, lying to the north, were open to a constant trickle of immigration; moreover, Alaungpaya had Shan, Kachin and Kadu levies, whereas the Talaings had only their own little corner of Burma to draw on for men.

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Several of Alaungpaya's court poets were also field officers, such as Letwethondara (p. 513), who served under the walls of Pegū; 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 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.¹

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¹ Mason, *Burmah, its People and Productions*, p. 106.

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In 1755 Alaungpaya sent an expedition to instil respect into the Manipurīs, who significantly call this, the first of his dynasty’s inroads, “The First Devastation”; the Manipurīs found the Burmese on this occasion using firearms for the first time, their weapons, like those of the Manipurīs, 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 Manipurīs 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 incarnation he promoted religion among the Kathe (Cassay, Manipur) Shans along his line of march; in his capacity as a king he massacred² more than four thousand of his Manipurī prisoners because they stubbornly refused to march away in his slave gangs. These incursions, lasting down to 1819, ended by depopulating the country and stamping out Manipurī civilisation so completely that we can no longer tell what their social and political conditions were like.³ The Burmese valued Manipurī captives highly and settled them near the capital; they served the court as silversmiths; as silk-workers they introduced the *acheik* pattern;⁴ 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.

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² *Konbaungset*, p. 303.

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³ Hodson, *The Meitheis*, pp. 4, 29, 58.

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⁴ Parlett, *Sagaing Settlement Report*, p. 4.

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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.

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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, 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 withdrew 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.¹

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¹ Hall, "The Tragedy of Negrais", in *Journal Burma Research Society*, 1931, part III. The statement, sometimes made in recent English works, that the massacre 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.

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After the fall of Pegū, 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.

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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. Capturing 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 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 surface of the rivers with their corpses.¹ 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."² But the Siamese had among them Talaing refugees who knew the story of Pegū (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.

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¹ S. Smith, *History of Siam, 1657–1767*, p. 108.

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² *Konbaungset*, pp. 315–18.

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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.

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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).

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The commanders, watching by his bedside, fearing to dishearten the troops, kept the death a close secret and sent their swiftest horsemen 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 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 Commissioner’s court.

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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.

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The East India Company sent Captain Alves to demand compensation 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.¹ He refused compensation 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.

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¹ Dalrymple, *Oriental Repertory*, I, 373.

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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.

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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, Āva, into which he moved in April, 1765. The gates of restored Āva 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 (Viengchang, 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, 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

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¹ Konbaungset, p. 377; Crawfurd, *Embassy to Ava*, II, 1; Enriquez, "Capitals of the Alaungpaya Dynasty", in *Journal Burma Research Society*, 1915.

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To transfer to Āva 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 Pegū 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.

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Nine Brāhmans 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 *Vyākarana*. Letwethondara, 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.

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The main armies spent 1764–67 against Siam. Starting from 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.

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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 heaps¹ 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.

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¹ Konbaungset, pp. 210-13, 381; cf. Alaungpaya Ayedawpon, p. 64; Laurie, *Pegū*, p. 461; Crawfurd, *Embassy to Ava*, II, 41.

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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 containing 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 commanders urged Mahanawrahta to withdraw, but he refused, and 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 were terrified at the noise.¹

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¹ Siamese palace tradition.

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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 Mahanawrahta died; and by royal decree was buried with extraordinary honours; 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.

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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 against the Chinese, whose attacks on Āva looked like breaking through; for the years 1765-69 saw a series of Chinese inroads.

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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 instigation 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.

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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 Āva. 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".

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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.

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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 a 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 underneath. 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 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 elsewhere: 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 Turkestān, 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.

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At length in 1769, after losing, from first to last, 20,000 men and great stores of arms and ammunition which went to equip Burmes levies, the Chinese were driven out of their great stockade at Shwenyaungbin 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

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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'École Française d'Extrême Orient*, 1909, p. 669; Warry, *Précis*; Parker, *Précis*, and *Burma, Relations with China*, pp. 83–94; *Report of the Superintendent, Archaeological Survey, Burma*, 1918, p. 22.

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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 slaves 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.

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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 quantities. 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.

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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 country of white people, which some people said was an island.

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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 Manipurīs had been exterminated. 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 say¹ with truth to his English suitor: "You do not realise. We have never yet met the race that can withstand us."

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¹ Gouger, *Two Years Imprisonment in Burmah*, p. 104.

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In 1773 Talaing levies, mustered for an expedition to Siam, mutinied. The Burmese commanders and guards fled, first to Martaban, and then to Rangoon. The mutineers failed to take the Rangoon stockade but fired the town and burnt 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.

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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 executed the captive Talaing king and princes; secondly, 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.

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² Taw Sein Ko, "The Po-u-daung Inscription", in *Indian Antiquary*, 1893.

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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.¹ He collected a few hundred determined men like himself and withdrew to the hills. The Burmese repeatedly tried to dislodge him but he flung them back. He went east and gained Cambodia, vastly increasing his resources. The men of Siam, sick of oppression, rose and called on him to lead them, for their lawful princes were in captivity. In 1768 he destroyed several Burmese garrisons, reoccupied Ayuthia, and founded the present capital, Bangkok. He was now king, but his palace never saw him, as he lived in the field. The Burmese sent expeditions. He harried them in ambushes, cut them off, starved them out. He and his people were united in a just cause. Whether the Burmese could in any case have held Siam for long is doubtful, but whatever chances they had were ruined by the disunion which now became the curse of their armies in the field. For the spoilers fell out over their prey, and though captains like Mahathihathura, the hero of the Chinese war, and Thihapate, the conqueror of Ayuthia, continued to win occasional victories, they could achieve nothing permanent in the face of rampant insubordination. If a commander disapproved the plan of campaign, he showed his disapproval by simply withdrawing his levies and marching off elsewhere. Some of them were executed, but the harm had been done; the Burmese were driven across the frontier, and even at Chiengmai they were ill at ease, when the king died. He was succeeded by his son.

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¹ Pallegoix, *Description du Royaume Thai ou Siam*, II, 94–8.

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Singu (1776–82) at once finished the Siamese escapade by withdrawing the armies. His only wars were in Manipur. The rightful raja who fled from the Burmese in 1770 made four attempts to oust their nominee between 1775 and 1782; his base was in Cachār and they drove him back each time, but after 1782 they left him in possession, perhaps because the country was now so thoroughly devastated that nothing more could be wrung out of it. In the first two years, for which Singu was not responsible, the army was absent continuously, losing 20,000 men, partly by fever, and gaining barren victories in Cachār and Jaintia. These states had to present daughters and pay tribute of a tree with the earth still clinging to its roots in token that the king had seisin of the land; and henceforth he claimed these countries, although his suzerainty was, as usual, nominal.

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The people liked Singu because he was peaceful. Except commanders who wanted titles and village ruffians who wanted loot, everyone was made miserable by these everlasting wars, which indeed led to migrations. Thus, the Yaw folk fled from their original home to the remote Mu valley in Katha district in order to get out of the king's reach and escape conscription. If a town was depopulated by rebellion or by the slaughter of its levy on foreign service, a few hundred households would be transferred to it from another charge, sometimes a week's journey away, whether they wanted to go or not.

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The people did not know that Singu was seldom sober; all they knew was that he left them alone, and they were deeply grateful. He built many pagodas, for he spent much of his time in prayer; he was an angler too, and had an eye for scenery, to judge from some of his favourite haunts, where the gleam of a golden spire is reflected in the green depths of the stream below. His chief queen had a talent for verse, and the tutor of his youth was the poet Nga Hpyaw, who now received the title Minyeyaza. Sleep, prayer, fishing, drink, the laughter of the palace ladies in some sequestered woodland—it was all very pleasant, far pleasanter than the hard life of the soldier in foreign fields.

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