The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c29.s4: (b) Pegū 1287–1539
The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c29.s4
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(b) Pegū 1287–1539
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Wareru (1287–96), a Shān pedlar born at Donwun in the Thaton district, took service in the elephant stables of the chief of Sukhotai, became Captain of the Guard, eloped with the chief's daughter and set up as lord of his native village.
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He had a fair sister, and Aleimma, the Burmese governor of Martaban, wished to marry her. Wareru prepared a wedding feast and when Aleimma came to get his bride, Wareru assassinated¹ him, seized his governorship, and so became lord of Martaban in 1281. When he built its walls in 1287, a pregnant woman was crushed under the gate post as a foundation sacrifice².
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¹ Paklat Talaing chronicle.
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² Razadarit Ayedawpon. The practice survived in Burma till a century ago; see *History of Burma*, p. 320.
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The Pagān kingdom was now breaking up, and Wareru made common cause with Tarabya, the revolting governor of Pegū, each marrying the other's daughter. But in 1287, after they had expelled the Burmese governors and occupied the country south of Prome and Toungoo, Tarabya tried to ambush Wareru. He failed. Wareru, calling the spirits of earth and air to witness his innocence, and pouring libations of water from a golden bowl, mounted his elephant, fought with Tarabya in single combat, and took him prisoner. At the intercession of the monks he spared his life. Tarabya again plotted, but his wife warned her father Wareru in time. So Tarabya was executed, although she twined her tresses with his and dared the executioners to cut off his head.
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Wareru now became sole prince of the Talaing³ state in Lower Burma which lasted till 1539. In 1298 it received recognition from China, which henceforth chose to regard its rulers as governors appointed by herself. Its capital was Martaban till 1369, when a palace was set up at Pegū.
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³ Halliday, *The Talaings*.
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Wareru received recognition from his old master and father-in-law, the chief of Sukhotai, who in 1293 sent him a white elephant because it chose to eat Martaban grass; no sooner did they hear of its arrival than the Shān Brothers of Kyaukse came raiding Martaban to get it, but were driven off.
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To Wareru we owe the earliest law book in Burma that now survives. The Hindu colonists who came to the Delta a thousand years before had brought with them traditional laws ascribed to the ancient sage Manu; these law books were handed down in the Talaing monasteries, and Wareru commissioned his monks to produce the standard collection called after him, the Wareru *dhammathat*. It forms the basis of Burmese law literature¹.
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¹ Forchammer, *Jardine Prize Essay on Burmese Law*.
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The Siamese kingdom, founded in 1350, included in its list of provinces Tenasserim, Moulmein and Martaban²; it certainly held Tenasserim, founding the town in 1373, and building the Wutshin-taung pagoda there in 1380; but it did not hold Moulmein save through some nominal tribute-offering, and Pegū held the country down to Tavoy. There was little established government. If it was not dacoits it was royal kinsmen who revolted, and sometimes bands of Shān immigrants from Siam would add to the disorder.
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² Pallegoix, *Description du Royaume Thai ou Siam*, Vol. ii, p. 75.
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Binnya U (1353–85) repaired the Shwedāgon pagoda, raising its height to 66 feet. He repelled raiders from Chiengmai who destroyed several towns in Thaton district; on the site of his victory he built a pagoda, enshrining relics obtained by sending a mission to Ceylon. But his white elephant³ died, after being 61 years in the palace, and while he was devoutly searching the forests for a successor, his kinsmen seized the palace and invited the Chiengmai chief to join them. For six years he maintained himself at Donwun, and then, being driven out, he moved to Pegū and repaired its walls.
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³ For the cult of the white elephant, see Harvey, *History of Burma*, pp. 274, 361.
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His eldest son Razadarit (1385–1423) was the greatest of Wareru's lineage. Fighting for his existence since the age of sixteen, with but little assistance from his father, who could not control the family feuds, Razadarit succeeded in seizing Pegū town soon after his father's death, subjected Bassein, and repelled successive Burmese invasions. Finally, in 1390, he captured Myaungmya with Laukpya inside; in thank-offering he built shrines at the Shwemawdaw pagoda, Pegū feeding a thousand monks throughout a seven days' festival and offering his weight in gold.
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Hearing that his son Bawlawkyantaw was practising horsemanship and sharpening his elephant's tusks, Razadarit feared he was about to rebel, and sent two lords to slay him. They announced their duty to the lad, who replied: 'I do but follow the custom of young princes in manly exercise. I do not plot against my father and there is no fault in me. Give me time to prepare for death.' They gave him time, and for three days at the Shwemawdaw pagoda he listened to the reading of *Abidhamma*, the holy scriptures. When it was finished, he offered his ruby bracelets and earrings to the pagoda, and thus he prayed: 'If I have wished ill to my father, yea though it be a little, then may I lie in hell for ever, and never behold the coming Buddha. But if I have not wished ill to my father, then may I be born again among the kings of Burma and be the scourge of the Talaings.’ Then he took the poison that had been prepared, and drank it and died.
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When this was reported to Razadarit, he said: ‘It was a terrible prayer,’ and, gilding the pagoda from top to bottom, he prayed: ‘If he become a prince in Burma and make war on me, may I on my elephant vanquish him.’
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During the war that followed, though he ultimately repulsed them, the Burmese sometimes left Razadarit in possession of little but Pegū town itself. In 1414 he gained a brief respite by stirring up Hsenwi to attack Āva, but was himself never free from the fear of Shān inroads, as on several occasions when he was hard pressed from the north the princes of Ayuthia, Kampengpet and Chiengmai would raid him from the south.
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He built the Danok pagoda near Twante, and to him is ascribed the traditional division of each of ‘the Three Lands of the Talaings’ (Pegū, Myaungmya, Bassein) into 32 ‘provinces,’ i.e. village circles.
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He was of great strength and personal courage, and several times killed his man in single combat. The chief of Āva never dared accept his challenge and meet him hand to hand.
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When the news of Minhkaung’s death in 1422 reached Pegū, the queens jeered, saying to Razadarit: ‘Now you can pounce down on his palace and capture all his women.’ But he rebuked them, saying: ‘My sweet enemy is dead. I will fight no more, but spend my declining years in piety.’
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A year later, at the age of fifty-four, while snaring elephants with his own hand in the Labut-tha-lut forest at the foot of the Pegū Yomas, north of Pegū, he was caught in the rope and injured so that he died on the way home. His queens came out to meet the body and buried it at Kamathameinpaik (Minkanyo), near Payagyi, north of Pegū. He has a chronicle all to himself, the *Razadarit Ayedawpon*, which ends with the words: ‘This Lion King, so wise, so generous, so mighty in word and deed, could overcome all his enemies, but he too at the last must bow before King Death.’
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Binnyakyan (1450–53) raised the height of the Shwedāgon pagoda to 302 feet. At his death, as a result of palace massacres, there was no male of the family left alive. The throne then passed by general consent to Razadarit’s daughter Shinsawbu (1453–72). Village headmanships have been known to descend in the female line¹, and Shān hill states have been held by chieftainesses, but this is the only instance of a major state in Burma being held by a woman. Daughter, sister, wife and mother of kings, she ruled well, leaving behind so gracious a memory on earth that four hundred years later the Talaings could think of no fairer thing to say of Queen Victoria than to call her Shinsawbu re-incarnate.
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¹ Furnivall, 'Matriarchy in Burma' in *Journal of the Burma Research Society*, 1912.
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Once, while being carried round the city in her great palanquin, sword in hand and crown on head, she heard an old man exclaim, as her retinue pushed him aside, 'I must get out of the way, must I? You call me an old fool, do you? I am not so old that I could not get a child, which is more than your old queen could do!' Thunderstruck at such irreverence, she meekly accepted it as a sign from heaven, and thereafter styled herself 'The Old Queen².'
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² *Thatonhnwemun Yazawin*.
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When young she had been given in marriage to the then chief of Āva and two Talaing monks had gone there to teach her letters. As she was not happy in a Burmese palace, she ran away, and fled down the river to Pegū. Her flight was successful because the two monks helped her, and, by benefit of clergy, a boat carrying monks could not be challenged. She admired the two monks beyond all other men, and when, after being queen of Pegū seven years, she wished to retire, it was one of them that she chose as successor. But she did not know which to choose. Therefore one day, when they entered the palace as usual to receive the royal rice in their alms bowls, she secretly put into one of the bowls not rice but a layman's dress, together with little models of the five regalia; then, having prayed that the lot might fall on the worthier, she returned the bowls³. Dammazedi, to whom the fateful bowl fell, abandoned the Order, received her daughter in marriage, and assumed the government. The other in his disappointment took to plotting, and was executed. The ambitious lords also objected, but in the end became reconciled to Dammazedi because of his wisdom and justice; and when some of them continued to murmur that he was not of royal blood, she took a beam out of a bridge in the city and had it made into a Buddha image, and said: 'Ye say he is of common blood, he cannot be your king. See here this common wood—yesterday it was trodden in the dust of your feet, but to-day, is it not the Lord and do ye not bow before it?'
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³ Sayadaw Athwa, Vol. ii, p. 131.
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Shinsawbu spent the remaining years of her life in retirement at the Shwedāgon. Successive princes had added to the original structure, and she made it practically what we see to-day. Round it she banked up the terrace fifty feet high, nine hundred feet wide, with a great stone balustrade and encircling walls, between which she planted palm trees; she kept forty-four people continually tending the sacred lamps, dedicated five hundred prisoners of war as slaves, and offered her own weight (91 lb.) in gold for gilding the dome¹. When, at the age of seventy-eight, she felt her end approaching, she had her bed placed where her eyes could rest on that wondrous spire, and thus she breathed her last.
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¹ Halliday, ‘Slapat Rajawan Datow Smin Ron’ in *Journal of the Burma Research Society*, 1923; Forchammer, ‘Notes on Early History and Geography.’
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Dammazedi (1472–92) gave four times the weight of himself and his queen in gold to the Shwedāgon as compensation for revoking some of its lands, which Shinsawbu had extended to Danok. At Pegū he built the Shwekugyi and Kyaikpon pagodas, and west of the Shwemawdaw he built a new stockaded town, and set up his palace and elephant stables there². The masonry of his reign is excellent, and a mass of pious edifices sprang up on the beautiful plateau between the old and the new town, men vying with each in works of merit, for it was an age of religious revival.
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² Shwemawdaw Thamaing.
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Dammazedi himself sent a mission to Buddhagaya³ in Bengal to take plans of the Holy Tree and of the temple as models for his buildings at Pegū. But his most important work was his mission of twenty-two monks to Ceylon⁴ in 1475. It was a long and dangerous journey, and several died in shipwreck or during their wanderings when cast away on the coast of Madras. To the Tooth, the Footprint, and the Holy Trees, at Kandy, they presented a stone alms bowl studded with sapphires, and reliquaries of gold and crystal; to the Cingalese monks, cloths and Chiengmai lacquer boxes; to the king of Ceylon, rubies, sapphires, Chinese silks, fine mats, and a letter on gold leaf. Their object was to secure valid ordination from the clergy of the Mahāvihāra, the great monastery in Ceylon which, founded in 251 B.C., still exists. On their return they proceeded to transmit this ordination to the clergy throughout Lower Burma: it was so generally accepted as valid that monks flocked to receive it from all over Burma and even from Siam; and thus religion in Burma, which for three centuries had been split into sects each with its own ordination, received a measure of unity from the standard Kalyānī ordination. It was and is granted at the Kalyānī *thein* (ordination hall) near Pegū, so called because the original monks were ordained on the banks of the Kalyānī stream in Ceylon. Dammazedi recorded these events on ten inscribed stones at the *thein*, called the Kalyānī Inscriptions.
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³ Report of the Supt. Archaeological Survey, Burma, 1914, p. 11.
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⁴ Taw Sein Ko, ‘Kalyānī Inscriptions’ in *Indian Antiquary*, 1893, 1894.
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One of the principal monks in the mission was Buddhaghosa, who translated the Wareru *dhammathat* into Burmese; later generations confused him with his namesake, the Father of the Church who lived a thousand years previously. Dammazedi himself was a wise judge, and a collection of his rulings survives, the Dammazedi *pyatton*. He died at the age of eighty and was succeeded by his son Binnyaran.
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Binnyaran (1492–1526) was beloved for his kindness, although, like others before and after, he enforced the Massacre of the Kinsmen, making a clean sweep of all his brothers. His son Takayutpi (1526–39) was the last king of Pegū.
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Soon after 1500 the opening of the sea routes brought the Talaings great prosperity. Burma lay off the beaten track and her goods could be bought in Malacca. Her spices were few, and her finished articles crude. But two places in Burma lay near the track: Martaban and Tenasserim. These commanded short cuts over the hills to Siam, saving a dangerous sea voyage. Martaban sold the produce brought down the Salween and Irrawaddy rivers, and in 1519 the Portuguese¹ founded a trading station there which lasted till 1613. Tenasserim², which belonged to Siam till 1760, commanded an even better overland route, and the Portuguese had a settlement there till 1641. The Portuguese imported European clothes and velvets, and exported rubies, lac, wax, ivory, horn, lead, tin, Pegū jars (‘Martabans’), and long pepper, which grew in the moist forests of Tenasserim; they exported also pepper from Achīn, camphor from Borneo, and porcelain and scented woods from China, brought by the junks for sale in the Talaing ports. There was no coinage, but goods were weighed against lumps of *ganza*, an alloy of lead and tin which passed as currency. Nikitin³, a Russian from Tver, who travelled in the East about 1470, mentions Pegū as ‘no inconsiderable port, inhabited principally by Indian dervishes. The products derived from thence are sold by the dervishes,’ which indicates that then, as now, the merchant community was largely foreign.
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¹ Faria y Sousa (Stevens), *The Portuguese in Asia*; Couto, *Da Asia*; Whiteway, *Rise of the Portuguese Power in India*.
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² Anderson, *English Intercourse with Siam*.
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³ Major, *India in the Fifteenth Century*.
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Pegū had peace between Razadarit's death in 1423 and the end of the monarchy in 1539. The dynasty was mild. The kings could indulge their peaceful proclivities because the Upper Burma hordes found all the fighting they wanted among themselves, and the states of Prome and Toungoo acted as a buffer. An Italian traveller in 1505 describes the reigning king, Binnyaran, as so gentle that a child might speak to him, and as wearing so many jewels that at night he shone like the sun¹. It was the golden age of Pegū, and there can be little doubt that its civilisation was higher than that of the savage north. If few traces remain, that is because it was a simple civilisation, the steaming climate of the Delta hastens decay, and the Burmese conquerors touched nothing which they did not destroy.
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¹ Badger, *The Travels of Ludovico di Varthema*, p. 219.