Ghosts of Empire (23 page)

The old King, Mindon, was happy in his palace, from which he had ruled the kingdom of Upper Burma since 1853. Having annexed Lower Burma, the area round Rangoon and the Irrawaddy Delta, in the 1850s, the British were content for Mindon to rule Upper Burma as an independent sovereign. Mindon was clever enough to understand who possessed real power in his part of the world. The old man was a pious Buddhist who had an extensive family; some people claimed that he had a hundred wives, though this is evidently incorrect, because only fifty-three wives have been attested to, thirty-nine of whom bore children. Altogether, Mindon had 110 children, of whom forty-eight were boys and sixty-two were girls.
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Mindon, as a local king, had experienced the power of the British at first hand, because his brother, Pagan Min, the previous king, had been an unpredictable and wild ruler who had been defeated by the British in battle. When it took over the southern part of the Burmese kingdom, Britain forced Pagan Min to abdicate. Pagan had been the worst kind of ruler for the British and had begun his reign by massacring a hundred members of his own family to secure his rule. He was devoted to cockfighting and debauchery of all kinds. According to British observers, the ‘acts of cruelty and extortion perpetrated in his reign have never been surpassed'.
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The family which now ruled Burma were relative upstarts. In 1752, Alaungpaya, an obscure village chief, launched a successful rebellion against the King of the Mon people, who had deposed Burma's ruling family, the Taungoo dynasty. Alaungpaya then crowned himself king and, in 1755, founded Rangoon. His last campaign was an invasion of Siam (Thailand), during which, in April 1760, he besieged the historic capital,
Ayutthaya. During the siege, a cannon he was watching exploded and wounded him, and he died on the way back to Burma. He was not yet forty-six years old, but his career, though short, had been brilliant. ‘In eight years he rose from the position of a petty village headman to that of one of the most powerful monarchs of the East.'
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Mindon was a less warlike, more conciliatory ruler than the founding father of his dynasty had been. He was also a pragmatic man who ‘knew and feared' Britain's power.
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Unfortunately, he was deluded in thinking that he could maintain a relationship with the British on equal terms. In his own eyes, and according to the propaganda of the court, he was still ‘the lord of all the Great Umbrella-bearing chiefs', the ‘King of the Rising Sun', and ‘lord of the Celestial Elephant'; most important of all, he was the ‘lord of the White Elephant', a phrase which itself has entered the English language to mean something expensive but useless, but which, in Burmese eyes, was the ultimate symbol of royal authority. More widely in South-east Asia–in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Burma itself–the White Elephant was a symbol of royalty. As long as a king possessed a white elephant, he was deemed to be a just ruler. This tradition derived from the time of the Buddha, whose mother was supposed to have dreamed of a white elephant the night before she gave birth. The white elephant gave her a lotus flower, the symbol of wisdom and purity. To be given a real white elephant was a blessing, but it was also a curse. It was a holy animal, a symbol of purity and royal favour, yet, for this very reason, there was no practical use for the animal, which was not allowed to work in the fields or do any other work.

As ‘lord of the White Elephant', Mindon felt he had the same status as any monarch in the world. His ambition was to ‘establish direct diplomatic relations between himself and the British Government without the interference of the Viceroy', who resided in India.
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Mindon was very sensitive to breaches of protocol. He demanded respect and anyone entering his presence was required to take off his shoes. Often there were mildly humorous exchanges. General Horace Browne recorded a visit to Mindon's capital, Mandalay, in 1872: ‘At the steps of the Audience Hall we had, as usual, to submit to the process of unshoeing, as our Government has not yet seen fit to make a stand against this un-Occidental custom.'
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Browne
was also wearing a hat, and a palace guard kindly asked him to take that off too. He replied, ‘No, my friend, give me back my shoes, and I will take my hat off, but I am not going to uncover both ends at once.'

This mildly jocular spirit had hardened by the end of the 1870s, when a greater degree of formality and protocol prevailed in Britain's relations with foreign powers. In Asia, in particular, with its widely differing cultures, diplomats were expected by local rulers to be sensitive to the demands of custom. In 1875, Sir Douglas Forsyth, the head of the mission to Mandalay, had been asked to conform to the Burmese court etiquette and invited to remove his shoes. He complied with this request reluctantly and, afterwards, expressed his indignation. The Viceroy's government in India then gave instructions that, in future, the British Resident in Mandalay should not take off his shoes on entering an audience with the King. This was a humiliation for Mindon.
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He refused to compromise on the issue. When Robert Shaw, the British Resident (and Francis Younghusband's uncle), was equally intransigent and refused to take off his shoes, he was barred from the palace.

The hardening of British attitudes to Burma in the 1870s formed only part of a progression towards greater imperialism. It was at this time, after all, in 1877, that Queen Victoria was given the title ‘Empress of India' by Benjamin Disraeli, the British Prime Minister, whose jingoism was then highly popular. Rivalry between European powers spilled over into contests in Asia and Africa, and Burma was caught up in this competition. Lord Cranborne, who as Lord Salisbury later became prime minister, had declared as early as 1867 that it was ‘of primary importance to allow no other European power to insert itself between British Burmah and China', since Britain's ‘influence in that country ought to be paramount'.
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Cranborne's view was that ‘an easy communication with the multitudes who inhabit Western China' was ‘an object of national importance'.

In the 1860s and 1870s, the prospect of a vast increase in trade with the hundreds of millions who were subjects of the Chinese Emperor was very alluring. Speculators and adventurers dreamed of building railways, which would connect Rangoon to western China. One of these speculators was a crank named Captain Richard Sprye who had badgered the British government with his schemes since the 1850s. British merchants were particularly
enthused by the China trade. As Horace Browne wrote in his diary on 31 July 1874, ‘the discovery of a north-east passage between Burma and China has long been agitating the minds of the Anglo-Burman and English mercantile world'. Captain Sprye had been the first to draw attention to this possibility. He was dubbed the ‘apostle of the overland route to China', an accurate if not very pithy description. His idea was simple. As Browne observed, ‘Any schoolboy with atlas in hand can demonstrate that a straight line drawn from Rangoon to the nearest point of the Chinese Empire [in Yunan province] has a length of about 500 miles, half of which lies in British territory.' The line even came to be known as ‘Sprye's Route'.

The problem was that Captain Sprye had been in Burma in the 1840s and had never ‘explored a single mile of the line himself'. He was the very model of an armchair general. ‘From his armchair in London he glorifies himself as the . . . Lesseps of Indo-China.'
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(Ferdinand, Vicomte de Lesseps was the French engineer who had built the Suez Canal in 1869 and who was very much an international hero of the 1870s.) For his part, Sprye had ‘been riding his hobby for fifteen years or more'. He wrote ‘interminable letters to every Government office in any way concerned' and was generally viewed as ‘an intolerable bore'.
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The problem with building a railway which connected Rangoon with the populous El Dorado of western China was the terrain. The route projected may have been only 500 miles, but it would have to cross rugged, mountainous ground. It was extremely difficult territory, as Yunnan itself, the Chinese province closest to Burma, was a land of ‘high mountain ridges which were over 8,000 feet even at the lowest points and whose river valleys were sheer crevasses'.
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The lure of Chinese riches, then as now, continued to beguile the minds of greedy entrepreneurs. All through the 1870s and early 1880s, self-appointed Burma experts, as well as the British merchant community in Rangoon more generally, were salivating at the prospect of commerce with China. ‘Supposing that the entire commerce of south-west China and independent Burma were added to that of British Burma, we may conceive what a vast opening there would be for the merchants of Great Britain.' In Rangoon, merchants had already calculated that ‘the Chinese provinces neighbouring Burma contained approximately 103 million inhabitants
and that such a vast population was hardly touched by European commerce'. The Chinese trade in tea, silk, tobacco, sugar and oil, everybody felt, would be enormous. Already in the 1870s, the British were clamouring to do business with the ‘teeming millions' of China, which was regarded as ‘a nation of born traders'.
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The logic of trade involved Britain in Burmese affairs to a greater extent, a logic which even King Mindon acknowledged. He was only too aware of the Burmese folk tale of the python and the virgin daughter. This was about an old widow who once found a python asleep under a fig tree. For some reason, she thought it was a bewitched prince, so she brought it home for her daughter. The widow asked her virgin daughter to marry the snake, promising that it would turn into a handsome prince after the marriage. They were put together in the same bed on the wedding night. Soon the young woman cried, ‘The snake is swallowing me!' The widow rushed to see her daughter and said, ‘Your husband loves you; he is merely teasing you.' The snake swallowed her up to the waist. The young woman again cried, ‘The snake is swallowing me!' The widow rushed in and said the same thing: ‘Your husband loves you.' After another hour, the young woman had been swallowed up to her neck. She cried out for the last time, but it was too late.
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The Burmese King did not represent the only obstacle in Britain's path to riches in South-east Asia. There were obviously colonial rivals whose interests had to be considered. Most notably, the French were eager to be players in that region, where they had traditionally been a check on British schemes to develop relations with the native kingdoms. Colonel Edward Sladen, Commissioner of Arakan in the far west of the country, wrote an assessment of the political situation in Burma in 1885 in which he observed that it was ‘somewhat strange that our own first political intercourse with the Burmese Court commenced . . . with an attempt to thwart and anticipate French interests'; in 1795, Captain Michael Symes had been sent by the East India Company to Upper Burma to strengthen ‘our commercial relations' and prevent ‘the French from gaining a footing in the country'.
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The French were now consolidating their hold over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, causing the British to fear that their rivals would now make their influence felt in Upper Burma.

It was against this background of colonial rivalry and commercial ambition that Mindon, now in his late sixties, entered what would be his final years of illness. In October 1877 his German doctor, Dr Marfels, diagnosed that the old King was suffering from dysentery. His condition was critical, the doctor said, but there was no heir apparent, as Mindon's younger brother, who had been groomed for the succession, had been assassinated in 1866. After this botched palace coup, in which he had been lucky to escape with his life, Mindon was understandably reluctant to identify any one prince as his successor. Of course, he had more than forty sons, of widely different ages, none of whom had been educated in the role of king. The sheer number of sons and wives obviously meant that the situation would become very confused when he died. Various factions, as was often the case in courts with this type of harem structure, would coalesce around different princes and make the court a fraught place, full of intrigue and suspicion. Mindon's favourite queen, the woman he had married earliest, had died in 1872. They had been married for thirty-six years, but she had failed to give him any children. He was grief-stricken by her death, which left Hsinbyumashin, the Middle Palace Queen, as the most senior of all Mindon's wives. She had no sons, but she had daughters, and her plan was to marry one of them to a son of King Mindon by another woman, as it was customary for members of the Burmese royal family to marry their half-siblings, rather like the Ancient Egyptian royal family, or the ruling families of the Incas. The Middle Palace Queen needed to find a suitable prince to succeed Mindon, one who would be pliable and could be easily persuaded to marry her daughter.

The Burmese council of ministers, the Hlutdaw, was also scheming in those months towards the end of 1877 and through 1878. Its members would choose Mindon's successor, and they were resolved not to give the throne to any of his three eldest sons; they too wanted a pliant prince they could control. The Prince whom the Middle Palace Queen wanted also suited the council, and the twenty-year-old Thibaw was chosen by her to be the instrument of their joint ambition. There were rumours about his paternity, but they were widely assumed to be tales told by the supporters of rival princes. Thibaw's mother had been the only one of Mindon's wives who had ever been convicted of infidelity. She had been expelled from the
palace thirteen years previously, in 1864, and had scandalously continued her affair with a Buddhist monk.
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Thibaw himself had been educated in the traditions of the Buddhist priesthood, as well as being introduced to British culture at Dr Marks's Anglican School, where he enjoyed playing cricket. He was remembered for being a terrible loser who used ‘unprincely language' when he was bowled out.
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