Golden Earth (10 page)

Why should it have been supposed that those who had died in such terrifying circumstances should be content, after death, to guard the city of their murderers? And did it ever occur to the victims to warn their executioners that they would refuse to accomplish what was expected of them? Every city in Burma and nearly every bridge and weir had its complaisant ghosts who, according to popular belief, were always ready
to drive off intruders, human or otherwise. As in the Far Eastern countries the living and the dead are divided by the most diaphanous of veils; the guardian spirits sometimes took on human form, fought with the weapons of their day, and were even wounded. A case in point was observed on the occasion of the annihilation of the Burmese army by the Mongols of Kublai Khan, when the guardian spirits of the Burmese cities, who had gone armed, presumably with spears and javelins, to the battlefield, were put out of action by the deadly archery of the Tartar horsemen. The Glass Palace Chronicle describes the incident tersely: ‘… on the same day when the army perished … the spirit who was ever wont to attend the King’s chaplain returned to Pagan and shook him by the foot and roused him from his sleep saying, “This day hath Ngahsaunggyan fallen. I have been wounded by an arrow. Likewise the spirits Wetthakan of Salin, Kanshi and Ngatinkyeshin, are wounded by arrows.”’ Perhaps the fifty-two spirit guardians of Mandalay were similarly handicapped by out-of-date weapons when the British gunboats began their cannonading from the river.

The atmosphere of this town in the days just before the British occupation must have been more macabre than that of Moscow under Ivan the Terrible in his madness. There was a ghastly combination of modernity and crazed medievalism. The telegraph had just been introduced and the town was served by the very latest in steamboats; but wizards went mumbling through the streets, and an English official could be seized and threatened with instant crucifixion if he failed to subscribe to the national lottery.

With a sense of inferiority that was engendered in the knowledge of weakness, every attempt was seized upon to humble the pride of the hated foreigners, unless the king felt that there was any hope of extracting from one of them any of the secrets of their regrettable supremacy in certain matters. Shway Yoe quotes a typical dialogue of the kind that took place between King Mindon and any fresh wanderer to arrive in the city. ‘What is your name?’ ‘John Smith.’ ‘What can you do?’ ‘May it please
your Majesty, I am a sea-cook.’ ‘Can you make a cannon?’ Whereupon John Smith, if he were a wise man, would agree to make the attempt. A lump of metal would be made over to him, and he would chisel and hammer away at it, and draw his pay as regularly as he could get it.

The contempt for Europeans was rooted originally in Burmese cosmogony, according to which the true human race was concentrated in South-East Asia, which was seen as a symmetrical land-mass, in the centre of which were located, not unnaturally, the Burmese holy places. To the north were the Himalayas, and beyond them a kind of fairyland containing the jewelled mountain of Meru and the magic lake in which all the rivers of the world (i.e. the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Menam and Mekong) had their source. To the south were dismal seas, and in them the ‘five hundred lesser islands’ on which dwelt the inferior people from across the sea. Their attitude, with less justice, duplicated that of the Chinese. In the days of Ava they were outraged that embassies should come from the Viceroy of India, and not the Queen of England, and when the envoys came they might be obliged to live, ignored by the court, on an island where bodies were burned and criminals executed. When called to audience they were forced to walk long distances barefooted and bareheaded in the sun; to pass through a postern-gate in the palace-wall that was so low that the shortest man was compelled to bend. For their benefit the carpets normally covering the floorboards were removed, and their feet were lacerated by the nails which were purposely left protruding.

With the death of Mindon the atmosphere of mania thickened. The ministers of state had manoeuvred the supine Thibaw into the kingship in the mistaken belief that he could be more easily controlled than any of the more intelligent of Mindon’s numerous descendants. The stage was now set for a traditional and regularly recurrent Burmese drama, but one which, on this occasion, provoked an unwonted flurry owing to the presence of a foreign colony. All the king’s half-brothers and sisters who might have been considered dangerous to the succession and had been promptly popped into gaol, were now, according to the current Burmese euphemism, ‘cleared’. The English were much impressed by the
preparations for this ceremony, which consisted chiefly in the making of a large number of capacious velvet sacks, a piece of exquisite sensibility on the part of whoever was in charge of arrangements. The ‘clearing’ was completed in a festival lasting three days, in the course of which the victims were placed in the sacks and respectfully beaten to death; princes, by light blows on the back of the neck; princesses, on the throat. The ingenious purpose of the red velvet was to camouflage any unseemly effusion of royal blood, an advance on the method of Thibaw’s ancestor, Bodawpaya, who burned to death all his surplus relations, complete with children and servants. Thibaw had shown, too, consideration for the modesty of the female sufferers, an aspect of Inquisitional burnings which was never found altogether satisfactory.

The Burmese have always been ready to excuse such methods of State, as the lesser evil; and even survivors of the Thibaw massacre told English friends frankly that, placed in Thibaw’s position, they would have done the same thing. The trouble is always ascribed to the harem system, and the superfluity of potential heirs that it produced. Burmese apologists find excuses for this too. It was expected by the king’s feudatories and allies that he would take their daughters into his
household
, and not to have done so, in the face of immemorial custom, would have given offence. In this way, too, the Empire was held together. Certainly, history does not show the kings as unduly concerned with family matters. The only concubine who is highly praised in the
chronicle
for her capabilities, is one who knew where to scratch the king’s back without being told where it itched. For the rest, the kings are
represented
as not even being informed of the children born to lesser queens. A principal queen could be returned at her own request to an old lover: the fantastic tests which Brantôme reports as carried out by Renaissance princes to ensure they married virgins, would have filled the Burmese kings with amazement. Even when a queen was seduced, the royal reaction reads more like irritation than wrath. It seems that the kings were content to procreate a polite minimum of a hundred or so descendants, and leave it at that.

Mandalay’s foreign colony had hardly recovered from this shock,
when another unpleasant affair occurred. A smallpox epidemic carried off two of the king’s children; and as epidemic disease was always ascribed to demonic interference, the Indian soothsayers were called in. A formal inspection of the jars of oil buried with Mindon’s human sacrifices was made. In the remote past a magic correlation had been established between the condition of the oil thus buried, and the efficacy of the haunting. In this case only one of the four jars of oil was found to be intact; and at the full conclave of court astrologers which followed, it was unanimously voted that the city must be abandoned. When the king’s ministers refused to do this, the astrologers presented their alternative: the sacrifice of six hundred more persons. Five hundred were to be Burmese, most carefully assorted to include representatives of all ages and stations. A hundred were to be foreigners.

Mindon had secured his fifty-two victims with tact, giving lavish public spectacles which attracted crowds, from which an odd spectator could be quietly spirited away without attracting attention. Thibaw, lacking Mindon’s solid, meditative endowments, went at the thing like a bull at a gate, and ordered wholesale arrests. Accounts of such Burmese customs by the early travellers had been too much for the reason of the eighteenth century; consequently they had been denied in Europe as fictitious: ‘an abundance of monstrous and incredible Relations … which one would not think could gain credit even with the weakest of their Readers.’ But now the Europeans were to see for themselves. A wave of utter terror seized the city, and wholesale evacuation began. The populace crowded aboard the Irrawaddy steamers or stampeded into the fields and hills. The paralysis of the life of the city together with some doubt as to the possible effect on relations with the English of the inclusion of the hundred foreigners necessary to make a success of the sacrifice, produced an official
démenti
of the project. A few of those arrested were never seen again and it was concluded that, in his usual ineffectual way, the king had contented himself with merely tinkering with the problem.

Beyond the walls stretched a desolation of tumbled bricks and weeds I found the spot where, according to a scale-model of the palace which had been erected, the apartments of the white elephant had stood. But of these, too, only the foundations remained. This singular beast dominated the imaginations of all the monarchs of South-East Asia; and although regarded as an avatar of Gautama in numerous previous existences – and therefore primarily of interest only to Buddhists – a kind of collector’s fever had developed, seizing such non-Buddhist potentates as the Emperor of Annam. This pressure by the uninstructed – the Hearsts of their day – on a limited supply, only increased the ferocity of the competition between the Buddhist rulers.

The wars between the Burmese and their Siamese neighbours were usually undertaken – in theory, at any rate – for the acquisition, or recovery, of these picturesque symbols of power. ‘The king in his title,’ said Ralph Fitch, writing in 1586, ‘is called the king of the white elephants. If any other king have one, and will not send it to him, he will make warre with him for it; for he had rather lose a great part of his kingdom than not conquer him.’ In spite of the alleged rarity of albinism in elephants one could be relied upon to turn up sufficiently often in the days of imperial expansion to keep both kingdoms in a state of devastation.

The whiteness of the elephant was nominal, and its sanctity depended upon so many esoteric factors, beyond the layman’s grasp, that a
substantial
body of literature on the subject grew up. The pinkness of the outer annulus of the eye entered into this, as well as the length of the tail, and the number of toenails. Ten toenails instead of the normal eight were required in a successful candidate. Black elephants possessing this number were collectors’ items, although not entitled to adoration, and were classified as white elephants debased by sin in previous existences. The final test, when all others had been passed, was the water one. If the skin, whether black, grey or otherwise, took on a reddish tinge when water was poured on it, the animal was conclusively white. It was elevated immediately to the position of first personality in the land after the king, accorded white and golden umbrellas, given the revenues of a province, diverted daily by a
corps de ballet
, lulled nightly to sleep by a sweet-voiced
choir, and if of tender years suckled daily by a line of palace women – an honour eagerly contested by those in a position to aspire to it.

But of all these spectacles and splendours, not a vestige remained. Nothing had survived the citadel’s devastation but a few antique cannon. The largest of them turned out to be imitations, with great immovable wheels made of brick. In the later centuries cannon assumed for the Burmese a purely magic significance, having taken over the protective qualities of the leogryph. As they were never fired, there could be no objection to their being fakes, with enormous intimidating bores and twenty-foot-long barrels. The kings were usually ready to offer its weight in silver for any piece of ordnance however old or cracked, and the palace of Mandalay where all the firearms in the country were stacked up, was a repository of strange museum pieces. They were drawn, when mobile, by teams of auspiciously marked bullocks, which were trained at the word of command to kneel and bow their heads to the ground. The gunners’ personal kit was stored in the muzzles. Occasionally a cannon would become, like Alaungpaya’s three-pounder, the centre of a cult, and receive offerings of flowers and libations of brandy.

By the end of Mindon’s reign it must have been clear that nothing could save Burma. The Burmese, together with all the rest of the Easterners, except the Japanese, were the prisoners of a cosmology composed of interlocking systems, all complete and perfect, and founded in error. Everything had been decided and settled once and for all two thousand years ago. No question had been left unanswered. It was all in the Three Baskets of the Law, its commentaries and subcommentaries; dissected and classified beyond dispute: the seven qualities, the five virtues, the six blemishes, the eight dangers, the ninety-six diseases, the ten punishments, the thirty-two results of Karma. Although Burma was a young nation it had inherited a civilisation with the hardened arteries of senility. By comparison with the certainities and self-sufficiency of Eastern Asiatic thought, the people of medieval Europe lived in intellectual anarchy. When the end came, the Burmese were beaten not so much by
nineteenth-century
gunners, as by the Galileos of three centuries before.

That day I was invited to Tok Galé’s house for lunch. He lived in the sere reflection of an English suburb, in a detached villa with front garden, gate and path. It was about two miles from the town’s centre, in the dacoit belt, and two or three miles from the White-Flag Communists’ frontier which ran through some low hills to the east.

The Tok Galés were grandchildren of the Burmese ambassador to France under King Thibaw, and there was a faded photograph in the drawing-room of this dignitary in his court uniform, looking rather sullen, as a result, perhaps, of the long period of immobility imposed by the time-exposure. The family had adopted the Baptist creed, in its tolerant and accommodating Burmese form, and had taken English Christian names. The youngest sister, mild, sweet, and mysteriously unmarried, was Anne, who, in spite of not being a Buddhist had recently been accorded the great honour of acting for a short distance as
pall-bearer
at the cremation of the venerable U Khanti. Although she had the good sense to retain the Burmese costume, Anne was much anglicised by the friendships she had formed in the old days with members of the British Colony. She produced two autograph albums full of the familiar unrevealing snippets in which their memory was enshrined. An American officer had called her, unjustly I thought, a yellow Burmese rose, never having noticed, I suppose, that the complexion of the
so-called
yellow races is rarely yellow. In any case, if obliged to employ a floral analogy, I should have found this charming lady’s grace suggestive of the lily rather than the rose. Although the foreign colony of Mandalay was now completely dispersed, Anne maintained her westernisation at full strength by correspondence. She was a member of the Robert Taylor fan club, through which she had made many pen-friends, both in England and the United States.