The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (12 page)

The Mongol hordes in the thirteenth century brought terror and destruction to enormous swaths of Europe and Asia, and Burma was no exception. Pagan was already by then in decline, but the Mongol invasions hastened the demise of the kingdom.
²⁴
Early in the century the warlord Genghis Khan had united the Mongol tribes in the grasslands south of Siberia, and over the next several decades he and his successors drove deep into the Islamic world, conquering Persia and Russia and China and halting, only by choice, on the very borders of Western Europe. Burma was in a way an extension of the Mongol campaign to encircle the Chinese. When Genghis’s grandson Kublai Khan was a lieutenant of his elder brother Mangu, he led an invasion that put an end to the still-independent kingdom of Dali and brought Mongol arms right up to the borders of Burma. Twenty years later Kublai became emperor of all China and continued his southwesterly conquests, first demanding tribute from Pagan and then sending his infamous cavalry under the Turkish general Nasruddin of Bukhara.
²⁵

In 1271 under instructions from Kublai Khan, the new military governors of Yunnan sent envoys to the Burmese demanding tribute. Bad diplomacy was followed by rash actions and then by war. The Venetian traveler Marco Polo, the first European ever to mention Burma, was then a privy councillor on the emperor’s staff and heard stories about what happened. According to him, the Burmese king’s forces, said to number sixty thousand, included two thousand great elephants, “on each of which was set a tower of timber, well framed and strong,
and carrying from twelve to sixteen well-armed fighting men.” Against this, Nasruddin, “a most valiant and able soldier,” had twelve thousand cavalry. They met in the hills close to the present China border, and in the early stages of the battle, the Turkish and Mongol horsemen “took such fright at the sight of the elephants that they would not be got to face the foe, but always swerved and turned back,” while the Burmese pressed on. But Nasruddin was a cool soldier and didn’t panic. Instead he ordered his Mongols to dismount and, from the cover of the nearby tree line, aim their bows directly at the advancing elephants, throwing the animals into such pain that they fled. The Mongols remounted and cut down the Burmese.

Nasruddin then descended into the valley of the Irrawaddy, destroying a number of stockaded positions against fierce Burmese resistance and then overrunning the ancient town of Tagaung itself, the home of the country’s first kings and known in Chinese chronicles as the “nest and hole” of the Burmese. For years more there was fighting between the two sides, the Mongols eager to teach the Burmese a lesson, the Burmese battling for their own survival, a war punctuated by attempts at negotiation, including a celebrated mission in 1284 by the minister Disapramok to the court of Kublai Khan. It couldn’t have been easy for the Mongols, unwashed men on horseback used to the open steppe, to face fighting elephants and a withering climate. A final invasion was headed by a grandson of the emperor himself and moved into the heartland of the kingdom. The country was soon in disorder, the king having fled in panic to Prome and there killed by his own son. Little warring principalities and rival princes emerged in place of Pagan’s once-imperial writ. Burma was never integrated into the Mongol imperial administration but was nevertheless, for a few years, under the distant authority of Peking and Xanadu, and for the first and only time under the same yoke as Kiev, Moscow, and Baghdad.

In the centuries to come, no longer a capital, Pagan dwindled to a village, though always an important village, and into the 1800s the intricate local aristocracy enjoyed a symbolic importance well beyond any remaining political or economic clout. Its hereditary rulers carried the title of
mintha
, or prince, and in the nearby town of Nyaung-U the local chief claimed direct descent from Manuha, the enslaved king of Thaton, whom legend says Aniruddha brought to Pagan after a campaign of conquest in the south.

For many Burmese this history of the remote past, from the legendary rulers of Tagaung to the fall of Pagan, offers up a sense of deep-rooted tradition and of a long-lasting association among Burma, the Burmese, and the Buddhist religion. No matter that civilization in the Irrawaddy Valley long predated Buddhism or that Buddhism in its present form is a fairly new thing or that the Burmese language itself spread only with alien conquests from the north. There is a feeling of continuity and of a national and pristine past that was interrupted only with the British occupation. When the people of Mandalay mourned the exile of Thibaw, they felt they were mourning the loss of an institution that they believed stretched back across thousands of years.

But there were always other peoples, with other pasts and other traditions, as well as the slow approach of India from the west and China from the east. And in the modern world to come—with guns and gunpowder, mercenaries from as far afield as Lisbon and Nagasaki, and an emerging globalized economy that promised the adventurous untold riches—renewed Burmese attempts at empire would not go unopposed. 

Notes – 3: FOUNDATIONS

1
. Pe Maung Tin,
The Glass Palace Chronicle of the Burmese Kings
, G. H. Luce, trans. (Rangoon: Rangoon University Press, 1960).

2
. Aldous Huxley,
Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey
(London: Flamingo, 1999), 118–20.

3
. Bob Hudson, “A Pyu Homeland in the Samon Valley: A New Theory of the Origins of Myanmar’s Early Urban System,”
Proceedings of the Myanmar Historical
Commission Golden Jubilee International Conference
, January 2005; Bob Hudson, “Thoughts on Some Chronological Markers of Myanmar Archaeology in the Preurban Period,”
Journal of the Yangon University Archaeology Department
, Rangoon. On Bronze Age Southeast Asia, see Charles Higham,
The Bronze Age of Southeast Asia
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

4
. Fan Chuo,
Manshu: Book of the Southern Barbarians
, trans. Gordon Luce. Cornell Data Paper Number 44, Southeast Asia Program, Department of Far Eastern Studies, Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y., December 1961), 90–91.

5
. Bo Wen et al., “Analyses of Genetic Structure of Tibeto-Burman Populations Reveals Sex-Biased Admixture in Southern Tibeto Burmans,”
American Journal of Human Genetics
74:856–65 (2004).

6
. Jacques Gernet,
A History of Chinese Civilization
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 119–20; Nicola di Cosmo,
Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 197–98.

7
. Bin Yang, “Horses, Silver, and Cowries: Yunnan in Global Perspective,”
Journal of World History
15:3 (September 2004).

8
. G. H. Luce, “The Tan (A.D. 97–132) and the Ngai-lao,”
Journal of the Burma Research Society
14:2, 100–103.

9
. Romila Thapar,
Early India: From Origins to A.D. 1300
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 174–84.

10
. On the history of Buddhism, see epecially Richard H. Robinson and Willard L. Johnson,
The Buddhist Religion: A Historical Introduction
(Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1997).

11
. Janice Stargardt,
The Ancient Pyu of Burma
, vol. 1,
Early Pyu Cities in a Man-Made Landscape
(Cambridge: PACSEA, Cambridge, in association with the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1990), chapter 7. See also Burton Stein,
A History of India
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 100–104, 127–28.

12
. Tansen Sen,
Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003), 150–51, 174.

13
. From the Old Tang History quoted in Luce, “The Ancient Pyu,”
Journal of the Burma Research Society
27:3 (1937).

14
. G. H. Luce,
Phases of Pre-Pagan Burma: Languages and History
, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Stargardt,
The Ancient Pyu of Burma
, vol. 1.

15
. On Nanzhao, see Charles Backus,
The Nan-chao Kingdom and T’ang China’s Southwestern Frontier
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); see also Christopher Beckwith,
The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), especially chapter 6.

16
. Fan Chuo,
Manshu
, 28.

17
. Beckwith,
The Tibetan Empire
, 157.

18
. Fan Chuo,
Manshu
, 91.

19
. Michael Aung-Thwin,
Pagan: The Origins of Modern Burma
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1985); Htin Aung,
Burmese History Before 1287: A Defense of the Chronicles
(Oxford: Akoka Society, 1970).

20
. Bob Hudson, “The King of ‘Free Rabbit’ Island: A G.I.S.-Based Archeological Approach to Myanmar’s Medieval Capital, Bagan,”
Proceedings of the Myanmar Two Millennia Conference, 15–17 December 1999
(Rangoon, 2000).

21
. On Aniruddha, see G. E. Harvey,
History of Burma: from the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824—The Beginning of the English Conquest
(1925; repr., New York: Octagon Books, 1967), 18–36; G. H. Luce,
Old Burma Early Pagan
, 3 vols. (Locust Valley, N.Y.: Artibus Asiae, 1969); Tin,
The Glass Palace Chronicle
, 64–71. On Pagan in general see also Michael Aung-Thwin,
Pagan: The Origins of Modern Burma
and Victor Lieberman,
Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context c. 800–1830
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 85–123.

22
. The Sung History, chapter 489, quoted in Luce,
Old Burma Early Pagan
, 58–59.

23
. Harvey,
History of Burma
, 48.

24
. Paul Bennett, “The ‘Fall of Pagan’: Continunity and Change in 14th-Century Burma,” in
Conference Under the Tamarind Tree: Three Essays in Burmese History
, ed. Paul Bennett (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1971).

25
. On the Mongol campaigns in Burma see Aung-Thwin,
Myth and History in the Historiography of Early Burma: Paradigms, Primary Sources, and Prejudices
(Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1998); Harvey,
History of Burma
, 64–70; Htin Aung,
History of Burma
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 69–83.