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Cockett’s enlightening history, from the colonial era on, explains how Burma descended into decades of civil war and authoritarian government. Taking advantage of the opening up of the country since 2011, Cockett has interviewed hundreds of former political prisoners, guerilla fighters, ministers, monks, and others to give a vivid account of life under one of the most brutal regimes in the world. In many cases, this is the first time that they have been able to tell their stories to the outside world. Cockett also explains why the regime has started to reform, and why these reforms will not go as far as many people had hoped. This is the most rounded survey to date of this volatile Asian nation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300215984 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/25/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Blood, Dreams and Gold
The Changing Face of Burma
By Richard Cockett
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Richard CockettAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21598-4
CHAPTER 1
"A world at its zenith": Rangoon, commerce and colonialism
Uniquely for a contemporary Asian metropolis, it is a religious monument that still dominates the skyline of Yangon, Burma's biggest city and former capital. Vertiginous plate-glass skyscrapers long ago vanquished Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul and Singapore, but in Yangon the shimmering golden stupa of the 99-metre-tall Shwedagon pagoda continues to draw the eye from all vantage points. Deservedly, every tour of the city starts here, and if you are going to visit only one building in Yangon, or the whole of Burma, it has to be the Shwedagon. "A golden mystery upheaved itself on the horizon – a beautiful winking wonder that blazed in the sun", is how Rudyard Kipling, poet laureate of the British Empire, described it on first sight, and the Shwedagon remains as much a wonder today as it was in Kipling's time. Beyond being Asia's most graceful religious monument, it is surely the most treasured. There are 22,000 gold plates on the Shwedagon. Every Buddhist pagoda has a tapering, conical structure at the top known as a hti, or umbrella, usually encrusted with gemstones, but the six-metre hti of the Shwedagon is a thing of fable. The whole structure is believed to hold about 85,000 jewels, and at the very pinnacle is a single 76-carat diamond.
The Shwedagon probably dates from around the fifteenth century, although the Burmese claim that it is over two thousand years old. Whichever is true, this is no lifeless, ancient monument, merely to be cosseted and admired from a respectful distance. Quite the opposite. The Shwedagon is constantly being restored, refreshed, regilded and rebuilt; it is an organic structure, still the central shrine of the very vital and lively Burmese tradition of Theravada Buddhism. Thus, every five or six years most of the pagoda is cleared of the millions of tiny pieces of gold leaf that have been pressed on it by pilgrims and worshippers. The wood beneath is inspected and, if necessary, repaired. The gold that is scraped off is moulded into pure golden Buddha images.
The hti is replaced regularly as well, if at rather longer intervals. The present hti is the fourth, and was hauled to the top in 1999. The three previous ones are preserved at the foot of the pagoda. The two older htis are encased in stone tombs, but the third one is still visible in a metal and glass shelter; it was donated to the Shwedagon by the penultimate king of Burma, Mindon, in 1871. And like the old king himself, except on a more modest scale, every year thousands of Buddhists donate their own gifts to decorate the hti. Rings, bracelets, pendants and necklaces of ruby, sapphire, jade and diamond, are winched to the top in a little wooden sleigh, to sparkle and shine over the sacred site. Jewels are popular now with the faithful partly because there is no room left within the vast Shwedagon complex to build their own pagodas or pavilions, or to contribute a statue of the Buddha, as they would have done in the past. There are already about 150 smaller, separate pagodas and six thousand Buddha images jostling for space around the main pagoda. Doing a good deed, such as honouring the Shwedagon, is a very pragmatic way to improve one's life in Burmese Buddhism: it is called "making merit".
At the base of the Shwedagon pagoda are the eight stations celebrating the days of the week (Wednesday has two); here worshippers come to honour their own birthday by pouring water over the small statue of the animal that represents their day. The most famous visitor is Aung San Suu Kyi; she comes to the Tuesday corner, by the south entrance, and gently douses a lion.
It is just as well that the Shwedagon is so organic since, apart from the demands of Buddhist tradition, it has had to survive numerous tremors and storms. In fact, the first hti was toppled by an earthquake. The Shwedagon has also had to survive the predatory instincts of invading armies. After subduing the city that they called Rangoon in the mid nineteenth century, British soldiers tried to carry off the exquisitely carved, 24-ton Singu bell, as booty, but they dropped it into the Yangon River while trying to manoeuvre it onto a waiting ship. It was subsequently dredged up by the Burmese and has now been restored to its original position close to the Shwedagon pagoda. Legend has it that one golden Buddha image taken by the British, the Su Taung Pyay, had to be sent back to Burma by Queen Victoria because she dreamt that it was giving her headaches. The queen's migraines cleared up, apparently, once the Buddha was back in Rangoon.
However, although the Shwedagon dominates Yangon, much of the city that we see today is hardly a Buddhist city at all; it is, in fact, primarily a creation of commerce and colonialism. To this day, the two worlds of the Shwedagon and the Western commercial city feel remote from each other, as much spiritually as geographically. They are isolated in their own worlds by the vagaries of history and politics. Whilst the pagoda and its immediate surrounding are lovingly maintained and embellished, the old colonial city, by contrast, is mostly crumbling and forlorn. Down by the old docks, barely a couple of miles from the magnificence and serenity of the Shwedagon, Yangon is dilapidated, dirty and distinctly unloved. Until recently, Burmese tour guides scarcely bothered to take their charges into the downtown area, of whose history they were almost entirely ignorant, and concentrated instead on the Shwedagon and Yangon's other Buddhist temples and monasteries. They assumed that the rest of the city, the part built by the Europeans along the shores of the Yangon and Bago rivers, must be of little interest. And, on the whole, until very recently they were probably right.
Yet, scarcely a century ago it was just the reverse. Back then the Shwedagon was certainly admired, even if haughty Europeans were reluctant to remove their shoes to visit it, but the real attraction was downtown Rangoon. The capital of the British colony of Burma, it was a thriving mercantile capital to be compared with Kolkata, Singapore, Penang and Shanghai. It was one of the most modern, cosmopolitan and exciting cities in the East, "a world at its zenith", as the poet Pablo Neruda described it in 1927 when he was Chilean consul there, "a city of blood, dreams and gold".
Nowadays, although there have been decades of decay and neglect, enough survives of the area to evoke that city of dreams and gold, a metropolis that drew to its narrow, filthy streets such a number and profusion of the world's races and religions that it quickly produced an entirely new form of society, the precursor of the modern globalised world. That is why it is the best place to start an account of modern Burma, because today's rulers are still grappling with the consequences of what took shape in Yangon well over a century ago, a direct product of British colonial rule.
Churchill's great adventure
Europeans started arriving on the shores of what became Burma as early as the sixteenth century. The Portuguese, in particular, played an occasionally significant role in the various wars of conquest and reconquest, which raged across the Burmese heartlands in the centuries after. But it was the most successful of the European colonialists, the British, who had the most decisive influence on Burma, building the modern city of Rangoon and eventually shaping the country into the territory that we know today.
The British were initially drawn to the country during the early nineteenth century because of its close proximity to British-controlled India, then administered from the Bengali city of Calcutta. Theirs was a gradual conquest of Burma, completed in three stages as the century progressed. Border disputes between British India and the Burmese kings at the court of Ava, the royal capital just outside Mandalay, led to the first and most important Anglo-Burmese war in 1824. This was not, like many colonial wars of the time, a hopelessly one-sided confrontation between a small but modern army and a large but medieval one. Rather, it was a genuine clash of empires, between the two most militarised, ruthless and ambitious forces in the region. The Burmese had recently completed their own imperial conquests of Assam and Manipur in north-east India, having previously conquered the independent kingdom of Arakan (now Rakhine State) on the Bay of Bengal. Just as these victories had brought the Burmese perilously close to the borders of Britain's eastern empire, so they had also invested the Burmese generals with a great deal of faith in their own abilities, and the martial prowess of their army. They were confident that they could fight the British and win, just as they had seen off the Arakanese, the Thai army and many others.
In the end the Burmese were defeated, but only after two years of hard fighting at a cost to the British imperial forces of about 15,000 British and Indian lives, a high figure for the times, alongside tens of thousands of Burmese dead. The British forced the court of Ava to sue for peace and the Burmese were subsequently forced to cede the province of Manipur, as well as their own provinces of recently conquered Arakan and the Tenasserim Peninsula (then called Tanintharyi), a sliver of land on the Andaman Sea stretching down to the west of Thailand pointing towards what is now Malaysia. Thus, the British gained their first toehold in Burma. Languid, tropical Moulmein, a small port at the top of the Tenasserim Peninsula, became the first capital of British Burma.
Trade disputes with the court of Ava then led, in 1852–3, to the conquest of the rest of Lower Burma, the region of the country that comprises, roughly, the Irrawaddy Delta, littoral Burma and what was then the smallish port of Rangoon and its environs. Originally founded in the eleventh century as a fishing village by the Mon people, Rangoon had in turn been conquered by the Burmese kings of Ava only in the mid eighteenth century.
Finally, in 1885, the British launched their assault on the Burmese heartlands in Upper Burma, attacking Mandalay, the latest (and last) of Burma's many royal capitals. As was to be the case so often, on this occasion the remnants of the once mighty Burmese kingdom fell victim to great power rivalry and commercial avarice. This was the heyday of Victorian imperialism, and the British wanted to deny Upper Burma to their greatest imperial rival, the French, who had been pressing into Indochina, conquering the territories that now comprise Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. But politicians and officials in Calcutta and London were also seduced by the merchants and financiers of Rangoon into thinking that only the conquest of Upper Burma could open the door to neighbouring China and the vast trading opportunities that, they claimed, lay beyond in the Middle Kingdom.
So, just as the desire to force the free trade of opium on the Chinese had led earlier British governments into war with China, the 1842 annexation of Hong Kong and the start of the "century of humiliations", so now the prospect of doing still more business with China helped to seal the fate of Burma. As one British merchant put it, "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 were calculating that "the Chinese provinces neighbouring Burma contained approximately 103 million inhabitants and that such a vast population was hardly touched by European commerce." This was a prize, so the argument went, that the British could not afford to let slip from their grasp.
If these were the real motives driving the British, a pretext for invasion was provided by the mad, bloody and exasperating reign of the last king of Burma, Thibaw. His father, Mindon, had ruled relatively well, acting with an admirable degree of tact and diplomacy as British imperialists took ever-larger bites out of his kingdom. Having sired 110 children during his reign, including forty-eight boys (and thus possible heirs), he also left a court riven by factionalism. Soon after Thibaw succeeded him in 1878, most of Mindon's other children were rounded up and imprisoned. The following February, they were massacred over the course of a few days, strangled or wrapped in carpets and bludgeoned to death so as to avoid the spilling of royal blood. The dead included thirty-one of old King Mindon's sons.
These murders, although not unprecedented in the annals of the court of Ava, caused outrage among the British and other Europeans in Burma and beyond. King Thibaw always denied direct involvement in the deaths, but from that point on his court was dismissed as a den of vice, barbarism and insanity. Thibaw's often eccentric and maladroit behaviour did little to help, and his half-hearted courting of the French and refusal to grant British merchants all the trading concessions that they demanded finally provoked the British into action.
The man who eventually ordered the charge in 1885 was Lord Randolph Churchill, then Secretary of State for India. The third son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, he was a scion of one of Britain's most exalted aristocratic families and almost as grand, impetuous and regal as a Burmese king. Churchill was still only in his thirties in 1885, but already one of his country's most famous politicians. An aggressive Tory imperialist, he leapt at a chance, provided by yet another trade dispute with the Burmese, to send the Burma Field Force up the Irrawaddy to bring King Thibaw to heel. Unlike the first Anglo-Burmese war, this really was a one-sided affair, with the Burmese forces surrendering after their first clash with the ten thousand or so British and Indian troops under the command of General Henry Prendergast. Soon after, Thibaw was forced into exile in India, where he died in 1916. This was a novel form of forced imperial king-swap, for the British had earlier exiled the last Moghul emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, to Rangoon. Burma's Muslims still commemorate him every year on the day he died; his tomb is near the zoo.
The hasty invasion of Upper Burma and the toppling of the monarchy was Lord Randolph's very own contribution to the British subjugation of Burma, and it was to have lasting repercussions. The usual custom at the time was for the British to rule the empire through the good agency of local princes, tribal chiefs or maharajahs. This system has come to be known as "indirect rule", or in the parlance of the time "the establishment of a native prince under British advice". Lord Randolph, however, was adamantly for the wholesale annexation of Upper Burma in order to bring the whole country under direct British rule. Many British MPs and officials opposed this, mainly on grounds of cost. Lord Randolph's own boss, the Conservative prime minister, the Marquess of Salisbury, at least fretted about it, but in the end Churchill got his way.
Thus, on top of foreign invasion, the Burmese had to witness the exile of the king, the dismantling of the monarchy, as well as the council that advised him, the Hlutdaw, and the destruction of most of the other ancient institutions and practices that had sustained the royal kingdom. This outright suppression of their monarchy, customs and identity provoked in turn a furious reaction from the defeated Burmese, who embarked on what amounted to a guerrilla campaign of resistance against British rule. The British met violence with more violence, eventually deploying as many as forty thousand British and Indian troops to defeat the rebellion, only finally snuffing out the last resistance in the mid 1890s.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blood, Dreams and Gold by Richard Cockett. Copyright © 2015 Richard Cockett. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of illustrations, vii,Acknowledgements, ix,
Preface: The Burmese mosaic, xi,
On names and place names, xv,
List of acronyms, xvii,
Part One The plural society and its enemies,
1 "A world at its zenith": Rangoon, commerce and colonialism, 3,
2 The generals' revenge, 40,
3 Burmanisation, 64,
4 Under enemy occupation: The test of the Kachin, 109,
5 The catastrophe of drugs: The Karen and Shan, 131,
Part Two Reform, to preserve,
6 An embarrassment of poverty: Burma's collapse, 155,
7 The Lady's not for turning: The challenge of the NLD, 171,
8 Change from the top: Than Shwe to Thein Sein, 192,
9 A new "great game": The geopolitics of change, 214,
10 Burma's future and the ghosts of the plural society, 231,
Epilogue, 252,
Notes, 255,
Select Bibliography, 259,
Index, 263,