READING HALLTHE DOORS OF WISDOM |
BIOGRAPHYCAL UNIVERSAL LIBRARY |
SUPALAYAT, THIBAW'S QUEEN1854-1912BYH. FIELDING
CHAPTER I
THE BURMESE
THE immemorial East has passed into a proverb. To us
new nations of the west Asia is a country of the past. We think of it as the
land where the empires of Babylon and Assyria, of Persia and India, of China
and Japan flourished long ago. For two thousand years Asia stood in the
vanguard of progress. When we were savages colouring ourselves with woad, and
clothing ourselves with skins the east gloried in an old civilisation. Great
conquerors lived and fought and erected kingdoms and founded cities. Great rulers
arose and made laws and consolidated these kingdoms, and welded the peoples
into a whole. Great prophets were born whose teachings spread throughout the
earth. Science was cultivated there and prospered, art rose and became very
glorious, and there was a beautiful literature. But all that was long ago.
The empires of Assyria and Babylon, where are they?
India has fallen beneath our feet, and become our vassal. How has the strength
of China departed! The great warriors and their spirit have all gone, leaving
but a memory. And the cities that they founded are become dust. Asia is a land
of forgotten cities. The mud which the peasant of today kneads into bricks for
his hut is crumbled from the walls of palaces.
We have come to look upon the whole East in this
light. To say that anything is eastern is to say that if it be old it is good,
if modern it is bad. An eastern land must be a land whose only and great
attraction is in its relics and its memories of the past. An eastern people
must by the very nature of things be a very old nation, once strong and
civilised and young, now old and feeble, falling back into chaos.
In the valley of the great Irrawaddy, shut off on
either hand by great mountain walls from the old-world empires of India and of
China, there lives a people that is younger than any western people.
Mandalay, the royal city, was only founded in 1859,
not forty years ago. And as with its history and its buildings so it is with
its art and its learning. Whatever art you find that is worth admiring,
whatever knowledge of any kind you may discover, it is of today. The wood
carving and silver work is new within the last hundred years. It is only within
the last fifty that they have risen to any great beauty. There is more art in
the workers of today than of any time. No Burman graver or carver can look back
with regret to other days. These arts have sprung out of nothing within the
memory of men still living.
As it is with the land and with the art so it is with
the people. The Burmans are not as we imagine all orientals to be. They are bound by no traditions of the past. They have no objection to
new things, but take to them readily when they understand their value. They
have no caste to drag them back and hamper them in the race of life. They have
no traditions of a great past to live down to.
Whereas in India it is common to hear people speak of
the great days of three and four hundred years ago, in Burma I never heard any
one talk except of King Mindon's time. His was a golden reign they say, and he
died in 1878.
They are a modern people, an infant people in every
possible meaning of the word. Whatever of them is best worth learning is
comprised within the last two reigns, of King Mindon and his son King Thibaw. And yet of the events of these two reigns, events
that took place within the past forty years, it is extraordinary to find how
ignorant we are, how little we actually know of the kings and of the government
of those times. If they had been a thousand years ago we could not know less.
We have a few curious stories and that is all.
But the reasons are not far to seek. One reason is
that perhaps we have not thought the history of these things would be worth
learning. We have come to Burma classing it in our minds with the rest of the
East. We have assumed that the Burmans too are the outworn remains of a great
people, and that whatever period of their history may be worth learning must be
long ago and cannot be a recent one. And so although attempts have been made to
decipher the monuments of past reigns, to disinter bricks and read their
legends, and tell again the stories that we find on them, no one has cared to
inquire into the reigns of the last two kings of Burma. They are too recent for
us to care about them.
As regards the history of King Thibaw another reason is probably here. In later years the Burmese government of
independent Burma and the government of India were not on good terms. There was
always suspicion and doubt between them. The Burmese remembered the two wars of
1825 and 1852, when they were defeated and lost their best provinces. There was
the bitterness of defeat. And they thought that we were not yet content, that
we had only refrained from annexing the whole country because at the time it
was too big a mouthful for us, and that we only sought a good opportunity to
complete what our former wars had begun.
This intensified the natural concealment and reticence
of an oriental government. Looking upon us as foes, they did not care in any
way to justify and explain to us their acts. Expecting us to wilfully
misunderstand them and find evil where we could, the Burmese government and
people saw no use in trying to make matters plain and put their conduct in a
fair and clear light. Explanations would be a weakness, and moreover useless to
an enemy determined to see only the worst.
Therefore in place of the authoritative statements of
those who knew, the news that reached our agents and our papers was usually
merely the tales of spies whose only concern was to speak evilly.
An autocratic government, like any other, must make
enemies. A king and queen in the position of King Thibaw and Queen Supayalat must make many enemies. And it
was from these enemies that the reports that reached us of the doings of the
king and of the government arose. Friends of the palace and of the people kept
their own counsel afar from the foreigners ; enemies were only too ready to
pour their grievances and scandals into our, as they hoped, sympathetic ears,
hoping thereby to obtain vengeance upon those who had injured them. These
reports were generally believed.
I do not think we are a very kindly people. We are
generally glad, I think, to hear evil of other people and believe it. It suits
with our ideas of the eternal fitness of things that other nations and
governments should be wicked. More especially when the other people have, we
know, a feeling of hatred and of bitterness towards ourselves.
So partly through our own fault, partly through the
fault of the Burmese themselves, the only stories that obtained credence and
circulation about the king and his people were to their discredit. It was in
this way that arose the tales of the continual drunkenness of the king, of the
blood-thirstiness of the queen, of the utter wickedness of the palace in
general. Little sparks of truth were fanned into huge flares that lit the whole
history of these years with lurid light. Tale-teller vied with tale-teller as
to which could impute most wickedness to the palace, regardless of truth or
even of probability. Yet consider how improbable those tales were, how
impossible of belief to any one who stayed for a moment to consider them!
The king was a confirmed drunkard. Yet every one knows
that Buddhists are total abstainers, and allow no liquor to be manufactured or
opium imported into the country. Every one also who cared to know could learn
that King Thibaw was a very rigid Buddhist, was famed
as a learned monk before he came to the throne, was assisted and encouraged by
the head of the monkhood, a man universally respected for his holiness.
And the queen was bloodthirsty. Then was she very
different from the women of her nation. Who that knows them would impute
ferocity to the soft-mannered, gentle-hearted women that all of us honour ? The
king greatly loved her and she greatly loved him. Can a wild beast such as she
was represented to be love and be loved?
As I got to know the people I became sure that these
tales could not be true, and gradually the curiosity came to me to try and find
out what had really given rise to them. Such a search could not but be
interesting. For life in the palace in Mandalay was not like life anywhere in
the west nowadays. It seemed from all that I could hear that it would be more
like looking a thousand years back into the days of the charmed Bagdad, than
hearing a tale of yesterday. The whole atmosphere was full of hidden loves and
secret murders, of plots and counter-plots, of passion and of colour, such as
we know not now. It was a new Arabian night's tale this tale of the palace of
Mandalay, only greater and better. Behind these stories that were exciting and
false I thought I might discover facts that would be true, and as much more
exciting than the stories, as truth always is than fiction.
I tried, and I think I have succeeded. But how
difficult the search has been, no one who has not tried can tell. From
Englishmen it is, as I have explained, hopeless to look for the true story of
those years. And from Burmese it is not much easier. To the ordinary townsman
or villager, the king and the palace were as unknown as they were to us. From
them nothing could be obtained. And those who did know were unwilling to tell.
Fallen ministers of a fallen king were loth to tell what they knew of events in
which they had themselves taken part. They regarded inquiries with distrust,
and kept their knowledge to themselves. Even sometimes when they could be
induced to talk it was evident that their account was onesided and was made for a foreign ear. The Burmese have not yet learnt to make books.
There are no reminiscences of that reign, the last reign of the Burmese kings,
there are no voluminous letters, no official memoranda, no newspaper reports.
And so when it first occurred to me, that I would like to try and know
something of the truth, I found all my attempts came to nothing, all sources of
information were dried up.
At last a chance came. She was a maid of honour. She
had been maid of honour to the queen for four years up to the last moment of
the surrender. She had lived in the palace through many of these events of
which I heard such queer stories, and she had seen much that I wanted to know.
It is true that she had been but a child then. She was only thirteen when
Mandalay was taken. She saw but with childish eyes, heard but with childish
ears. But what she had seen or heard she was willing to tell me, and I was very
willing to hear. For much of it was very strange, very different to what I had
heard before, very tragical it seemed to me, very beautiful.
What she told me gave me the key as to what it was
that I should search for. With her account in my memory I found it much easier
to draw from others that which I required to know. I found information here and
missing links in the story there. And still as I have gone on I have found that
her stories were true, her view of what she had seen likely to be the right
one. It is strange to tell the story of a reign from information derived mostly
from a girl, a maid of honour. But what could be done ? Children are very
candid chroniclers, they do not criticise, they do not think a thing is so
because it ought to be ; they see and hear, and they tell what they have known.
So far as my maid of honour’s own facts go I have no
doubt of them. And for the rest I have done my best. Without any state papers
to consult, newspapers to read, letters, diaries, reminiscences, memoranda to
derive materials from, it is somewhat of a forlorn hope trying to write the
tale of the last of the Burmese kings.
It will be understood that this is no history. History
is I take it an account of statecraft, of laws and of wars, of how minister
succeeded minister, and policy succeeded policy, of how the people were taxed
and judged. But this contains little of such matters. Here and there, it is
true, the history of the times has become so much the personal story of the
king and the queen and those who lived with them in the palace that they cannot
be separated. Yet my story is rather of persons than of affairs ; it is of the
king and of the queen, how they came to the throne and how they acted when
there, of the lives and intrigues, of the vices and virtues of those around
them. It is, indeed, the life of those years as seen from the social standpoint
of one who lived as maid of honour with the queen. But whatever it loses in
historical value, it seems to me to gain in living interest.
To my maid of honour, the queen and king and ministers
were not mere figure heads through whom came orders and commands, who were
rulers and officers, but they were a man and a woman, much as other men and
women are, acting much as others would if placed in the same position and
surroundings. The story she tells is a living story full of the deep interest
which centres in the strength and weakness of humanity, full of the pathos that
clings to those who have loved deeply, ha , e hoped much, have striven hard,
and who have fallen from their great estate and lost all that makes life worth
living.
For the king and queen are prisoners today, have been
prisoners for twelve years now, will be prisoners till they die.
They will return to their kingdom never again.
CHAPTER II
KING MINDON (1853 to 1878)
King Mindon, the father of King Thibaw,
came to the throne in 1854. The people were angry and restless at their defeat
by the Indian government, and the annexation of the delta of the Irrawaddy, and
they attributed it, as was natural, greatly to the incapacity of Pagan Min, who
was the then ruler. So when after the peace the king’s brother Mindon rose in
rebellion and arrested Pagan in his palace at Amarapura all the people rejoiced at the change. And they had reason.
Of all the kings of Burma from Alompra to Thibaw, King Mindon was the best. The empire that
was left to him was, indeed, shorn from what it had been. The provinces of Arracan, of Pegu, of Tenasserim, the richest part of Burma,
were lost; and all that was left was the northern half of the Irrawaddy valley
and the Shan Plateau. In all, Upper Burma was the size of France, but much of
this was not under the direct rule of the king. In the Shan states
semi-independent princes reigned, whose allegiance was principally shown by
payment of tribute and by giving their daughters to be wives to the king. On
the west the fierce Chin clans can hardly be said to have been subdued at all.
Burma proper extended from the mountains above Bhamo
on the north to the frontier of the British province on the south, about four
hundred miles. The breadth from east to west varied from one hundred to one
hundred and fifty miles, and through the middle flowed the Irrawaddy river.
This country of Burma proper was divided into forty-nine provinces, each under
a governor appointed by the king, who had power of life and death within his
charge. The capital, the centre of the kingdom, was Amarapura.
This was a city built upon the banks of the Irrawaddy where it makes a great
bend to the west about seven hundred miles from the sea, and behind it and
below it was the most fertile land of the upper province. It was not far from
Ava, which had been the capital not so long ago. For it was the custom of great
kings among the Burmese to each build a capital for himself. A Burmese town is
built of wood and of bamboos, and the roofs are usually of thatch. To move a
big community was not the serious, nay the impossible task that it would be
with us. And there were many reasons for a new king to desire a change. A
palace built of wood, even of the royal teak, will not last for ever. The beams
will warp and the carving will lose its brilliancy and the pinnacles become
shaky. If a new palace must be built it may just as well be built in a new
place. There are traditions that hang about the palaces of kings that were best
forgotten. New rulers liked to begin with a fresh sheet in the minds of their
people.
Therefore when King Mindon came to the throne his
first idea was to build a new capital and a new palace, the most beautiful that
the nation had seen, to be to them a token of a new spirit that had come upon
the empire. The old city was small and cramped; the new city should be great,
capable of indefinite extension. The old palace was rickety and infirm; the new
should be as strong and beautiful as could be made. The old rule was one of
mistakes and misfortunes the new one should be glorious and happy.
It was not necessary to move far. Four miles north of Amarapura is a wide plain lying between the river and the
Shan mountains. It is fertile land, well watered by irrigation from dams and by
streams that come down from the hills, suited in all ways for the site of a
great city. Here beside the river the land was laid out into square blocks for
the merchants and the townsfolk. The roads were broad, the main ones being
those leading down to the river landing-places. To each trade was alloted a quarter, and land was reserved for monasteries
and pagodas.
The city itself was built three miles away from the
river. The king, it is said, objected to the noise of the steamer whistles
disturbing the quiet of the palace; but a better reason seems to be that he did
not like the idea of his new city and his new palace being exposed to the fire
of gunboats if at any time a quarrel should again arise between Burma and the
Indian government.
The walls were one and a quarter mile square, built of
red brick thirty feet high, crenellated, with great
gateways on each of the four sides. Within, the walls were ramped with earth,
and on the top were guard-houses with pinnacled roofs
lacquered and gilded, wherein the soldiers watched. Without was a moat fed with
water from a stream, crossed by drawbridges and covered in the season with
lotus and water-lilies of all colours. The city was for the great officials,
for the troops, and for the servants of the king. Traders and common folk were
not allowed land therein; it was kept as the capital, as a fort wherein
resistance might be sustained for long against any enemy.
It was laid out into squares that were given to
soldiers and to the ministers.
Nearly in the centre of the city was built the palace.
Here was erected a masonry platform raised six feet above the ground, and upon
this the palace stood. It was a very beautiful place, this palace of the king.
Even now, when its royal red is faded, its gold dropping from the walls, its
gardens levelled into open spaces, it is beautiful and strange, like no other
building that the world has seen. In the days of its glory it was a jewel.
Around about triple walls were guard-houses wherein the troops kept watch day
and night. The guard-houses were red, and they had carved facades, as had the
watch-towers on the walls. The great gate was in the east, and its steps were
flanked with guns. Above the audience chamber rose the glittering pinnacle of
the “centre of the universe.”
All was covered with gold, the pillars and the huge
facade, and the spire, even the cannon were gilded that guarded the steps. It
was a great and blinding blaze of gold. Seen from afar off the spire gleamed
with the glory of a flame. Very high was the throne room, built with
magnificent teak stems as pillars, so tall that they seemed almost slender.
Within was the throne, entered by little gates from behind. Behind this throne
room were the"other chambers of the palace; the state rooms all gilded and
the others lacquered red. They were not one great building, but innumerable
small ones, each with its triple roof and its carving. Between were little
courtyards where there were fountains, and there were trees that showed their
tender green against the glory of the gold and red.
Facing the west as the king’s throne room faced the
east was the queen’s throne room, only less magnificent, less beautiful, less
lofty than the king’s. On her side were no guns, but instead there were trees
and flowers and to the north and to the south the gardens where the king and
queen loved to walk. Beautiful gardens they were, with little lakes and canals
crossed by narrow bridges. Winding ways there were leading to tiny hills that
raised their summits crowned with bamboo plumes, and there were hidden places
in the trees. In the lakes there were lotus and many kinds of lilies, and the
gardens were odorous with champak and jasmine. They were small and not like our
gardens, but they were beautiful for all that. There were a few other buildings
within the palace enclosure but not upon the platform: a monastery, a pagoda, a
mint, an arsenal, and behind the gardens many houses for the servants. If you
ascend Mandalay hill that lies just to the north of the city, the whole scene
is before you. There is the great city with its red walls and the moat about it
like a silver girdle. There is the palace gleaming with gold amid the trees of
the gardens and the busy town beyond the city walls right down to the river.
And you can see the shining river itself, and beyond are the pagoda-crowned
hills of Sagaing.
No king ever looked on a more beautiful capital than
this. In the early morning with the sunlight making the world glad about him
King Mindon came to his throne. They tell you, those who saw that sight, that
such a thing was never seen before. First of all came the monks, very many of
them, in yellow robes, with downcast eyes walking very slowly, and behind them
soldiers of the Guard. Behind the troops came the king riding upon his
elephant, a blaze of gold and silver and of jewels, and after him came more
troops and ministers and a great crowd of people. Amid pomp and glory, with the
firing of the guns and the shouts of a great multitude of people, King Mindon
came to Mandalay. Here in this new city that he had built King Mindon lived and
reigned for twenty years.
He must have been a wonderful man. Everywhere you go
in Burma you hear of him and of how wise he was and how great. All things went
well in his time, the people tell you; there was righteous rule and strong
government, and fair taxation. Governors were kept from oppression, robbers
were suppressed, religion and trade flourished. Reforms were introduced
everywhere, and with success because the people were on the side of the king.
Before his time there had been no scheme of taxation.
When the kings wanted money they sent demands to the governors, who extracted
the required amounts from the people and paid it into the royal treasuries. The
officials had no salaries. To each official was given some province, or some
town or village, and he got from it what he could. He “ate it” in Burmese
phrase. The merchants and traders were at the mercy of their lords, who could
squeeze them as they liked. It was dangerous to be rich in those days.
King Mindon altered all this. A uniform tax was to be
levied. Every householder within the kingdom was to pay ten rupees per annum to
the king’s treasury. And that the distribution might be fair it was enacted
that each village or quarter of the town should appoint its own assessors and
collect its own taxes. So if a village contained two hundred houses it had to
pay two thousand rupees, and this amount it divided among its residents
according to their means. A wealthy trader would pay say fifty rupees, a labourer
but two rupees. It worked in those days admirably. Then out of his treasury the
king paid salaries to his governors and officials and forbade all oppression.
He did more, for he saw that his commands were obeyed. Then he reformed the
judicial system of the country, and made it as near as he could to a civilised
system, and he was careful in hearing appeals to insure that the law was
administered as it should be. Unjust judges came to great disaster in his days.
He built bridges, too, and dug wells and tanks and made roads. If you inquire
who built that bridge or made that lake nine times out of ten you will be told
it was King Mindon who did so. He gave his royal teak freely for all public
purposes, for monasteries and for rest houses and for other works of necessity.
He reformed his army and began a tiny navy for the river, to patrol its great
waters and maintain order. He introduced coined money in place of silver bars.
It seemed almost incredible the amount that he did for
his people. And they were grateful. Never was there such a king, they say, as
King Mindon. Never was there such a happy country as Upper Burma was in his
days. Gold there was then in plenty. Every girl had her golden bracelets, every
man his ring and buttons. Silk, too, was cheap and plentiful, and cotton was
grown in quantities, and the people spun and wove it for themselves. The rains
were always good and plentiful in his reign. Since then they have become more
and more scanty, so that many districts have for years hovered on the verge of
famine. In King Mindon’s time, it was never so. The rains came in due season,
and the crops were plentiful, so that the taxes were hardly felt. Religion
flourished, and the monks were honoured, and education spread among all ranks
of the people so that no man was illiterate. It was the golden age.
Much of King Mindon’s success was due no doubt to his
power of selecting worthy ministers to carry out his orders. As no man himself
can do very much, but must act principally through others, it is one of the
most indispensable qualities of a great man that he should be able to judge
men, and to gather about him those who will understand and be able to carry
them out. In this quality as in others, King Mindon was not deficient.
There were two ministers to whom much of his success
is said to be due, and as they lived through King Thibaw’s reign and took a leading part in all that occurred then it is necessary to
mention them.
They were the Taingda Mingyi and the Kinwun Mingyi,
names well known through Burma, associated irrevocably with the end of the
Burmese kingdom. They seem to have been very different. The Taingda Mingyi was a man cruel and vindictive, they say, very
patriotic, hating the foreigner and especially the Englishman with a bitter
hatred. He was a great leader of the old party, that which believed in Burma
and looked with suspicion on all new introductions from without. He seems to
have been narrow minded, and is not I think generally held as a wise man. But
he had authority. Throughout the country his was a name that was feared and was
honoured, notwithstanding many terrible faults, as a man honest to his king, to
his queen, to his country. He was a man ready to face all danger, all certainty
even of disaster in support of that which he thought right. He died the other
day after long exile.
But the Kinwun Mingyi was, the Burmans say, far too clever for that. He
was not popular, not to compare in influence amongst the people with the
Taingda Mingyi, but he was a wise man, seeing with
clear eyes that which was coming, understanding the signs of the times, ready
to make the best of circumstances for himself. And so he is alive still,
decorated by the Indian government, and a recipient of a pension from them,
while his king and queen are far away. The kingdom fell, but the Kinwun Mingyi remained.
Other ministers there were, but they were of small
account compared with these two. No one was to be named in influence or power
beside them. After King Mindon died they were left with almost supreme power
for a time, until a new influence arose which overshadowed theirs. But even to
the end they were the great ministers of Burma. Their acts speak for them.
CHAPTER III
THE DEATH OF KING MINDON
Into his private and family affairs King Mindon did
not introduce so many reforms as into the public affairs of his country.
Perhaps it is easier to reform a government than to reform a family, to change
a law than to change a custom. A law may be passed today and repealed tomorrow,
but customs are of long growth, of slow change; they alter, but they cannot be
altered. And so King Mindon lived very much as his fathers had lived before
him.
He had four chief wives who were queens, and many
lesser wives. The lesser wives were chosen where the king wished. If the king
saw a beautiful girl and desired her she became his wife; if a tributary
prince offered his daughter to the king she was accepted as a lesser wife. How
many wives the king had I do not know. There were many, perhaps there were
fifty of them; there may have been more.
Queens were far above the lesser wives and there were
but four. It was the custom in Burma for the king to choose his chief queen, if
not indeed all his four queens, from among his half sisters, the daughters of
his father. This had been a custom in many nations, in Assyria, in Egypt, and
among the Incas in Peru. Only a wife of equally royal blood could be a worthy
consort to the king, could be a worthy mother of kings to come. And where could
such be found but among half sisters to the king?
And so King Mindon took to himself, as his father had
done before him, his half sisters to be queens, and many beautiful women to be
lesser wives, daughters of Shan princes, of wealthy merchants, of officials.
Many of these are dead now, many are alive yet, of all of them I need mention
two only. These are the Laungshe princess, the mother
of him who afterwards became King Thibaw, and the Sinpyumashin, the famous queen-mother who was the mother of
her who was after the famous Queen Supayalat.
Of the Laungshe princess
little seems to be known. She was of royal blood, a half sister to King Mindon
and she had one son King Thibaw; she seems to have
fallen into disgrace and to have lived and died in obscurity.
The Sinpyumashin, who was at
King Mindon’s death the chief queen, was also his half sister. She had no son,
but she had three daughters, and all of them became queens to King Thibaw. There was Supayagyi or
the great princess, Supayalat or the middle princess,
and Supayagal, or the little princess. It seems to me
that in her and her daughters centres all that is most wonderful, most striking
in that seven years’ drama that came to an end in 1885. It has been a tradition
among the chief queens of Burma to be able to share equally with their husbands
the weight of empire, to make their influence felt in the councils of the
nation, and that the later queens of Burma were no degenerate daughters this
history of my maid of honour will show.
The Sinpyumashin was a woman
of great resource, of great courage, going straight to her end careless of all
the world besides, as is the way of women. Her great ally was the Kinwun Mingyi, and they had much
in common, for their views of life were the same.
With able ministers, with many wives, with many
children, King Mindon lived and reigned in his new palace of Mandalay. He was
the strong man who kept his house; in his time there was no trouble. A
rebellion that his son raised was quickly suppressed and the nation was at
peace. All his reign of twenty-four years did Upper Burma enjoy happiness and
prosperity, and at last full of years and honour, King Mindon was gathered to
his fathers.
In European countries where we have feudal customs and
the right of primogeniture there is no doubt as to who will succeed to king.
The king dies, and his eldest son becomes king; he is accepted by all as the
rightful claimant to the crown. But in these countries it is not so. To be the
eldest son is no sure title to a kingdom, or indeed to anything, save to his
share of the paternal property. All sons are much alike, and the eldest has no
exclusive claims.
It is true that King Mindon had nominated an heir, a
prince of the eastern palace, who was to be king when his father died; and had
the prince lived it is probable there would have been little trouble. But he
died.
Before King Mindon died the prince had gone, and when
the king lay upon his death-bed there was no prince to whom was ensured the
succession of the throne.
There were all sorts of stories afloat about the last
illness of the king. He is said to have been poisoned at the end, and the names
of those who did it are given freely. There is not probably any truth in these
reports. Illness and death come very suddenly in the East, and as the doctors
are not very wise, it is the custom to attribute an unknown disease to poison
or witchery.
There was no one who had any interest in the king’s
death, but very many whose chance in life lay entirely in his living. And so I
do not think that these reports are worth consideration. But the king was ill,
and very quickly he became ill unto death. It is said that the king himself did
not care who should succeed him. Perhaps he was too weary, too sick, to take
much interest in those things. The ministers would choose one of his sons, the
wisest and the most influential and the best, to be king when he was gone. And
this son was to take for his chief queen the Salin princess. She was the
daughter of the king, and her he loved above all his children, so that upon his
death-bed his only care was for her. Whoever would be king she must be queen,
that was all that the king desired.
There is a curious story told of this princess to
explain how it was that she was beloved by the king above all his children. It
is said that in her was incarnated the spirit of the king’s mother. As a little
child she talked and acted as if this was so.
She knew things that only the king’s mother could
know, she remembered events that only the king’s mother could have remembered.
And when she was about four years old she was taken into the apartments of the
dead queen to test her truth. Now these apartments had been kept carefully
locked up ever since the queen-mother’s death. No one had been allowed to enter
them, they were left just as they had been when inhabited. And when the child
was taken in she looked around and remembered everything. “There,” she said, is
where I sat, there is where I slept. On that shelf you will find my silk
dresses that I liked most, in that box are my jewels. They are of this pattern
and of that.” Thus spoke the child. And as she said so they found it. There was
no doubt that it was the queen-mother’s voice that spoke.
So the child was honoured above all the other
children. She was called “ queen ” while the others were but princesses and she
was destined to be the wife of the future king. She was plain, it is said, with
small eyes, quiet and demure, not a girl that men cared for, but her father
loved her above all his children.
About the bed of the dying king there was plot upon
plot, and intrigue upon intrigue as to who should succeed him.
King Mindon had many sons and nearly all of these had
little parties in the state, little cliques that wished to make their patron
king. The most prominent of these were the Mekaya prince and the Nyaungok prince, men who were older
than Prince Thibaw and who had great influence
through their relations and their wives’ relations in the palace. There were
two great parties, one for each of these princes, and there was a third party
amongst many of the ministers who did not desire a king at all just yet.
“The king’s sons,” they said, “are yet young, and no
one is well known, no one is wise enough to receive from the strong hands of
his father the sceptre of the kingdom.
“Therefore it will be better to wait. Let us have a
regency. Here are all the king’s ministers who have grown old in his service
and know how a kingdom should be ruled. We shall manage the kingdom, and later
on when the king’s sons are men and have shown what manner of men they are, it
will be easier to appoint one of them to be king. Burma is not as it used to
be, cut off from the world and safe behind its mountains, but it is threatened
by a great enemy who is very close. It is necessary for the government to walk
very warily lest it fall.”
Many of the wisest men in Burma were of this party.
But there was a fourth party yet. The Sinpyumashin was now head queen, the last of the four
queens, and there was no one whose influence was so great as hers. Had she had
a son no doubt he would have been king, no doubt she would have ruled the
country through him, and been the power behind the throne greater than the
throne itself. But she had no son, and therefore there was but one thing to be
done, to choose a prince whom she could manage and to make her daughters his
wives. And so it happened that her choice fell upon Prince Thibaw.
There were many circumstances that pointed to him as a suitable prince. He was
good-tempered it was known, easy going and unambitious, a man who would be
easily led, who would quickly surrender power into any hands stretched out to
grasp it. And he was learned. Of all the princes, he was the only one who had
passed the great examination in classic literature, success in which brought so
much honour for ever. A commoner who passed the examination was paraded
through the city with music and acclamations. To have such a prince for king
would conciliate many of the religious.
His mother too was of royal blood, whereas most of the
princes were sons of common mothers, and that was in itself a great
recommendation in two ways.
It clearly ennobled Prince Thibaw,
and it was the reason that he had no great following among the ministers and
governors. With the Mekkaya and the Nyaungok princes it was different. They had a great crowd
of relatives, and if either of them were made king it was most likely he would
listen to the counsels of his relatives and the power would fall into their
hands.
Therefore many things pointed to Prince Thibaw as the most fit for the succession, the most fit for
the purposes of the queen-mother; and two days before the king’s death he was
so proclaimed.
What part the dying king had in the appointment of
Prince Thibaw I do not know, and whether he even
heard of it is uncertain. On October 28, 1878, at eventide, he died. His death
was very sudden—so sudden that no one was prepared for it, no one had made the
necessary preparations for what was to happen afterwards, to prevent the
trouble that would certainly arise. As long as the king was thought to be alive
there would be peace; at the news of his death all the varying discordant
interests would awake and fight. If the queen mother and her party were to
succeed in their plans they must act, and act quickly, ere the news was spread.
And so, until their designs were matured, the news of the king’s death was
concealed, and rapid and secret action was taken.
Messengers were sent all about the palace in great
haste to the king’s children. “The king is very ill. He is dying, and before he
dies he wishes to see you.” So the message ran. All through the golden
corridors the order went that the king’s children should come swiftly to their
father’s side. Others were called too, officers and ministers. In the soft
tropic night they came in twos and threes, awakened suddenly from their sleep.
All the king’s sons who were in the palace, and some of the daughters, came to
see the last of the king their father. The great chamber outside the bedroom of
the king was crowded with men, with women, with children, even with babies. Many
were crying. King Mindon was a good father, he was much beloved of all his
children.
It is I think difficult for us to realise all it meant
to them, this death of King Mindon.
With us a king dies, a king succeeds; it makes not
very much difference, except sentimentally, even to his children. But here, to
the loss of a father was added the loss, perhaps, of all that made life worth
living, very likely of life itself. To that crowd, waiting there to see the
dying moments of their father, all the world beyond was buried in ignorance.
A king, a convict, a corpse—who could tell what the
day would make for each of them ?
They waited there in the great ante-chamber full of
wandering shadows, lit with uncertain lamps that threw strange gleams across
the carvings and the gold. They waited there, a sad crowd of men and women,
but boys and girls almost all of them, waiting to be called to the bedside of
their father, waiting the signal that was to call them to a last word with him.
As they waited the corridors filled up with armed men, the doors around were
closed, sentries with drawn swords were seen to stand at each entry of the
great room. The silence of the antechamber of death was broken by the rattle
of steel, the movement of armed men. While they gazed at it wondering what it
all meant, in fear, in quickly growing dread, there came to them, not the
messenger from their dying father, not one to call them to his side, but an
officer with far different words. “ The king is dead,” he said; “ King Mindon
is dead an hour ago, and Thibaw is king now. We have
heard that you are plotting against him, or may plot, and so you are all
prisoners. Take them away.”
He waved to the guards and the guards took them.
Almost all the men and boys, children to King Mindon, that were in the palace
were arrested on that fatal night. But two escaped. They were all led away to
prison, and next day Prince Thibaw was brought from
his monastery and made king.
So died King Mindon, wisest of all the kings, and Thibaw his son reigned in his place.
CHAPTER IV
THE NEW KING AND QUEEN
King Thibaw was born in 1859
and so he was nearly twenty years of age when he came to the throne. His recent
years had been passed in a monastery and from thence he was translated to a
palace. All who know the life of Buddhist monks will appreciate the contrast.
For laws of the monasteries are very strict and very stringent and cannot be
broken by any one. To eat but one full meal a day, to abstain from all smoking
and of course from all liquor, to wear only the yellow garment, to preserve
always a sobriety of demeanour, never to look upon the face of a woman to
admire her, these are some of the rules of the monkhood. And Prince Thibaw was a good novice and observed the laws and worked
hard at his books, every one tells you that. He was a pleasant boy, good
humoured and kind hearted, hating to be worried about things, liking to take
the world easily, very amenable to influence.
Every one speaks well of him while he was a boy. Then
suddenly he came to the throne. There was no interval. He came straight out of
the monastery and became a king, straight from the self-denial and world-denial
of a monk to unlimited power. For submission was exchanged command, for
absolute poverty great wealth, for self-restraint the possibilities of complete
self-indulgence, all between the setting of one sun and the setting of the
next.
Can any worse training be imagined for a king than
this? He came to be king absolute in power, and of all that it behoves a ruler
to know he was completely ignorant; of his country, his people, their wants and
desires, of foreign nations, their power and ambition, he knew nothing
whatever.
He was but a big school boy put upon a throne and told
to govern, a boy monk wholly dependant upon those about him. And so King Mindon
died and Prince Thibaw was brought to the palace and
declared king. So far all the plans of the queenmother and the ministers had gone well. Thibaw was king and
the rival princes were safely locked up, there was no immediate sign of trouble
to come.
King Thibaw would marry the
queen-mother’s daughter the great princess, and through her would the
queen-mother govern the kingdom. The Salin princess was forgotten. Her father
was dead and she had no one to help her, and promises are easily broken when
there is no reason to keep them. After King Mindon died no word was ever said
of the Salin princess.
The queen-mother had three daughters, the great
princess, the middle princess and the little princess. The king was of course
to marry the great princess as his chief wife. That was all settled. Of . this
girl Supayagyi but little is generally known. She
seems to have been a quiet biddable girl, willing to do what she was told,
ready no doubt to be wife to her half brother the king. She was about the same
age as the king.
The second daughter Supayalatwas a year younger than the king, a girl such as her mother had been before her,
proud and passionate, loving and ambitious. All the nineteen years of her life
she had loved Prince Thibaw. As children in the
palace they had played together and loved each other, and as they grew older
the love grew stronger. When Prince Thibaw went to
live in the monastery the girl did not forget him. Though she might not .see
him yet she remembered him always. Whenever she could she would send him a
message, a letter, a little present. There are not many things a monk may
receive, but all she could she did. New robes and sweet food, and books, and
above all loving words, such did the middle princess send to the young prince
in the monastery. No one then ever dreamt that he would be king.
Then of a sudden the boy monk became a king. Within
two days he was changed from an unknown prince, one amongst very many, and
became king. He came to the palace and it was known at once that he was to
marry the great princess. She was to be his queen, and in a short time they
would be married, all was arranged.
And the middle princess, the girl who had loved him
all her life, what was she to do ? The king could not marry her, for she was
but a second daughter. She must be thrust aside and be forgotten too. What
could a girl of nineteen do against the customs of a nation, the rights of an
elder born, the arrangements of a government? What does love weigh in the
balance of a policy? It is lighter than a feather, not worth regarding. As the
Salin princess had been put aside so would the middle princess. Girls must suffer
that kingdoms may stand. It was hardly worth thinking about. I am sure that in
all the palace, in all the nation, no one thought twice of the middle princess
and her disappointed love, no one dreamt anything could come of it, except the
middle princess herself.
And she, what could this child do alone against all
the government to get her lover to herself? Well this is what she did. When she
heard that the prince was made king, and was come to the palace, and was
shortly to be married to the elder princess she sat down at once and wrote him
a letter. She sent it to him on the same day that he came to the palace. She
lost no time. This is what she wrote.
“The king,” she said, “is now king and I his sister
the middle princess rejoice with him. He has become king no one knows how. And
now it is said that he will take to be his wife the great princess my sister.
And yet if the king stops to v think this will not be so. Did my sister ever
care for the king ? What did she ever do for him ? When the king was sent away
from the palace to be a monk, did she write to him, did she send him money and
presents ? Where are these letters and these presents ? Are they to be found
anywhere? The king knows it is not so. There was no one who wrote to the king
but me the middle princess. No one ever remembered him, no one ever sent him
presents but me. Who can number the letters I have written to the king or
measure the love that I bear to him ? These are beyond knowledge. Let then the
king consider in his heart, let him call back the memories of the past and he
will be sure that he can have no queen but me.”
Something like this, says my maid of honour, was the
message the girl princess sent to the boy king. “You see, Thakin,
that she loved him very much. There are many people who say that she only
wanted to be queen. I do not think this is true. She always loved Prince Thibaw when no one ever supposed he would be king. I am
sure that if he had not been king at all she would have married him just the
same. It was the man she wanted, not the king. Of course that he was king was
so much the better.
“Thakin, I lived near the
queen for four years. I saw her every day, and I am quite sure that this is
true. In everything that happened till the end, there was always this first,
that she loved her husband, that she wanted to keep him all to herself, not
from desire of power, but from sheer affection and jealousy, and whatever she
did in the kingdom, whatever advice she gave, whatever acts she committed, she
thought first of the honour of her king.
“She was very self-willed, very ambitious, very
passionate, very cruel sometimes, but of all her passions this was greatest,
her passion for the king.
“She could not bear that any one, even her elder
sister, should take first place with the king. She wanted the first place, she
wanted the second place also, she wanted all the places.
“She wrote to the king, and sent messages to him not
to marry any one but her.”
What the king replied I do not know, but a little
later in the day the middle princess left her mother’s rooms and went to the
king. Straight to the king’s apartments she went, and she stayed.
When the queen-mother heard the news she was furious.
The conduct of her daughter the middle princess was unheard of, impossible. She
went to the king and demanded that her daughter should be returned; she ordered
the girl to come, never v doubting of course that the boy monk that she had
raised to the throne would do as she told him; that this daughter of hers would
obey her mother as before. But she was mistaken. It was of no use. The girl
would not go, nor would the king order her to do so. As she wished to stay, she
should stay, so said the king. All the queen-mother’s threats and
expostulations were in vain.
When the ministers remonstrated with the king they had
no better success. They pointed out that this was contrary to all law, to all
custom, to all tradition. The king must marry the elder* daughter, only she
could be chief queen. And then after that, after he had married the great
princess as custom ordered that he should do, he could take the middle princess
to be his second wife. Meanwhile let the king send back the girl to her mother.
So said the ministers. The king could not now on the very day of his accession
so outrage all decency in this way.
But it was of no use. While the ministers talked the
king looked in the girl’s eyes, and when they had finished he refused them
roundly.
“If she wishes to go then shall she go,” said the
king, “but if she will stay then shall she stay with me for ever.” In the face
of this the ministers were powerless.
The king was king and his will was law. If he said no,
then would no one do anything. That was how the middle princess came to be
queen in place of her elder sister, in defiance of all the palace people.
She came to the king, and the king took her and never
again were they separated. Such a thing had never been heard of in all the
kings’ reigns before until now, that an elder sister should be dispossessed by
a younger, and that the latter should make herself queen.
Yet this was but the beginning.
From that day the queen grew in strength and influence
until in time there was no one in all Burma but only the queen.
What she wished the king ordered, and what the king
ordered all people must obey. What was the source of her power no one can say.
She was not beautiful. Even my maid of honour admits
that. “She was not beautiful, Thakin, but she was a
queen. Women far more beautiful than she was faded before her into nothingness.
And her eyes. Ah, Thakin, whoever had eyes like the
queen? Like pools of deep brown water, so large, so wonderful, but with a
flame deep down in them that made one fear. She always cared for herself to
make herself admired, K her manners to those she loved were as the charm of a
magician. And her voice was as clear as a silver gong thrilling across the
evening waters where all is still. No one ever did but one of two things : they
either loved her for ever or hated her as men hate and fear death. For she was
very proud and very fierce, and when she hated she never forgave. There were
two things that she could never abide: any attempt to wean the king from her,
or any insult to his dignity. Whenever she heard that any woman was trying to
come between her and the king she became like a mad thing; there was nothing
she would not do. When any one tried to reduce the king’s power or glory she
would never allow it. Easier would death be than suffer such things.”
That is what my maid of honour says of the queen. It
must never be forgotten that she came to the throne as a girl of nineteen and
was but twenty-six when the empire came to an end. Her power belonged of right
to another, her husband’s love belonged by custom to as many sweethearts as he
liked to take. All her life in the palace she had to fight, to hold her power
against enemies, to hold her lover from mistresses.
She did both to the end. Had she lived two thousand
years ago in other conditions of things surely she would have gone down into
history as one of the greatest of all queens. But she was born too late.
CHAPTER V
THE MASSACRES
It was in October 1878, as I have said, that King Thibaw and his queen came to their throne of Mandalay. Two
days after King Mindon’s death King Thibaw was
proclaimed king and took the place of his father. The power, of course,
remained in the hands of the queen-mother and the old ministers who had been
with the old king. This novice fresh from a monastery, full of wise maxims, and
of little else that belongs to wisdom, was not of the fibre to seize upon the
reins of government, and make his rule felt. He was put upon the throne to be a
puppet and under one guiding hand or another, he remained so all his life.
The queen’s time was not yet come. Even for a woman of
her strength of will, of her directness of purpose, it took time to deprive the
old ministers of their power, to convince the queen-mother that in future she
was to take a second place. And so for some time, these children that had lit
upon a throne by chance were but as royalties at play. They played about the
steps of the throne, but did not govern.
The first news of the reign in Burma that reached the
outer world, and astonished and horrified it, was the report that early in 1879
all the king’s brothers had been executed. Not the king’s brothers only, but
their wives, and not grown people alone, but children. Men and women, boys and
girls, even the infants at the breast, nearly all those who were arrested that
fatal night in Mandalay, were executed.
I have heard from one who was at Mandalay at that
time, that there had been for days rumours flying about. It was said that there
was about to be a rebellion, that many people did not assent to Prince Thibaw being king, and that there would be a revolution.
Many influential men it was stated had given in their adherence to one or
another of the princes, and determined to release them. How much truth there
was in all this I cannot say. There are those who say that all this was a mere
pretence got up by the queen-mother and the palace clique to excuse their
subsequent actions. There are those who emphatically affirm that all these
plots were true. “There have always been plots,” they say. “Did not the Mingoon prince rise against his brother King Mindon and
occasion terrible trouble ? Have other princes, or more especially their
adherents, ever agreed to the kingship of one brother ? Is not all history
full of such rebellion ? There were innumerable plots to put this prince or
that on the throne, all agreeing that first of all King Thibaw must be deposed and the palace clique of queen-mother and ministers destroyed.”
In prison with the captive princes were many leading
men. There was a fully arranged design to break the prison, and then to attack
the palace. Which story is true I cannot say.
Then came what are called the massacres. All the sons
of King Mindon and their families and many other men too were executed. It
happened at night. “On that night,” says my informant, “there was a great hush
over the city and town of Mandalay. A great fear of unknown horrors. Men kept
to their houses in fear. In streets where at other times you would hear music
and see dancing there was darkness and silence. No one knew what was happening.
There under cover of the night horrible things were done. It was as if death
brooded over the great city, and no one knew but what he would be taken ere
dawn. No one slept all that night. In the darkness of their houses they
listened and watched.”
All King Mindon’s sons who could be found were
executed. Only two, the Nyaungok and Nyaungyan princes, escaped. The British resident saved
their lives and took them to Lower Burma. In after years these princes tried to
get up a rebellion against King Thibaw and upset the
government, but their attempts failed. If there had been seventy sons left
alive, there would have been no doubt pretty nearly seventy invasions and
rebellions. It was to prevent this that the massacres occurred. For there is no
doubt that for the peace and safety of the kingdom nothing could have been
better than this execution of all claimants to the throne. In such a kingdom a
king has duties and responsibilities. He is of some use. A prince is of none.
He is a mere expense to the people and a danger to the throne. Any prince’s
life that fell then, meant that a hundred, perhaps a thousand, lives were saved
to the nation, lives of merchants and soldiers, of ministers and peasants. In
King Thibaw’s reign there was no serious rebellion,
no wholesale destruction of villages, no confiscation of lands and proscription
of rebels. There was as far as that goes, peace, and it was bought with the
blood of the sons of King Mindon.
It may be said that they would not themselves have
raised rebellions, that many of them were quiet and peace-loving, only too glad
to be allowed to live in obscurity. That may be true, and it may not. It makes
but little difference. They would have been made the figurehead of plots
despite themselves. Every one who had a grudge against the government would
have declared he was acting in the name of one or other of the princes. Each
brother of King Thibaw would have been, willy nilly,
the focus of intrigue and trouble. And the people themselves understand this. I
have heard it spoken of many and many a time in the villages when work was over
and cigars were lit in the warm dusk. It saved the kingdom from much trouble,
from ceaseless unrest and uncertainty. From the people’s standpoint it was a
good thing, although, of course, they could not approve of it. And from the
standpoint of the royal family ? Well, it is one of the prices a family pays
for having unlimited power. It is the price that autocrats have had to pay for
their power, this eminent necessity that all rivals must be put aside. History
tells us but one tale about this. East or west has not differed, save that in
the East the families are larger, the slaughter therefore heavier.
Where power and authority lie in the king and not in
the people, there can be but one end to possible rivals. And so when we
consider the execution of the king’s brothers we must not allow ourselves to be
carried away by sentiment, but look the matter fairly in the face. There is now
no object in raising a howl against the government of Burma. It is gone and
dead. Let us therefore admit that this massacre was a necessity, a terrible one
no doubt, but necessary.
Who was responsible for it I am not certain. What does
it matter now to inquire ? But of this I am assured, the young king and the
girl who was become his queen were innocent. They knew nothing till all was
over. And when he heard, the king sat down in his golden palace and wept. “My
brothers,” he said, “ are dead because I am king. Surely I would never have
been king had I known that this must happen.”
So King Thibaw mourned for
his brothers that were slain. He was a kind-hearted boy, and this was a most
bitter, most terrible thing that had happened to him. While he was reposing in
his new grandeur, giddy with the glory that had come to him suddenly and
unexpectedly, he found that he must pay a bitter price for it. The steps of his
throne were the corpses of his father’s sons. Could there be a more terrible
awakening from a young dream of greatness and of love than this was ? He never
quite forgot it. But his throne was safe. After this there was no doubt as to
who was king. Thibaw was lord of the golden palace,
and of all the white elephants, the king of kings. His ministers were the
Taingda and the Kinwun Mingyis,
and the power behind the throne, the power that was to move the king as she
willed, who should it be but the queen-mother ? She it was who had put the king
on his throne, who had secured the throne to him in safety, who was mother of
his wife. It seemed indeed as if the queen-mother was to be supreme. And so the
king was king, and, for a time, the queen-mother and the ministers ruled the
kingdom.
But before very long there was a change. As soon as
the young queen felt herself firm upon the throne, as soon as she had time to
look about her, she began to act. Then was it soon known that' there was to be
no one in the kingdom but her.
She talked to the king. “Maung, Maung,” she said, “do
you know all that is going on about you ? Do you understand what is happening?
You think you are king, but is it so ? I think not, but that the ministers are
really the kings. They have divided the kingdom. Each has taken to himself part
of what is yours. See now, how one minister is in charge of the river and all
boat business. All that concerns these subjects comes to him, and he passes
orders. As far as these go he is king. And one minister is over the revenue,
and another over the foreign affairs, and another over justice, and another
over war. So is the kingdom divided up. You are king but in name. Let us stop
all this.”
As the queen said, so the king did. Gradually all
power was withdrawn from the ministers and came into the king’s hands, into the
hands of her who was behind the king. The ministers’ orders were disregarded,
their authority destroyed. If a man was condemned by an order of a minister, he
had but to appeal to the queen to be freed. “Let him go,” she said. “Who is a
minister to order such a thing ? ” She took a delight in thwarting and snubbing
the ministers. There was to be no one in all the kingdom but her, and all were
to know it. She was the very spirit of jealousy incarnate.
The ministers who were trained under the wise old king
to know their work and to do it were rendered powerless, and the queen tried to
govern by herself. She rejected even all advice. It was an impertinence. Nay,
more, a minister had but to suggest anything to have it rejected at once; and a
girl who has never been out of a palace, who is as ignorant as can be, how can
she rule a kingdom ? She could not do it.
Gradually the kingdom went back from the happiness of
King Mindon’s time, and trouble came upon it. For one thing, there were bad
seasons. The rain failed, and the crops were short, and so the people suffered.
Upper Burma was never a rich country; now it became poorer. With short crops
came restlessness. Farmers were ruined, and took to evil ways of living. Crime
increased, and it was not suppressed. In King Mindon’s time if crime increased
in any district the governor was held responsible, and unless the trouble was
quickly dealt with he came to grief. The local officials were afraid of the
king, and knew he was well informed.
But under the boy king the local officials again
raised their heads. They did not care very much for Mandalay, they were aware
that the king was only so in name, and they became slack in the performance of
their duties. Bands of robbers increased until whole districts were held in
terror and paid blackmail to one brigand leader or another. The officials did
nothing. Indeed it is said that many of them were in the pay of the brigands
and protected them from harm in case they happened to be arrested. Justice became
degraded and the law was forgotten.
The revenue in consequence suffered, and the soldiers
and others could not be paid. Then they also had to prey upon the country and
matters became worse. It is a sad story how the nation which had been
prosperous and happy under King Mindon fell into misery and lawlessness so soon
afterwards.
When a government is all centred in the king and
everything depends upon him, then, should he not prove a strong man, all
authority is gone. And the king was a boy. It is doubtful how much he knew of
what was going on, whether he could have done anything, even had he known and
understood. The country became a prey to the palace clique. Places were openly
sold to the highest bidder and then he was disgraced in order that the place
might be again sold. It was somewhat of the principle of the Borgia and his Cardinals.
Justice became a scoff and was a matter of money.
The border tribes broke out. Feeling that the strong
hand that held them so firmly was gone, they raided into Burma. On the north
the Kachins, and on the west the wild Chins threw off their subjection and
attacked the country of their sovereign. They were only repulsed with loss and
great difficulty and the yoke that they had thrown off could not be
re-enforced. The allegiance of the Shan princess in the east became doubtful.
Everywhere was evident that the strong hand and wise
brain that had ruled the country so well was laid to rest. Of course all this
did not happen at once. It takes time both for a country to improve and to
deteriorate. I am looking far ahead, almost to the end of the kingdom, when I
say that the country became a prey to brigand bands. But the change began to be
felt very soon after the king’s death, and the evil grew year by year. No doubt
in time the nation would have refused to submit to such a state of things any
longer, and there would have been a change of some sort. It is impossible now
to guess what that change would have been. For no time was given. Another
nation stepped in and subdued the kingdom.
CHAPTER VI
DAYS IN THE PALACE
It was not till nearly two years after the king’s
accession that my maid of honour came into the palace; a child of nine years
old, maid to a queen of twenty-one. And this was the way of it. She was not an
Upper Burman at all. She was born away south in British Burma, in Tavoy, and there she lived through her early childhood.
When she was nine years old her father, who was a Chinaman, came to Upper
Burma to live and began to take up contracts for the government. He built
amongst other things the round tower with the winding stair at the south-east
corner of the palace. He would have been a rich man she says if he had received
all the money due to him. But he was never paid and now he is dead and the
money is lost. He knew many people in the palace, and so after a time his
little daughter was accepted as maid of honour to the queen.
“There were other maids of honour,” she says. “The
king had maids of honour, and the queenmother had
maids of honour also. But they were not nice, not the same as we were who were
the queen’s own maids.”
She is very proud, I think, of having been maid of
honour to the queen, and when she speaks of it she flushes with a little flush
of pride, for it seems to her to have been a great thing. “ None of the other
maids of honour were the same as we were. The maids of the queen-mother were
such as we did not care to know. Many of them were very curious, wild Shan
girls and Chin girls, all sorts of girls, some with tattooed faces. So ugly, Thakin, they were, and they had no manners at all. The
queen’s mother and her maids lived on the north of the great throne room, and
it was always untidy there. We did not see much of them.
“Then there were the king’s maids of honour who had
charge of his clothes. There were but few of them compared to us, and they were
not so much esteemed as we were, for we were of the best.
“There were, I think, five or six hundred girls maids
of honour to Mebya. They were divided into companies
of thirty or forty, with one as head. My head was the daughter of the Taingda Mingyi, the old minister who brought on the war. Each
company went on duty for six hours at a time, and the queen herself distributed
the hours of service for each company.
“ We lived by two and two in a room. All the little
houses on the south of the western throneroom were
our houses. Out of the windows you can see into the south garden, and there are
steps near there to go down by. My first companion was Ma Mya, who was daughter
to a governor somewhere in the north country. She took a husband afterwards and
got into trouble and was sent away. The next companion of mine was Ma Shwe Tha.
‘‘There was one European maid of honour, a Roman
Catholic sister, and some of us were daughters of Shan chiefs and other
princes. I think many were kept in the palace so that their fathers might keep
true to the king. One of them came into trouble too. Shall I tell the Thakin how that was ? ”
“Let that be afterwards,” I said. “There is so much to
tell. But tell me first of your life in the palace. You were only such a little
girl when you went in. Did your mother not go with you to look after you ?”
She shook her head. “No. Of course she came sometimes,
but I was quite happy. Ah! Thakin, it was pleasant in
the palace. There was my room-mate to help me, and there was our chief, the Mingyi’s daughter, and there was the queen. She looked
after us very carefully to see that nothing went wrong with any one, and would
always listen to any complaint. She was very good to us. She gave each of us
nine silk skirts a month to wear, and money besides to buy jackets and other
things.”
I suggested that this seemed a large number to wear
out in a month, nine silk skirts in twenty-nine days, but she shook her head.
Skirts got spoiled many ways, playing hide-and-seek in the palace gardens, and
feeding the fishes—you were never allowed to wear an old skirt, even to go
boating in ; it was always necessary to be smart before the queen.
The silks were usually pink and silver, but they
varied. Of course on state occasions the queen wore the proper state dress, and
so did the maids. This is a very elaborate, very beautiful dress, with a sort
of helmet on the head. It is quite indescribable to those who have never seen
it. The helmet has a curious effect in giving a soft childish expression to the
face which is delightful.
But in ordinary life they wore much the same dress as
Burmese women always wear. This is a short skirt of silk, usually in
longitudinal stripes. At the top there is a piece of cotton of a different
colour, usually purple. At the bottom is a piece of silk, of a very light
greyish-pink, getting darker as it approaches the ground, where it ends in
numerous little stripes. Whatever the main part of the dress may be, the top
and bottom are generally the same. The skirt is open at the side and the leg
shows a little, in walking, very prettily. The jacket worn in the palace was
always white cambric, open in front, the jacket and skirt being so arranged as
to give the appearance of a dress cut square at the bosom. There was always a
bright kerchief to drape over the shoulder or carry in the hand, as the wearer
thought most becoming. It is a very pretty dress, very graceful, very gay,
matching so well their fair brown complexion, their merry laugh, their pretty
coquettish manners. They wear almost always a pearl necklace about the throat
and many gold bracelets. The hair is worn in a coil on the head with flowers in
front, and of course their feet are bare. No shoes could be worn in the palace
; it was sacred ground. As we take off our hats, so do Orientals take off their
boots when entering another man’s house ; in so far, today here, is as it was
two thousand years ago. Did not Abraham do the same ? Is it not done in every
eastern country, even in Japan today ?
So all the maids went barefooted in the palace,
passing softly to and fro, their little feet making
no sound on the solid pavement. The queen wore much the same dress as her
maids, but there was this rule, that if she was wearing a dress of a certain
design no princess nor maid might wear one of the same design on the same day.
“But how did you manage ? ” I asked. “Did you know
beforehand what the queen would wear?”
“When we went on duty we would peep and see, hiding
behind some one else. And if we found we had on a skirt like the queen wore, we
would run away and change quickly and return.
“Ah, Thakin ! it was very
pleasant in the palace. There was but little work to do attending the queen, it
was a pleasure not work. The maids read aloud to her sometimes, sacred books
and books of plays, and every one would listen, and stories would be told.
After a little time I was made to roll cigarettes for the queen. She smoked
many cigarettes, just like the Thakin does. She did
not like the Burmese cheroots. And so I would sit behind her and roll her
cigarettes, and listen to her talk.
“The king was nearly always with her, sometimes he
went away to talk with the ministers or do business or amuse himself with his
pages, but generally the king and queen were together. She loved him so much, Thakin, the king her husband, no one can say how much she
loved him, and she wanted always to be with him.
“Ah! Thakin, it was very
pleasant in the palace. There was always something to play at, always so many
to play with, all girls. No, of course we were not allowed to have the pages to
play with. They kept to their place in the palace, to their apartments and
their duties, and we kept to ours. I was young then and did not care, ah! Thakin laughs and says it is not so now. Why should the Thakin laugh; what if I have a sweetheart now ? Is there
any harm in that ? Has the Thakin never had a
sweetheart ? The Thakin shakes his head, but ah ! it
cannot be true. We played all our. games among ourselves with the queen and
sometimes the king. We used to play many games. There was hide-and-seek in the
gardens. One of us would hide, and the others would come and look all over the
place. Sometimes the girl who hid could not be found at all, she would hide so
well. The queen too would hide and we would look for her. It was not a proper
thing to find the queen, and so the princesses and the maids of honour would go
wandering about and looking in all the wrong places.”
“ What happened if any one was rash enough to find the
queen ? ” I asked. The girl laughed. It appears that when she first went to .
the palace and played hide-and-seek she found the queen. “ For indeed it was
easy enough. I could see her kneeling down on a little hill behind a clump of
bamboos. Every one who looked could see. I went up and found her. I thought I
was very clever?’
“And then ? ”
“ She boxed my ears. She was angry.”
“I suppose you never found her again?” I asked.
“No. No one could ever find her but the king, if he
were playing with us. Then after a time when she was tired of seeing us wander
up and down and look in all the wrong places, she would come out laughing, and
say she was too clever for us and some one else must hide. So one of us v would
hide and there would be great fun looking for her all up and down the gardens,
in the boats, behind the rocks, or perhaps we would find her perched in a
tamarind tree.
“Then we would go out in the boats. The fish were so
tame that if you put some rice on the edge and tapped the bank and cried ‘Hey,
hey,’ the fish would come crowding up and eat it. There were so many they would
quarrel and fight and push each other about to get at the rice. Some had gold
leaf on their heads. Once when the queen was in a boat with the king, a big
fish jumped right into the boat, and the queen was delighted and laughed and
screamed and took it up in her hands and put it back into the water. Her dress
was all splashed over with water and mud but she did not mind that. We also
used to catch crows.”
“What did you do that for ? ” I asked.
“For fun. We would wait till a crow came into the room
and rush and slam the doors. Then there would be great running about and
climbing on tables and throwing handkerchiefs to fetch the crow down. He would
fly to and fro for a long time, but at last he would
get tired and we would catch him.”
“What did you do then ? Kill it ? ” I asked.
“Kill it ? ” she answered with great surprise, u what
should we want to take its little life for ? No, we would stroke it and give it
some water to drink, and the queen would put gold leaf on its beak, or a ring
on its foot or tie a string with something on it round the crow’s neck, and let
it go again. There was always a tremendous excitement among the other crows
when this crow came forth. They would crowd round it and caw very loudly, and
the caught crow was ashamed. We never caught the same crow twice.
“If it was very hot and we could not go out, the queen
would wrap a lot of things in paper—rings and gold and stones and feathers—and
put them in a bag. The princesses and maids of honour drew the things out. When
you got a ring or a jewel you were pleased and every one congratulated you.
When you got a feather every one laughed. Oh, how ashamed you were ! ”
“Did you ever get a feather ? ” I asked.
“No. I never got a feather, but I got a piece of
tobacco-leaf once. Every one laughed, and the queen said : ‘That is very
proper; she makes my cigarettes, of course she should get tobacco.’ On another
occasion I got a small gold ring. I have it now, Thakin.
It is not worth much.”
It was a little ring of plain gold with a small ruby
in it roughly set. It was not worth much, as she said.
“The stone,” she continued, looking down at it sadly,
“is not very bright. But you can see down into it, and it is full of lights,
full of memories of long ago. I shall never forget the day when I got it. We
were all there: the king and the queen and all the maids of honour. Ah, how we
laughed, and how we enjoyed ourselves! This ring is full of pleasant memories.
I have another jewel the queen gave me full of memories that are very sad, but
this is full of pleasure.
“Those are the sort of games we used to play every
day, but at certain times we had great festivals. Three times a year there was
a great amusement, throwing water at each other. A low bamboo barrier was put
up in the garden, and the queen and her maids were on one side and the king and
his pages on the other. We got water in little cups out of the moat and threw
it, one side at the other. We got very wet, and we were not allowed to wear old
dresses, but quite new ones. They were all spoilt of course.”
“Who threw at the queen ? ”
“The king, and the queen threw water at him and we all
threw water at the pages and ministers.”
“And did the ministers and pages never cross over the
barrier ? ”
“ If any minister or page had crossed the barrier he
would have been executed right off. No one did, of course. No. Girls never
crossed to the men’s side. How can you ask such questions, Thakin ? The barrier was put up to prevent it.
“Then twice a year money would be thrown by the king
for the people to scramble for. He would throw fifty thousand rupees or more.
One man got thirty rupees or fifty rupees. It was such fun to see them
scrambling. All the soldiers would come and the attendants, men and women, and
make a great crowd and fall over each other in their haste to get the money.
Where a handful of rupees fell twenty people would fall one on top of the
other, scrambling and struggling and laughing. Oh, Thakin,
it was such fun, you have no idea.”
She clapped her hands. “We all used to laugh : the
king and queen and everybody laughed till they could not laugh any more.”
“What did you get ? ”
“I was a maid of honour, one of the queen’s maids of
honour,” she replied somewhat severely, drawing herself up. “ The Thakin does not suppose that the maids of honour scramble
for money ? ”
That was how they spent their days in the palace, this
king who was twenty-two years old and this queen of twenty-one. They played as
children play who do not care, who are happy in the day and do not think of
to-morrow. Surely it most have been pleasant in the palace.
CHAPTER VII
EVENINGS IN THE PALACE
I asked, “What did you do in the evenings after the
sun set and the ghosts came out in the gardens so that you could not stay there
? ”
“In the evenings,” she answered, “ we had pwès, marionette shows, and dramatic performances. We had
them very often. The king would say : There is nothing to do; let us have a
pwè.’ And the queen would clap her hands and agree. So the dancers would be
sent for, and they would dance all night in the great portico. The Thakin knows the place in the south of the palace. There is
a great room there whose walls are glass panels enclosing flowers. We would sit
up there in front of the room, the queen and the king and the princesses and
ourselves. And down below would be the performers and a great ring about of the
lower people of the palace, the guards and attendants. I have seen many plays
there. If we only had a little performance of perhaps only one dancer, then it
was not held in the great portico, but in one of the rooms on the west of the
palace. The Thakin has seen the king’s dancer. She
was very beautiful. She danced like a grass stem swaying in the wind. We often
had her to dance in the palace. There were so many dances and performances in
the palace, I forget them all, only the last great one at the end, two days
before the fall. That I remember always, but the others I forget.
“When we did not have a pwè we would sit and talk. The
maids of honour would tell stories. Those who came from far parts would tell
very strange stories of things in their country. They said there were devils
sometimes in the hills, and all kinds of snakes and tigers. Thakin,
did you ever see a tiger ? ”
“Oh yes,” I answered, “once or twice at a distance.”
“And a devil ? ”
“No,” I said ; “never a devil ; are there devils ? ”
My maid of honour opened her eyes wide. “Of course.
There are several kinds of devils. I never saw one at all, but I saw the spirit
of a tree once.”
“You did ?”, I asked. “What was he like ? ”
“He was all white and shining, and he stood under the
great tree and looked at me. I was not afraid at all. I told the queen about
this one evening, when we were all telling stories, and she said she would like
to see one too.
“The girls from the Shan country told very strange
stories and the European maid of honour also told stories. She said that in her
country all the rivers turned into ice in the winter, so it must be very cold.
I do not know how the people live. And she said there were no teak trees in
that country, so the houses must be very poor. I felt quite sorry for the
people there, Thakin. She said that in the winter it
was only light for about seven hours in the day, and sometimes for two months
you would not see the sun. Is that true ? ”
“Oh yes,” I said, “ it’s true enough.”
“She must have been very glad to live in Burma, I
should think, where we have always sunlight and it is warm, Thakin.
Many other stories too, she told me, but some we could not believe because they
were too hard. I liked the stories our own people tell best. I remember, Thakin, one very curious story a maid of honour told us one
evening in the palace. She was a girl from away in the north where they seem to
have more curious things than here. She said there was a man there, who was a
toddy climber, climbing up the great palms to get the juice. He was the son of
a man who owned many palms, and so was well off.
“One day he had an accident. When he was climbing up a
tree the frail bamboo ladder broke, and he fell down flat on the ground. Some
men who were in the grove some way off saw him fall, and supposed he was killed
because he came down from so far up with such a crash. ‘Ah, ah!’ they said, ‘there
is Po San, falling off a tree, probably he will be killed; we must go and carry
his dead body to his father’.”
“They came running to the tree to pick up the body,
but when they came there Po San sat up and looked at them. They were so
surprised that their mouths remained wide open. Then Po San got up and said, ‘What
is the matter ?’. And the men said, ‘Oh nothing, nothing at all, only we
supposed you were killed, and we were about to carry your body to your father’.”
“Then Po San said he wasn’t in any way dead, and he
didn’t know what they came bothering about. He seemed quite annoyed, so the men
went away again.
“Po San was to be married to a girl in the village,
and as he did not seem at all hurt by his fall he was married all right.
“But soon his wife began to complain. He was not as he
used to be. He used to be kind and good-natured, and very merry, but now he was
stupid, and cross, and evil-tempered. Also he used to steal away at nights.
When his wife would wake up at nights and stretch out her arm to feel for her
husband that his presence might give her courage in the dark, she could not
find him. So she began to get suspicious and think he must go after some girl
instead of her. One night she made up her mind to watch him. She did not go to
sleep, but only pretended, lying with her eyes shut and making her breath come
very slow, and when Po San got up and went out, she crept after him. She
expected that he would go to some house in the village, but he did not. He went
through the village and crept through a hole in the fence and his wife followed
him. The thorns scratched her, but she did not care. He went on through the
field and at last he came to the graveyard. His wife remained under a tree
watching and she saw her husband go to a new grave and scratch up the ground,
and pull up the body of a man recently buried. When he got the corpse out he
ate some of the flesh, and then put the body back, and put the earth over it
again. And his wife understood what had happened.
“This was not her husband at all. When he had fallen
from the tree he had been killed, and because when he was killed there was no
one there to shut his mouth, an evil spirit had entered into it. This man she
married was not Po San at all, but an evil spirit, a pok;
wasn’t that a dreadful thing, Thakin ? ”
“What did they do with him ? ” I asked.
“The woman reported it to the governor next day, and
the pok was killed.
“The queen when she heard the story said she did not
like it at all. She liked pleasant stories about good spirits. Stories like
this made us all afraid. We were afraid to go about alone at night for fear of poks and devils, and when we woke up in the night we
shivered. So when any one was about to tell a story afterwards the queen would
ask first if it was a pleasant one before she allowed it to be told.
“Those evenings were so pleasant, Thakin,
in the palace. When the queen was in a good temper, and she generally was, she
would laugh and talk just like a girl. And the king would laugh and talk too.
The rooms were so beautiful with their gold and their mirrors, and the lights
that fluttered here and there as the wind came sighing through the great doors,
and the maids were so pretty too, with their bright dresses and jewels, and it
seems to me, looking back, like a fairy story. Ah, I was so happy in the palace.
But one night I got a great fright, and this was the way of it.
“It was a night in the hot weather, it had been very
hot all day, and even now at night it was hot, though the fans waved to and fro.
“The king was not there, and the queen and maids were
not talking, but reading aloud from a sacred book, and it was very difficult to
understand. I tried and tried, but it was full of hard words, and so I gave up
trying, and began to watch the fans move to and fro,
and try and count the diamonds on the queen’s hands. I do not know how it was,
but I fell asleep. I do not know how long I was asleep, but at last some one
woke me. She pushed me on the arm and said, ‘Wake up, wake up ; the queen is
speaking to you.’ So I woke up all stupid and saw every one looking at me, and
I felt dreadfully frightened. I didn’t know what the queen would do to me for
falling asleep. But she only laughed and held up her finger and said, ‘You
have been asleep.’ When I tried to say something and could not find words, she
went on, * You are only a child to sit up so late. Go away to bed, you very
sleepy little maid of honour’. ”
My maid of honour laughed. She always laughs when she
thinks and talks of those days, the cheerful laugh of a child.
“So I went away all by myself. I had never walked
about in the palace alone before, and when I got away from the lights and
sounds of the queen’s room, I felt afraid. The palace was so still, and so
high, and it was almost dark everywhere. So I walked at first very fast, and
then I began to run, and so coming round a corner I ran into a door that was
shut, and knocked all the breath out of me. There was a corridor there with big
doors at both ends, more like a room than a corridor. The doors were always
open before, and we went that way to our rooms, but on this occasion the doors
were shut. I pushed against them and beat with my hands, for I was afraid that
the dark was full of poks. ‘Open,’ I cried ; ‘open,
please open.’
“I heard a moving inside and I hammered more. ‘Open
quick,’ I cried ; ‘ why are the doors shut like this ? ’
“At last the door opened just a little, and a man
looked out. I could not see who it was, because the light was behind him, and I
could not see his face, but I was not afraid of men.
“Let me in”, I ordered. “I want to pass through.”
“The man opened the door and came out. Then he shut
the door behind him, and caught me by the ear.
“Who are you? “ he said ; “a little girl in such a
hurry ? “
“I am one of the queen’s maids of honour,” I said, who
am going to bed. Who are you shutting the doors ? ’ I felt angry at this man
stopping me when I was in a hurry, and I spoke crossly.
“Oh,” he answered, “I am the king.’
“I was very much frightened to find it was the king,
and I wanted to go down on my knees, but he held me by the ear”. “I didn’t
know,” I stammered.
“What did you come this way for?” said the king. “Tell
me truly. Did the queen send you ? “
“Then I told the king it was because I was asleep, and
the queen told me to go to bed, so I came this way. ‘It is the short way to my
room,’ I said ; “may I go ?”
“But the king said I must go round, that I could not
go that way tonight. So I turned away and ran down the passage to go away
round. The king watched me till I turned the corner. I looked back and still
saw him standing there. Thakin, I did not think of it
at the time. I was only a little girl. How could I guess what was happening?
Even when two days later there was a great trouble, I could not guess.”
“What was the trouble ? ” I asked.
“It was about a Shan princess. I do not know all that
happened, only the queen was very angry. The Shan princess was one of her maids
of honour too, like me, only much older. And the queen was very angry. First
she intended to have her killed, but then she changed her mind. I think the
king must have spoken to the queen, for they spent a very long time together
that day talking alone in the little white room by the fountain. But the Shan v
princess was taken into the gardens and beaten once or twice to dishonour her,
and then thrust through the gates out of the palace.
“I do not know what became of her, but she never came
back again. No one ever spoke of her any more. And for days after the queen was
angry with the king, and the king was very much ashamed of himself. I think, Thakin, this was the first quarrel they had ever had. I was
so sorry for the queen because her eyes were big with tears for several days,
and though she was very cross to us, yet we were all sorry for her.”
CHAPTER VIII
THE ENTHRONEMENT OF THE KING
“After that no Shan princesses were allowed to come
into the palace and be maids of honour to the queen. It was the custom always
for the Shan princes to send their daughters to be wives to the king of Burma,
but in future this was not to be. If any Shan princess came she was never
allowed to be in the palace. She was either returned to the prince her father,
or shut up in a sort of prison where no one was allowed to come. When the Shan
princes heard how their daughters, whom they sent to be queens, were treated
they became very angry. But the queen did not care. As long as the king was
faithful to her she did not care who was angry. She was ready to do anything to
keep him.”
“It was hard on the princesses,” I said.
And my maid of honour replied with a sigh, “ Yes, it
was hard on them. But the queen was afraid of herself; who could blame her ?
Any woman would do so, just as the queen did.”
There was never any peace for the queen. She could
never rest and shut her eyes and be sure that all would go well. She must watch
always, lest the king her husband be taken from her, and she became but one
wife among many. If sometimes the queen was called, with reason, cruel and
revengeful, a woman who could not forgive, let this be remembered on her side,
that she was fighting always for that which was more to her than life. There
was always some danger pressing her, some imminent danger, that it took all her
strength and all her will to avert. No sooner was the Shan princess disposed of
than there arose a new peril.
It was necessary for the king to be enthroned, to go
through that ceremony which to them was equivalent to our coronations. It was
time that the king was king, there was no one else to dispute his power, his
brothers were dead or in banishment, and he had no rival near his throne. But
that was not sufficient. He must be crowned, there must be a great ceremony in
the palace, and all the people must be called, and King Thibaw must there before his ministers and soldiers take the oaths that all the kings
of Burma had to swear to. Until this was really done he was not king; he was
but a locum tenens sitting upon a vacant throne, and his reign was not assured.
To signify to the nations and to foreign powers that King Thibaw was in very truth in undisputed possession of the kingdom the ceremony must be
performed.
But to do this the king must be married. Here was the
trouble. The king must be married, so that when the oaths were taken he should
have by his side a queen to share with him the responsibility of his promises,
the glory of his power. And the middle princess could not be that queen; for
she was but a second daughter. While the elder princess lived, the king could
never publicly marry the middle princess. He might love her and take her as his
wife, and give her all the power and all the glory of the queenship, but chief
queen she could never be. Even the power of the king failed here. There was
limit beyond which even the K strength and courage of the middle princess could
not carry her.
She had to bow her head to necessity, knowing perhaps
that it was but a form, and though her sister might be carried into the palace
as chief queen, yet that it would be but a shadow of grandeur, and that all the
reality of power, of love, of possession would remain hers.
She consented to the wedding.
And so after two years of the king’s accession to the
throne, in the full moon of October 1880, King Thibaw was married to the elder princess.
The full moon of October is always a great feast in
Burma. It is the end of the Buddhist Lent. The two months of fasting are over,
and the rains’ are gone, and the south wind is dead. The north wind is
beginning to blow down life-giving coolness from the far-away hills, and the
sky is become clear as a sapphire. With the full moon the fast ends and all the
people rejoice.
On that day was King Thibaw married to the elder princess. It was a great ceremony, gay and beautiful and
joyous as these people knew how to make their festivals, and all the palace was
crowded with people.
It began as all festivals begin with presents to the
monks. For no Buddhist can be happy until he knows that he has given of his
wealth and of his property for the happiness of those who live about him, and
purified his heart with charity, so that all may be well with him. Great
offerings were made to the monks, of robes and of books, strange books written
in golden letters on lacquered leaves and bound with crimson. Fruit there was
too, and flowers, great heaps of flowers and food of all kinds. There are so
few things a monk may receive that the choice of gifts is limited. And when the
monks were satisfied there was yet left plenty for the people, for generosity
is a virtue that people believe in here.
Then was formed a great procession, and the king and
the elder princess were carried on their golden chair amid all the people,
followed by the princesses and the maids of honour and the ministers wearing
all their court costumes, a great crowd. The procession went through the
gardens and up the steps of the palace to the great throneroom, guarded by
many troops. There the king and the queen— she was now for a moment queen —were
placed upon the throne, and the great multitude knelt before them and there was
a dead silence.
Then the ministers read out the oaths. One by one they
were read out, so that all the people could hear, and one by one the king and
the queen swore to them.
They were such oaths as these: To be honourable and
just, to be kind hearted and free from revenge, to be peace loving and averse
from bloodshed. The king swore to maintain the faith of the Buddha and remember
the holy men, to keep the offices and courts of his nation free from all blame,
to remember always that the people were his care, and that the poor were to be
cherished and not ground down. All the oaths that the ministers offered did the
king accept. The people were surprised at this; for his father Mindon, the
great king, had refused to swear some of the oaths. w How can I refrain from
bloodshed,” cried King Mindon, “and be a good king ? The wicked must be
punished, and who can punish them but I the king?”. So King Mindon would not
take all the oaths.
But King Thibaw accepted
them all and swore to them before the people. And those that knew him say that
he meant them all—that as far as lay in his power he kept them always to the
end. No one doubts but that he was an honest king.
After the ceremony there were feasts and dances and
amusements all the day, and all the night too. Every one rejoiced that the king
was at length upon his throne, that he had taken to himself the queen whom he
would have. In all the palace there was rejoicing and music and lights, and the
laugh of the people who are glad.
But the middle princess sat alone. All day she sat
alone in her room in the palace, waiting till the king returned. Though the
queen-mother and all the princesses and all the maids of honour were at the
ceremony, yet would the middle princess not go. “Ah, Thakin,”
says my maid of honour, “ how could she go? For the king was hers, her very
own. How could she go and see him sitting on the throne with another, or join
in the train that followed another queen than herself? Some women might have
done so, but the middle princess could not.
“ All day she sat in her rooms in the palace with the
shutters down, to shut out the sight of the many people passing and the sound
of the music and the laughter. All were gone to the procession but she, and her
rooms were empty. We were all ordered to the procession. But now and again some
of us would come very quietly and enter the ante-chamber and peep into the
room, afar off, in case that we were wanted. But she never noticed us. All day
she sat quite still with eyes of stone, and even when they brought her food she
did not notice. The night fell, and the moon came out, and there were great
white beams across the darkness of the room, while outside all was as light as
day. Half the night passed and the king did not come, because he was at the pwè
in the portico. And then at last the king came. Though he was newly married
that day to the elder princess, yet when the festivities were over he came
straight back to the middle princess, without a thought of her who was become
his chief queen.”
The elder princess was given the great state
apartments that were for the reigning queen, and there she lived for a time.
The queen’s apartments were hers, and the name of chief queen, and that was
all.
As for the middle princess, she did not want any
rooms. Her rooms were the king’s rooms, and with him she always lived. That the
king had married the elder princess made no difference. It was because only of
custom. And before long the elder princess lost even what she had. “ Let her
return,” said the middle princess to the king. “What do we two want with her so
near us?” And the king agreed. So the elder princess returned to the rooms of
her mother, and the king never saw her again. Even her name abandoned her. She
was queen but for a day, and after that there was no queen but the middle
princess. If one spoke of the queen, that was whom he meant— the middle
princess. There was no other queen but she.
CHAPTER IX
THE “STEAMER DOG”
“How was the palace furnished?”, I asked. “Did the
king go in for European furniture at all, chairs and tables and such things?”
“No,” said my maid of honour, “the king and queen did
not like to sit on chairs, nor did they care for furniture except just their
own things. They sat on cushions covered with velvet and with silk. The only
time they sat on a chair was when they played the big musical box that they had
got from France. It was a very big box and it played K our own Burmese tunes,
such as they play at pwès. The queen was very fond of
it, and the king too often played it in the evenings. It was very pretty, and
went ‘tink, tink, tink,’ like a lot of silver bells on a pagoda.
“There were mats and carpets on the floors, some of
which came from France, and there were great mirrors.
“These mirrors were very large, taller than a man, and
you could see all of yourself at once in them. And they were so clear, it was
like looking through very clear water at another person the same as yourself.
The queen was very fond of looking at herself in these mirrors, and we too,
yes, all of us liked to look at ourselves in the mirrors when we got a chance.
But there was nearly being a sad catastrophe about these mirrors.
“The queen had a little dog, a very small beast with
long silky hair and big ears and eyes. The queen was very fond of it, had
taught it to sit up when she clapped her hands, and it was very clever. She
always had it with her. One day it was lost.
“Such a search there was about that dog. People were
going to and fro about the palace asking, ‘Have you
seen Mebya’s little steamer dog?’ (the queen was
called Mebya) and every one was answering, ‘No, I
have not seen it.’ I was asked about twenty times and I too went about and
inquired. But no news could be obtained. The queen was in great distress. ‘Who
can have stolen my dog ?’ And every one assured her that no one could have
possibly stolen her dog. ‘Who could steal the queen’s dog? ’ we answered ; ‘no
one would steal it. The little dog must have fallen into the water and been
eaten by a big fish, or it may have been carried off by a kite. Of course no
one would take it?
“It happened that next day the queen gave orders to
move one of the mirrors. It had not been properly placed, and it must be taken
away and put elsewhere. And when the mirror was moved the men found behind it,
squeezed against the wall, the queen’s little dog.
“One of the soldiers who had been moving the mirror
came to the garden where the queen was with the dead little dog in his arms and
told the queen about it. The queen was very sorry to see her dog dead and she
took it in her hands and stroked it. And then she became very angry and said it
was disgraceful carelessness on the part of the soldiers who had first put up
the mirror. She would have them all executed at once, she said, because of
their killing the dog by carelessness.
The king was very much disturbed when he heard the queen say this. He patted her soothingly on the shoulder and he said, “Think now, Su, Su, what this is you are about to do. Here is only a little dog, and because it is dead, you would take the lives of perhaps twenty men. For these mirrors are very heavy, and many men must have been working at them.’ “Maung, Maung,” said the queen to the king, “I do not
think your soldiers are any better than animals, or they would not have let my
little dog die like this. They ought to be executed.
“But the king patted her shoulder again.
“You are angry now, Su, Su, but you would be dreadfully sorry to-morrow if you had a lot of men killed because of your dog. See now it was only an accident. “But the queen was very angry and moved away towards
the palace to give the order to have the men executed, and the king went with
her, speaking soothing words to her as she went. We all looked at each other in
fear and followed behind, horrified at what the queen proposed to do. We all
hoped that the king would succeed in quieting the queen. And he did. After he
had talked to her for a little, she became more calm and she said that because
the king asked her she would extend her mercy to the soldiers who had killed
her little dog, but that they must be very careful in future. Then the little
dog was buried in the garden, and soon we forgot all about him and the narrow
escape the men had, who put the mirrors in the palace. But it gave us a great
fright at the time.
“We often got frights in the palace. Things were
always happening that made us afraid for some one or another, but when the
danger was passed we quickly forgot all about it.”
They breakfasted about nine o’clock, so my maid of
honour told me, and they dined at four o’clock or five in the evening. At midday
the queen would have a little luncheon of cake, Japanese cakes. She had a
Japanese cook-woman who knew how to make sugar cakes which my maid of honour
tells me were very good.
“The queen would give us some,” she said, “ when she
was pleased with any of us. She was always ready to give things. She was very
generous.”
Their breakfast and dinner were just rice like those
of other Burmans. “I never supposed,” said my maid of honour, “that people
could live on anything but rice. The king and queen ate rice, and, of course,
there was curry too. It was v brought in golden bowls by the man who cooked it,
and he had to eat a little of each dish to show that there was no poison in
it.”
“Was there ever any poison?”, I asked.
And she said, “No, no one ever tried to poison the
king. Why should they? If there had been any of his brothers alive in the
palace then no doubt attempts would have been made to poison the king. But they
were all dead, Thakin, all but the two princes who
had fled to Lower Burma. All was peace in the palace and in the kingdom.”
They are very temperate people the Burmese, temperate
in all ways, eating not very much ; you never see a gross fat man or woman in
all the country, drinking not at all. There are stories amongst the English of
how the king drank, and they are all untrue. My maid of honour laughed when I
told them to her.
“Thakin,” she said, “there
was just a little story about the king when he first came to the throne, that
he was so delighted at being king, so giddy at the sudden change that he hardly
knew where he was. One evening he was led away by some of his pages and drank
some beer, and disgraced himself. But he only did it once, and he was
dreadfully ashamed of himself for long afterwards, that he had thus forgotten
how a king should behave, that all the teaching of his days in the monastery
were broken so quickly.
“The king was very much given to religion, Thakin, he was very fond of the sacred books and he often
sent for the monks to come and teach him concerning all those things. And when
the monk came the king would come down from his golden chair and sit on the
floor with the pages and the monk would sit on the chair.
“He was fond of quoting from the sacred books, and he
was full of proverbs and wise sayings. I think, Thakin,
he would have done very well as a monk, he would have been a very good man, a
very good man in a monastery where all temptation was kept from him. But it is
very hard to be a king. When you have the power to do things, it is very
difficult not to do them. Every one liked the king because he was good-natured
and kind and never wished to harm any one at all. Twice a day, morning and
evening, he would go to the pagoda and repeat the teaching of the sacred books
that he had learnt in the monastery when he was a monk. I suppose, Thakin, he would hardly realise them then; but now that he
is far away from all his people a prisoner in a strange land he must
understand, Trouble, weariness, illusion,’ there is nothing in all the world
but that.”
“Is that what they say at the pagoda when they pray?”,
I asked, and my maid of honour said, “Yes, that is what they say.”
For my maid of honour is religious; she too goes to
the pagoda often and to the rest-houses to hear the law read and to fast on
every Sunday. She has beads which she passes through her slender fingers when
she repeats her prayers. She showed me hers once. They are just a string of
plain beads, not at all pretty nor ornamental.
“The queen”, I asked, “did she too] go to the pagoda
?”
“Yes, Thakin, she too would
go twice a day, at sunrise and sunset, to the pagoda, and she would say as the
king did, (Trouble, weariness, illusion,’ and think of the teaching of the
great teacher.”
“Is that all?”, I asked; “would she not pray for
anything to be given her ? ”
My maid of honour answered slowly, “How should I know, Thakin ? The monks say there is no prayer, that it is
no good, that it is wrong. But many women pray. Whom do they pray to ? I do not
know. Perhaps the Teacher may hear; there in the Great Peace, he may hear and
understand and help us who cry to him. What do they pray for ? I think all
women pray much the same. The queen would ask that she might keep the love of
her husband and that her little son might not die. A queen would not pray any
different from other women, Thakin, would she ? Her
son died from small-pox, and the Queen was very sorry. The little girls did not
die.
“They lived in a separate part of the palace, and
every morning they came to make their bows to the king and queen—their father
and mother. The girls lived, but the son died. And yet the queen did all she
could to have strong children. When a baby was coming, she would eat lizard’s
eggs out of the jungle. They were toasted over a fire and are very strong food,
and she would eat the flesh of unborn calves. Only she of all the people in the
palace was allowed to eat beef, and then only when she was about to have a
baby. But it was no good, the son died, Thakin. And
the queen wanted a son to be king after her husband. Now I have heard that in
that far place she has a son. I do not know if it be true, but if it be true,
yet will he never be king after his father now.”
That, my maid of honour told me, was the queen’s
greatest sorrow, that her son died ; and her great trouble, her great continued
aim in life was to keep her husband true to her, to retain for herself the sole
place in his affections. She tried every means to do this : by watching the
king, by keeping temptation out of his way, and also, because she was without
doubt a very clever woman, by making herself always pleasant and gracious to
the king and by trying in all ways to retain her beauty. She was most careful
about this my maid of honour says, careful to be always dressed in good taste,
always neat, and with her face properly powdered and her hair beautifully
arranged. She knew where the power of woman lies, and she did all she could to
make herself attractive to the king. There was a European maid of honour in the
palace, as I have said, and through this maid the queen obtained from Paris all
the most famous cosmetiques to make her complexion
clear and her lips red and her eyes bright, that she might be fair in his eyes.
There was no one in the palace, says my maid of honour, like the queen, no one
that had her grace and presence.” I do not know, Thakin,
how the king could look on any one after the queen.”
Yet he did. The Shan princess, if she was the first
was not the last, and the next case did not end even so well as that.
It is a sad story, the story she told me of the king’s
next infidelity, full of pathos I think, it leaves one full of compassion for
every one concerned: the king, and the girl, and the girl’s people, but as much
as any for the queen, one who felt herself disdained and plotted against,
obliged to be on her guard and defend herself against all around her.
CHAPTER X
THE KING’S MISTRESS
It is the story of the Yenaung prince and the Kanni Wun’s daughter, and this is how
my maid of honour tells it.
“The Yenaung prince was not
of royal birth at all. Who his people were I do not know, but they were not of
great family or of any influence, and he became a prince all through the
affection of the king. For when Prince Thibaw was a
lad at school in the monastery the boy who was afterwards the Yenaung prince was at school with him, and they became
friends. They must have had some tastes and desires in common one would
suppose, but it is difficult to guess what they were, for in after life they
differed as much as two men could differ. But they were friends, and although
in those days there seemed to be no possibility that Prince Thibaw could come to be king yet his schoolfellow believed in him.
“You will be king one day,” said the boy to the
prince. “You will surely be king.”
“And when, as they were playing in the garden of the
monastery, a kite swooped down and carried off the prince’s turban the
schoolfellow was even more certain.
“It is a sign,” he said, “that you will be king.”
“The prince and the other boys laughed, but the boy
was unmoved.
“You will surely be king. And promise me that when you
are king you will not forget me, who am now telling you of what is to come.”
“The prince promised; and when in the course of events
the prophecy was fulfilled and the prince became king he did not forget. Thibaw as prince or as king never forgot his friends, and
as soon as he was firmly on the throne he sent for the boy, who was now become
a young monk, and raised him to the dignity of prince. All that the Yenaung prince asked the king gave: money and power and his
affection, so that the Yenaung prince became almost a
little king himself.
“King Thibaw loved him and
the very poor people admired him because he was generous to them and gave away
his money freely, but the better people disliked him and feared him, and the
queen hated him above all.
“The better people feared him because he carried off
their wives and daughters. Why the queen hated him will be seen later.
“He had many wives. It is impossible to say how many
wives he had. Whenever he saw a nice-looking girl as he passed through the city
he would send his followers to bring her to him, so that whenever it was feared
he was about to ride through the city, all the pretty girls were hidden away by
their parents lest they should be carried off.
“It was not necessary for the prince to see a girl
before desiring her. If he only heard she was pretty that was sufficient: he
must have her at once. And so men would come and tell him things out of spite.
If a merchant had a beautiful daughter, wicked men would demand money from him,
and if he would not pay, then they went and told the Yenaung prince that the girl was more ' beautiful than a fairy. The prince would
immediately send off for her, and she would be torn from her home and given to
the prince. No one could resist his force, for he had many armed men and was,
moreover, the favourite of the king.
“The Yenaung prince lived
there in his strong house with his many wives and his numerous followers. No
one dared to try and interfere with him. He had electric bells fitted up from
his room to the rooms of the wives, one bell to each, and when he wanted any
particular wife he just touched her bell and she came running quickly. He did
this so that the other wives should not know who was with him and be jealous.
They only heard a bell ring somewhere, but they could not tell who it was the
prince favoured. If he wanted them all he rang all the bells, and there was a
noise as of a tempest of ringing, and girls came running from all their many
rooms.
“The queen did not approve of this at all. She thought
the Yenaung Prince was a wicked man living in such a
scandalous way, and she had many complaints from parents about the carrying off
of their daughters. The queen heard their complaints and she was very sorry,
but she could do nothing.
“Often she spoke to the king about it, but without
result. .
“What can I do?” the king would say ; “it is my
brother’s way. He has not got a wife like you, Su, Su —so he always called the
queen— he has not got a wife like you. Perhaps he is trying to find one. When
he does all this will stop. Shall we try and find one ?”
“But the queen was not to be laughed off like this.
She was very angry. She was scandalised at the prince’s wickedness with women,
and she feared the great escort of armed men he kept ready round his house. She
feared too his influence upon the king, an influence that was always used
against her.
“For the Yenaung prince used
to laugh at the king because he was under the rule of the queen. He would jeer
at the king, and the queen knew this and hated him in consequence.
“Where are the king’s wives?”, the Yenaung prince would ask. “The king our father had fifty wives; where are King Thibaw’s wives ? Is it true they are locked up in prison ?”
“The king would look foolish at such questions, and
then the Yenaung prince would tempt him to do as he
did and have many mistresses. Gradually there grew up between the queen and the
prince a deadly hatred and a knowledge that one of them must conquer the other,
for that they could not continue like this. And so each sought whereby the
other’s influence might be destroyed.
“One day, about four years after he had come to the
throne, King Thibaw went out of the palace to visit
his brother the Yenaung prince. The king did not
often go out of the palace, and then not very far, but sometimes he would go
just as far as his brother’s and stay there for a short time and talk, for he
was very fond of the prince. And when they were alone there together in a room,
the prince got up for a moment and presently returned with a girl, leading her
by the hand, and the prince sat down again by the king and the girl knelt
before them.
“The girl was very pretty, and she was confused and
afraid to be brought thus before the king and she blushed, which made her more
beautiful than before, and the king’s eyes fell upon her with delight.
“See now,” said the prince to the king, “how beautiful
she is: her eyes, how big they are, and her figure, how tall and slight. Is she
not fit to be a queen ?”
“The king was delighted, and he fell in love with her
as she sat there before him, and he said he had never seen any one so beautiful
as she.
“She is of good family,” said the prince; “her father
is the Wun of Kanni, a powerful official and anxious
to please the king. And the girl she is but seventeen years old, sweet as a
champak bud, with a heart of gold.”
“Then seeing that the king’s love was captured he went
away out of the room leaving the king and the girl alone.
“The king was dreadfully in love with the girl. He
loved her with all his soul and for a time he forgot the love of the queen. He
forgot to love her, but he did not forget to fear her. What was he to do with
this girl ? He could not come often to the prince’s house to meet her there,
and if Mebya knew of her being introduced to the
palace, there would be terrible trouble. What was to be done. The prince had a
plan ready. The girl should accompany the king back to the palace dressed as a
boy!”
This amongst the Burmans is quite easy. It meant just
the change of a long silk instead of a skirt and a rearrangement of her hair.
Girls and boys when they are under twenty are often so alike that one can
easily pass for the other. It is quite a common ruse to dress one as the other.
In a story I have to tell later on, it was a boy who was dressed as a girl and
brought into the palace. In this case it was the girl who was to be dressed as
a boy. And so in the Yenaung prince’s house the girl
was dressed up.
The flowers were taken from her hair and it was tied
up like a man’s, the powder was washed from her face and her necklaces and
armlets were laid aside. A man’s jacket was given to her and a man’s long silk
paso, while a sword was hung across her tender shoulders as if she were the
follower of one of the court officials. And so dressed she was introduced
quietly into the palace that evening and kept in a room on the pages’ side of
the palace, and no one knew. For the queen was sick, and her eye not so watchful
as before.
How long she remained there unknown to all save a few
I cannot say exactly, but it was several months. Of course it required time for
the girl to consolidate her power over the king and for the plotters to find
their opportunity. It was not intended that the girl should so remain for ever;
some time she was to be queen. She was most carefully instructed by the Yenaung prince and her father of the game she was to play.
She was to exert every nerve to bring the king entirely into her influence and
to destroy that of the queen. She was so beautiful and so clever the plotters
were sure she could do that. The plotters were also wide awake, strengthening
their own influences and waiting on events, and they intended as soon as their
plans were ripe to urge the king to dismiss the queen as the queen had herself
dismissed her eldest sister, and place the Kanni Wun’s daughter on the throne as queen.
It was a daring plot. It must have been nearly
successful for the girl to have been there so long and undiscovered. For the
palace was full of prying eyes that saw, full of listening ears that heard all
that went on ; full of secret tongues that told the queen all that she might
desire to learn. And yet for months she did not know.
The girl lived there disguised as a page, hidden in
the men’s part of the palace, and the king met her daily, sometimes here and
sometimes there, where no one could disturb them, and the queen did not know.
How it all came out I do not know, but suddenly it was
all discovered.
My maid of honour gave a scornful little laugh when
she told me.
“They were very clever ; they thought themselves so
very clever and that they could deceive the queen and dethrone her. As if their
little minds could plot against the queen whose mind was greater than any one’s
in the kingdom.
“For a time they were successful, but at last the
queen found it all out. And in a thought, in a moment, before the king had even
time to realise that he was discovered, before the girl and her people had time
to attempt to escape, the girl and her father and all those who had taken part
in the plot were seized and executed.
“Thakin, it was a terrible
time. The queen was like a mad thing, when she saw how very nearly she had been
to losing the king and all that made her life worth living.
“She had forgiven the Shan princess, but there could
be no more forgiveness. Moreover she was older now and stronger and her power
was established. All those who plotted against her must understand that they
staked their lives on their plots. There were many people in this plot— all who
could be found were executed.”
“And the king?”, I asked. “He was king. Could he not
save his mistress and those who had helped him? Was he quite helpless?”
“Ah ! Thakin, you do not
understand. If you had ever seen the queen you would not ask that. No one could
stand against her when she was angry. Not the ministers, nor the king, nor any
one. It were better to face a tigress. Every one bent and shivered before her,
and whatever orders she gave were carried out. The king was but a foolish
school-boy before her. When the queen was angry she was queen and king too, and
there was no one beside her in power.
“She was dreadfully angry. No words can say how angry
she was at being disdained and plotted against by little people, at having the
king’s affections stolen from her. She was fighting for her life, for what was
more than life to her.
“People say she was cruel and vindictive, but she was
only cruel to those who plotted against her.
“And so the girl, the beautiful young girl, with the
big eyes and the skin like gold, was executed, and all her relations.
“Of all those in the plot but two remained—the king
and the Yenaung prince.”
It must be remembered, when considering the king’s
part in all this, that he was entitled by all law, by all custom, to have four
chief queens. His father, King Mindon, the great king, had done so— all kings
of Burma had done so.
That he should take to himself the Kanni Wun’s daughter to be a queen was not considered disgraceful,
but, on the contrary, honourable and right. To all the men of the old school
the king’s subservience to one wife was considered weak and contemptible. All
the influence of the whole palace, of the queen-mother, of the ministers, of
all the entourage of the throne was lent to induce the king to take other
wives. Perhaps thereby the ascendency of the queen might be destroyed and the
petticoat government overthrown. The king was within his rights in all he did,
and the catastrophe is but a proof of the extraordinary ascendency this girl
queen had obtained over every one.
Custom and tradition, influence of ministers, the
opinion of the nations were nothing to her. She threw all these things to the
winds, and no one could stand before her.
CHAPTER XI
THE DEATH OF THE YENAUNG PRINCE
Once more was the queen again queen. She had
overthrown her enemies and her rivals, and she stood supreme in all the palace,
in all the kingdom. No one was so great as she, because she held the king in
the palm of her hand and could do unto him as she would. All her enemies had
fallen ; all who were concerned in bringing the Kanni Wun’s daughter into the palace were dead, save one.
The Yenaung prince was still
there. Though the queen could kill many people yet could she not kill him. He
was brother to the king, and was safe. The king loved him as he had always
done, and before long would listen to him again. When the queen frowned at the
prince and refused to receive him he only laughed. She could not hurt him.
Then a strange thing happened.
It was a custom always of the Burmese kings to have
four great chests placed in various quarters of the city. They were made of
teak, very strong, with gold mouldings upon them and a heavy lock to fasten
them. At the top was a slit, and when people wished to petition the king and
could not gain access to the palace to present their petitions, they put them
in one of these boxes. They were brought every day to the palace to the king,
and the queen opened them with the keys, and the letters and petitions were
read by the queen, who showed them to the king.
“Thus the king came to hear of many things that would
not otherwise have reached his ears. All sorts of letters were put in the
boxes—complaints against officials for dishonesty and cruelty, petitions for
justice and for the king’s favour, accusations against high ministers. Any one
who had a hatred towards an official wrote a petition secretly and put it in
the box, and so it came to the king. Many of these were never signed with any
name, were but stings in the dark, and some were untrue, but often these boxes
were the means of discovering great frauds and great injustice and putting them
right. The king never did anything merely on the letters themselves, but when
an accusation was made he appointed a minister to inquire into the case and see
if it were true. If it were, he punished the culprit; if not, he tried to find
out who wrote the letter so as to punish him.
“Now, about this time the boxes came to be full of
accusations against the Yenaung prince. He was
plotting against the king, so the letters said. He wanted to be king himself.
He declared openly that King Thibaw was only a puppet
ruled by a woman, unfit to be the king of a great nation. King Thibaw, he said, knew nothing of the world, while he, the
prince, knew a great deal. The king was cooped up in his palace under the
command of a girl, but the prince went about, and the people knew him, and the
soldiers liked him. So ran these unsigned petitions.
“Every day they came in, every day fresh proofs were
offered of the truth of these accusations. The prince was collecting men. He
had a little army at his house, he had many more up and down the kingdom. He
knew also how to lead fighting men, while the king was but a monk let loose.
“These things went to the king’s heart because many of
them were true. The prince had a great following. He knew that, and the prince
knew how to manage his men, while he the king knew nothing. If it came to a
fight the prince would have the advantage. Then, many of the ministers were
angry with the king, and more especially with the queen. The Kanni Wun had many relations and friends, and all these were
alarmed at the way the king had allowed the queen to execute the Wun and girl. Many people were disgusted at it all.
“So when the warnings came thicker and thicker every
day the king began to believe them and to be much afraid. He caused inquiries
to be made and these seemed to support the letters. It was true that the prince
was very angry with the king about the Wun’s daughter. It is true that many officials went to see the prince. It was true
that he had a great following of armed men. Therefore the king soon believed
that it was true that the prince intended to depose him and execute him and the
queen.
“He was terribly frightened. How much of all this was
really true I cannot say. People who ought to know declare the prince never had
any idea of dethroning his brother. They say that these letters and warnings
were all sent by the queen, all a plot of hers to cause the destruction of her
enemy the prince. Who shall say ? The lives of kings and princes are full of
terrors; it is easy to make a king believe that there is a plot against him
even if it be not true. There are so many true plots that no king can afford to
disregard what he hears, even if he is not sure. A mistake, too much
confidence, means fall and death. So the king believed.
“After the execution of the Wun’s daughter, for some time the king had not seen the prince. The king was very
much ashamed and the prince was very angry. Perhaps it was the king’s shame
that made him quicker to think evil of his brother.
“Then one day the king sent for the prince. He sent a
pleasant message that it was a long time since he had seen his brother and
would he come to the palace, for there was something the king wished to say to
him.
“The message was pleasant and the prince suspected
nothing. He had no idea that the king had been told that he, the prince, was
plotting against him. He had no idea there was anything in the wind but just a
little talk. Had he guessed he would never have gone. But he guessed nothing
and he went.
“He came to where the king was sitting with the queen
in their rooms near the portico, and he bowed down on his face before the king
as is the court custom.
“And as he bowed, the king drew forth from his sheath
the short sword that he always wore and held it over the prince, his face full
of anger.
“You deserve,” he said, “that I should kill you as you
sit; you have been plotting to kill me. What can you say to save your life?”
“The prince was very much surprised, very much afraid,
but for a time he said nothing, and the king remained there with his drawn
sword over the prince, the blade shaking with the anger that was in the king.
All those who were about were terribly afraid and very sorry for the prince,
fearing what would come next, all but the queen. She was not sorry, nor afraid,
but she looked at the prince kneeling there in peril of his life and she smiled
and smiled, but between her parted lips were her teeth tight closed.
“What have you to say”, said the king, “you, whom I
have loved as my own brother, you who have plotted to kill me ? What have you
to say”
And the prince answered that he had nothing to say. “If
you want to kill me, kill,” he said.
“And so because he was too proud to answer, the king
ceased to question him and he was given to the guards and led away to prison.
Then were messengers sent to the prince’s house to
search it for proof of his guilt. They found there what was they said certain
proof. In his bedroom there was a great golden bed, and that bed was made in a
fashion that only kings are allowed to use. So there was no doubt about the
prince’s guilt. He was plotting to be king and was in his heart king already.
In public he was prince, but in private, to his wives and to himself, he was
king.
“The report was brought back to the palace and told to
the king, and he believed. He was very angry with the prince his brother, and
he left him there in the prison till he thought how he must be dealt with. He
must consider what could be done with the prince his brother.
“The queen watched the king’s face to know what he
would do; she watched and waited. When the prince was arrested the queen was
glad, and when the news of his royal bed was brought she was still more
pleased. For the king’s face became clouded and he was angry.
“But when the next day the king’s face began to
lighten, the queen became anxious. She watched and watched, and she saw at
length the king’s gentle-heartedness, his love for his brother, coming back,
and all the anger fading away from his eyes. He began to be sorry for his
brother and to think of him, and he ceased to talk to the queen as they were
sitting together and to answer to her questions. Each day after the prince’s
arrest the king seemed to be drifting away from the queen.
“All the whole palace witnessed it, and we were sure
that before many days the king would forgive the prince and restore him to
honour as before.
“And then”, says my maid of honour, “one day the
queen gave news to the king. It was in the little garden pavilion early in the
morning, and the king and queen sate there and listened to the birds who called
from bush to bush through all the scented groves. They were very fond of
sitting there just by themselves while the princesses and the maids of honour
walked down below or played in the gardens round about. No one would be near
only I, who rolled the cigarettes for the queen, and a girl who fanned her.
“The king and queen sat and they said nothing. The
king’s eyes were far away watching the purple shadows on the far-off mountains
to the east, sitting very quietly. The queen made one or two remarks to him,
but he did not reply, only looked and looked at the far-off hills. And the
queen watched his face, trying to see what was on his mind.
“The cries of the girls running in the gardens came to
us, broken by the trees, and gongs rang now and then in the palace grounds.
“The queen turned suddenly to the king.
“Maung, Maung,” she said,” what are you thinking of ?”
The king nodded towards the far-off hills. “See how
cool they look,” said the king, “and how fresh, while here it is so hot.”
The queen looked at the hills. “Yes,” she said, “from
far away they look beautiful, but if you come near who can tell? Perhaps they
are not so.”
“Behind these hills,” continued the king, “is my own
city, the one from which I was named, the city of Thibaw.
But I have never been there. Some day we will go, Su, Su, to see it.
“Yes”, said the queen, “when there is no more
trouble. When the country is quiet, and there is no one to plot, then will we
go?
“‘You and I, Su, Su,” said the king, smiling at her, “and
my brother the Yenaung prince. You will be friends
with him then again, and all of us will go together?
But at the prince’s name the queen’s face grew angry.
Her eyes shone out from under her drawndown brows as
she turned upon the king.
“Never will you go with the Yenaung prince,” she said sharply. “Never will you see him again. For he is dead?”
“The king turned with frightened face to the queen and
put his hand upon her shoulders.
“What is that you say, Su, Su?”
The queen shook off his hand. “Oh,” she said, “did you
not know ? Where are your ministers not to tell you ? I thought of course that
you knew. He died of fever last night.”
“The king looked at the queen and his face became full
of sorrow, and tears came into his eyes. “My brother”, he said, “my brother”,
and as he looked reproach came into his look, reproach of the queen and a
question that he dared not ask.
“But the queen stared back at the king, her face like
iron, and at length the king’s eyes fell before hers.
“I am very glad,” said the queen slowly. “I am glad
that he is dead”.
“At her words’ certainty came to the king. He knew
then of what sort of fever his brother had died.
“Without a word he rose. Without a word or sign he
came down from the summer-house, and went away walking very slowly towards the
palace and went up the steps towards his own rooms. He called to a page as he
went to fetch a secretary, and then the doors shut and the king was lost to
sight.
“But the queen never moved. Her face was quite white
and her breath came quickly as if she had been running in a race, and had won.
“Down below the girls ran to and fro in the gardens and splashed the waters, and the sounds came more clearly
because of the stillness in the pavilion.
“Then at length she too went away. But she did not
follow the king to his rooms as she went, but went now to the north of the
palace till she came to where her mother lived in the rooms by the little
golden spire. Here she went in leaving us without.
“Not all the rest of that day did she see the king,
for he kept to his own rooms.
“ So did the queen give the news to the king of the
death of her last enemy.”
CHAPTER XII
THE QUEEN’S SELF-JUSTIFICATION
“It was a day or two after the Yenaung prince died,” said my maid of honour, “and it was very hot in the palace.
Outside the sun was blazing down making the golden facades one great stream of
flame. And in the gardens the air was hushed in heat; the leaves hung
motionless upon the trees, and the shadows lay as pools in the grass. All the
birds were still, except the crows, who panted with red, opened beaks and cawed
hoarsely now and again.
“Inside the palace it was as silent as without. The
great state chambers were vacant. The queen had retired to her private
apartments to sleep, the king was away no one knew where. A few days before the
queen would never have allowed the king to go away from her, but now that the Yenaung prince was dead there was no one to fear, and she
could go and sleep in peace. Four or five girls were with the queen fanning
her, and awaiting her waking, but the rest of us were in our great room where
we stayed while on duty on the queen.
“It was so hot there, Thakin—you
know how hot it can be sometimes just before a storm comes. It was so hot we
did not know what to do. The great doors that gave upon the courtyard near the
fountain were wide open. For no man dared to come that side of the palace. The
approaches were all guarded by armed soldiers to keep intruders from the places
of the queen. And so, Thakin, although the doors were
widely opened so that any breeze might come in the girls were not afraid. Here
and there they sat about on cushions or mats upon the floor, reading, talking,
sleeping. Many had taken off their jackets that were tight and hot, and just
tossed a corner of their satin kerchiefs across their bosoms. They were so
pretty, Thakin, ah, so pretty as they lay about in
their silken dresses with soft, fair arms and shoulders against the gold and
crimson of the walls.
“I was sitting away in a dark cool corner of the great
room with another girl, my friend Ma Shwe Lon, and we talked to each other in
little whispers about all that had happened in the last few days. We were only
children in that far-away time, but children in a palace grow quickly and see
much. And so we talked of the Yenaung prince and how
he had died and how glad we all were. For the Yenaung prince had been to us a threat and fear. We knew he hated the queen and would
try to get her into trouble, and we loved the queen and hated the prince. So we
were glad that the prince was gone. It was to us as the lifting of a great
cloud, the passing of a terrible fear. For days and days we had hardly dared to
laugh or talk or play for the fear that hung over us. But now all was safe
again. Such a change no one can imagine it.
“But although we were all pleased, we knew that many
people were angry. The king was sad, and several ministers were angry and
afraid, and many of the common people were angry. For the devil prince had been
generous with the money the king gave him, and threw it to the people, and he
went often abroad in state for the people to see him, so that he was popular in
a way amongst the common folk. Many of them would be sorry at his death.
We talked to each other about this.
“Presently we noticed coming across the sun- drowned
courtyard two ladies. They came to our room and the head of our company of
maids of honour went to speak to them, and they sat down.
We were curious to know who they were and so we crept
quite near and hid behind a great golden pillar and looked at them.
“One of them we recognised at once as the wife of one
of the secretaries of the palace. She had been a maid of honour before she was
married to the secretary, and we knew her quite well.
“But the other girl was a stranger. She was very
pretty. Of all the girls that I have seen none have been prettier than this
girl. She was tall and rather slender and her hands were so tiny and so fair.
Her cheeks were round and soft, with little dimples in them when she smiled.
Her eyes were big and lustrous, like those of the deer that live by the feet of
the great hills, and her voice had a ripple in it as of water falling far away.
No one could see her and not love her, but she seemed a little sad, as if some
trouble had come to her and she was afraid. She sat leaning upon a cushion, and she kept her face to the ground and only spoke in little words when she was
addressed. She was come by the queen’s order, so we guessed, but for what
reason we could not tell. Only the chief maid of honour said to her, ‘ Sit down
here, Ma Le, and wait. Before long the queen will awake and will send for you.
And do not be afraid before the queen. Be sure that the queen will not wish to
hurt you. So be of good courage, and when the queen speaks to you answer
clearly?
“When I heard the chief maid of honour call her Ma Le,
and when I. looked carefully at her, I remembered who she was. For I had known
her a little when I was able to leave the palace and go to see my mother in the
city.
“She had lived not very far from us. I had not seen
her for a long time and she seemed changed, so that was why I did not recognise
her at once. But when I remembered who she was, I looked round the pillar at
her and nodded and smiled. And she, when she saw me, nodded and smiled too with
surprise at seeing me there. I could not go and speak to her then as I was
afraid of the chief maid of honour, so I went away back to my dark corner, and
sat and wondered why Ma Le had come to the palace, and what the queen wanted to
say to her, and why she looked sad. But I could not think of anything.
“Presently the queen’s gong rang, the clear silver
gong that warned us the queen was risen. All of us were awake at once. You saw
the girls who were lying asleep jump up in a hurry and those who were talking
stop in the middle of a sentence. There was no delay allowed when the queen
called. We put on our jackets in a great hurry, and one girl said to another,
‘Tell me now if my hair is straight ?’ ‘Are my flowers right? ‘Is the powder on
my face smudged?’ Such a hurrying there was and looking in mirrors and
straightening of dresses.
“Then we went out across the courtyard to the great
glass chamber with the dais at one end. All the room was covered with glass.
There were glass crystals on the pillars, and glass panels on the walls
containing flowers, and the ceiling was gold. In front, the room was open, the
walls lifting up, and there was the garden where the birds were beginning to
awake and the flowers to raise their heads as the cool fresh evening breeze
came wandering over them.
The queen was not in the room when we arrived, and so
we went and sat in our places at the back of the dais, and Ma Le with the lady
who came with her knelt in front awaiting the queen. Presently K the queen came
in with the king. They came handin-hand as they went
always, and their cushions were placed for them and they sat down on the dais.
The king was sad and troubled, but the queen was fresh from her sleep, and
laughed like a girl who is free from care, for she was but a girl, Thakin ; even when the palace fell she was only a girl
still.
“The queen looked round upon us all and smiled. She
liked to see us look pretty and happy ; we were her own maids of honour, and
she cared for us as if we had been her sisters. And then she looked at Ma Le
kneeling before the dais very much afraid, and her brows came together and she
asked, ‘ Who is this? Is this the girl whom the Yenaung prince stole ? ’ The lady with her said, ‘ Yes.’
“The pleasure was gone from the queen’s eyes, the
ripple that danced within them was dead, and we could see the anger in them
deep down, like a flame in the dark.
“‘This is,’ said the queen, ‘the girl whom the prince
stole. One of many whom he stole.’ She spoke very slowly in her clear voice,
clearer than any gong.
“Tell me, now,” said the queen to Ma Le, “tell to the
king, and to me, and to the princesses and the maids of honour, who you are,
and what it is that has happened to you. For we would hear what you have
suffered at that prince’s hands.”
“The queen ceased, and we all kept very quiet, looking
at Ma Le, waiting for her to speak. But she was so afraid that she could not.
Her shoulders trembled as she knelt, and her face was hidden in her hands.
“Then after a minute the queen spoke very softly.
“Do not be afraid”, she said. “There is no one here
but who will be kind to you. Are we not women and can understand ?”
“But Ma Le was still very much afraid and her voice
was full of tremble, and she began to speak, and stopped, and so I crept from
where I was very quietly, and I came to her and knelt by her and took her hand.
“I felt so sorry for her kneeling there, and she was
so pretty. It did not seem as if she was the grown-up woman and I the little
girl, but as if I was her big friend who ought to encourage her.
“Do not be afraid”, I whispered to her.
“The queen laughed and said, See now this very little
maid is not afraid. You are a big woman, so be not so frightened.
“Then at last Ma Le began to speak. At first she spoke
so low that the queen had to bend forward to listen, but after a little she got
more courage.
“She told of who she was, how her father had been a
goldsmith in the city, and how her mother had died when she was a little girl,
and she had lived alone with her father all her childhood. And how when she was
grown up to be a big girl she was married to her husband, who was an officer in
one of the king’s regiments of horse. Her husband came to her father’s house
and they all lived there together in such happiness as could never be forgotten.
“Her father worked at his work, making gold ornaments
and silver bowls for the ministers and the rich people of the palace, and her
husband went about his duties each day with his soldiers, returning every
evening to his wife who was waiting for him. Never was there any trouble or any
sorrow in that house. Then it happened that one day, in the middle of the day,
when it was very hot, Ma Le was asleep. She had been up very early in the
morning seeing to her husband’s wants and the household requirements, and so
she was tired and she went to sleep. And in her sleep there came to her a great
noise from outside, the sound of men shouting and the trampling of horses, the
rustle and movement of people.
“So, startled and not knowing what it could be, she
ran out into the verandah and looked.
“It was the Yenaung prince
passing by. With a great concourse of soldiers and servants, some in front of
him clearing the way, and others following behind, he came riding along on his
pony. Many of the people in the streets had run away down bye-streets or into
houses to get away from the men with the sticks, and those who could not so
escape were kneeling by the side of the road, and bowed to the prince as he
passed.
“And as Ma Le came running into the verandah her face flushed with sleep and her hair all
ruffled the prince passed just under the verandah.
“When Ma Le saw who it was she ran away within and
hid. But it was too late. For the prince had seen her.
“Then she told the queen of how terrified she was, and
how she had told her father and her husband when he came home and how for days
they lived in terror. And then one day her husband was sent for by the
commandant of his regiment and never returned, not though his wife waited up
all the night did he come back to her.
“But there came instead men from the Yenaung prince and they caught her and put her on an
elephant and carried her away to his house. Although she cried yet it was of no
use. Even as she now recalled it all tears came into her eyes, though she sate
before the queen.
“She told of how she was received into the prince’s
house and how many women there were there, and how she was taught to dance and
made to perform before the prince, as if she had been but a dancing girl.
Herewith she said things of what had happened in the prince’s house, things
that made the queen’s brows come lower and lower and even the king looked
ashamed. Of how many men were killed in that house and how the prince was said
to eat men’s flesh and to live as if he were lower than any beast.
“ There she lived many, many months until at last the
prince was dead and she was free.
“But now”, said Ma Le, “though I am free what is the
use of it ? For my father is dead with shame and my husband no one can tell
what has become of him. Surely he is dead too. And if he were not, who am I now
to be his wife, I that have been mistress to another man and made to dance like
a dancing girl ? Surely it was better that I too were dead with them.”
“So Ma Le told her story, and as she finished her eyes
were full of tears and her throat of sobs for her father and for her husband
and for herself. Many of the maids of honour too were full of sorrow for this
girl and they looked sad, but in the queen’s face there was both sorrow and
great anger. There was compassion for those who had suffered, anger for him who
had caused it, and she turned and looked at the king to see what he thought.
“But the king looked away. He was angry still with the
queen for the prince’s death and even though he was sorry for Ma Le yet would
he not show that he was angry with what his brother had done.
“So the queen turned away from the king and looked
upon the princesses and the maids of honour and those who were in attendance,
and she spoke :
“You have all heard” said the queen, “this story that
the girl has told us. It is a truth that should be carefully considered. For
she is not a common girl but of respectable people.
“Her father was a goldsmith and made no doubt many of
the gold things we have here. He was an honest man. And her husband was an
officer in the king’s cavalry. But the prince did not care for any of these
things. Because he liked her pretty face he cared not what trouble he brought
upon her and her husband. Surely even tigers are not so bad. Think now” she
went on to her maids of honour, “suppose this girl were you or your sister or
that her husband were your brother. Then will you understand how vile were the
deeds of this prince? She paused a moment and all of us were silent with fear
and sorrow, no one even moved.
“For the queen’s eyes blazed and her golden bracelets
trembled on her wrists and her face was white. She was terrible to look at.
Such”, she repeated very low and clearly, “was the prince, a dishonourer of
women, a murderer of men. Is it not right for all men to rejoice that he is
dead ?”
“She looked round upon the king, but he never moved,
he looked away as if not hearing, as if it were some private business of the
queen that was not for him. There was a long, long silence. Outside you heard
the birds twitter to each other in the gardens and the soft sweet murmur of the
breeze among the trees.
“A distant gong sounded in the guard.
“Thakin, this was the
defence of the queen, her justification before the king and people for the
execution of the Yenaung prince. For she knew that
the whole kingdom would talk about it, that many people that did not know would
perhaps condemn her because of her having him executed. And so she had called
Ma Le and made her tell her story there before all of us that we might
understand. And she knew that we would tell our relations and friends till
many heard of it.
“Was there ever a woman so clever as our queen? ”
CHAPTER XIII
ROYAL COOKERY
It was in February 1884 that the Yenaung prince was executed. The five years that the queen had sat upon the throne had
changed her from a child to a woman, had given into her hands all the power and
the authority of the kingdom. When in the early days of her reign the Shan
princess offended her, she was expelled from the palace, but when, later, the
Kanni Wun’s daughter attempted to usurp her
authority, the answer was death.
Five years of incessant watchfulness, of constant
danger, had turned this unformed girl into a remorseless queen. She had learnt
to fight and to win, and to show no mercy to the vanquished.
But in other ways she seems to have changed but
little, to have hardly grown older at all.
All the great world was hidden from her and her
husband. They lived within these palace walls shut in from all that matures the
understanding; of all that went on without they were hopelessly ignorant. They
did not know, and I do not think they very much cared. As long as the queen
could keep the king to herself she was satisfied and happy. That was all the
wisdom she wished to have.
The king’s desire was for a quiet life. If only there
could be peace, and people would give up scheming and plotting, quarrelling and
fighting, all would be well. As for political affairs, had they not ministers ?
So in the intervals between the plots and the
assassinations they played. They ran about the gardens and hid in the thickets,
and laughed with the abandon of children.
“Thakin,” said my maid of
honour, “ did you ever hear of a king and queen cooking their own dinner?”
I said that none of the kings and queens of my
acquaintance would do such a thing.
“No,” she acquiesced. “It is quite unheard of. But my
king and queen did so one day.”
“What for?”, I asked.
"For fun. There was nothing to do one afternoon.
It was hot, and we were all sleepy except the queen. She was not sleepy at all.
Suddenly she said to the king, ‘ There is nothing to do, let us cook our own
dinner. I never cooked a dinner, did you?’ The king said he never did. The
queen said it was a thing everybody ought to know, even kings, and it must be
great fun.
“We were sent off in a hurry. Some went to get
firewood, others to get earthenware pans for cooking, others for rice and
water. It was, ‘A hundred rupees for a pumpkin,’ or ‘Here, five hundred rupees
for some curry powder,’ or ‘A thousand rupees for a few chillies.’
“We got all the things at last, and put them down in
the shade outside in the garden, and the king and queen set to work. They
should not let any one help. So we sat around and looked on.
“The king lit the fire after much trouble, and made
himself dreadfully dirty doing it. One of us had to tell him how to do it, and
how to put three bricks to hold up the pots.
“The queen put the rice into the cooking-pot v with
water. She ought to have washed the rice first, but she did not know that. Then
the king set to and made another fire between three bricks and boiled the rice
while the queen made the curry. She did not know anything about making curries,
and she kept asking questions all the time. She never peeled the pumpkin, and
she put in far too much chillies.
While the king and queen were arguing how much salt
there ought to be in the curry, the fire under the rice went out, and the king
had to light it again. When he thought the rice was sufficiently cooked he
took it off, and thought that all was done. But he could not understand why it
was so wet. We had to tell him to pour off the water and dry the rice over the
fire, stirring it about.
When at last it was done we had all of us to eat it,
for the queen said she was not hungry. She ate just a little, and we had to eat
the rest. It was not good at all. The rice was quite hard in the middle, not
sufficiently cooked, and it was smoky, too, and the curry was so hot that tears
came into our eyes.
Fortunately there were a great many of us, and every
one wanted to eat a little because the king and queen had cooked it. For no one
had ever before heard of a king and queen cooking their dinner. It was a quite
unknown thing in all the world for kings and queens to cook. But it was very
amusing.
For three or four days after that the king and queen
cooked their dinner every day, and they got to know how to do it quite well at
last. The king could boil rice just as well as any one after a little practice,
and the queen even learnt how to make cakes like the Japanese woman. Then they
got tired of it, and did not cook again. But it was very great fun while it
lasted. Ah, Thakin, it was pleasant in the palace in
those days.”
And as she talked there came into my mind a saying of
the wise old minister the Kinwun Mingyi in these last days of the fall. Now one day he went into the palace to see the
king about some very important business, that business on which lay the fate of
the king and queen and their followers and people, and he could get no
attention because the king was playing with the queen. The minister went away
sadly to face the ruin coming swiftly up the river, and when he came without
the palace to his own house he met there some of his advisers, Europeans who
were trying to help him to save the king in spite of the king. They asked him
how he had sped in his interview, and v the minister told them what had
happened—how the king was at play and could not be disturbed. “The kingdom,”
he said, “is in the hands of children. There is no hope at all.”
Yes, they were only children ; full of impulses like
children ; impulses towards good, towards evil, with no very settled purpose
towards anything. They would make up their minds one day to one thing and the
next to another. They were without the knowledge that alone could have directed
their paths. And I do not think their councillors were much better than they—in
knowledge I mean. True there was the Kinwun Mingyi, the wise old minister, the favourite of the late
king. But he was only one, and often he was not listened to at all, and
sometimes perhaps his advice was not good.
They were full of impulses, as I have said, eagerly
desiring one thing to-day and forgetting it to-morrow. The king desired to have
an army modelled upon European designs, armed with European arms, fit to fight
for the kingdom when in danger. And so with great difficulty he obtained arms,
cannons and rifles, and European instructors to drill his men in their uses.
But when these European instructors took their troops out to the country behind
Mandalay to practise those arms, to learn how to shoot and drill, there was a
terrible commotion. The noise of the firing was heard in the palace and caused
great consternation. Noone knew what it could be : was it a Chinese army
attacking Mandalay or a rebellion or what ? There was a panic in the city, and
the bazaars closed, women shrieked and men hid their valuables as in time of
war.
When the mounted men who were sent speeding in all
directions for news came and reported that it was only the European officer
drilling his troops the fear turned into anger.
Urgent orders were sent to him to desist at once and
never on any future occasion to behave in this way again. Hints, pretty broad
hints, were thrown out as to what the consequences would be. And so, though the
troops were armed and partly drilled, there the matter ended. The artillery
could not be practised, the infantry could not become marksmen. Their weapons
remained to them but ornamental appendages, rather heavy and useless than
formidable. Such was the army of the king. This was an example of many things.
It occurred to the queen once that it would be a good
idea to send some little girls to be educated in European fashion. As the king
had sent some pages to France to learn something of the wisdom of the west, so
she the queen would send some maids of honour to be brought up as European
girls are brought up. They would on their return lend an additional lustre to
her court, and be able to teach the other maids useful things, and be besides
able to amuse the queen in the evening with stories of their adventures.
Four little girls were chosen, and were put under the
care of the Roman Catholic sister in the palace, to be taken away and brought
up in western ideas.
“She took them away,” said my maid of honour, “and
kept them for a year or two and took them to Bengal and elsewhere, I think, and
after a time they came back again to Mandalay, and the queen sent for them to
come to her in the palace, and they came.
“They were dressed in European dress, and their hair
was done in European fashion, and, ah, Thakin! you
have no idea how ugly they looked. Amid all the bright dresses of the maids of
honour with their silk skirts and pure white jackets they looked as sombre as
crows. English girls look nice in English dress, but Burmese girls look
dreadful. I never saw any Burmese girls in English dress since, and I never
want to. They looked so common. Yet they were pretty little girls. They wore
their hair down their backs loose, which did not seem to us at all proper.
“They had lost all their manners. They did not know
what to do. They came into the queen’s presence and stood up before her not
knowing what to do. Everybody must sit down before the queen, but these
children had not as much manners or sense as the fish in the watertanks.
“The queen looked at them for a moment, and it was
easy to see that she was not at all pleased.
“Sit down”, she said, but they did not move. They were
frightened, I think, and did not understand, only looked about foolishly. The
queen caught one by the wrist and pulled her down, and then the others sat
down. The queen then looked at them all over and said at last, ‘They are very
ugly. I do not think much of the European dress, why, it makes their faces look
quite black.” And so it did, Thakin, much darker than
if they wore our dress.
“Then the queen asked them what they had learnt and
they could not say.
“Can you speak any foreign languages ?” she asked, and
they said, “Yes?”
“Then say some” said the queen.
“The children were afraid, and at first did not know
what to say. At last one of them said something. I think the language was
French, not the same as the Thakin speaks. .
The queen listened and shook her head. “There has been
a lot of money spent on those children”, she said, ‘ but I do not see much good
of it. They have become ugly and very morose? Then she noticed that one had a
chain round her neck. ‘What is this ?’ she said, and pulled it. The chain came
out and with it a little image at the end. ‘ What is that image?’ she asked,
and the little girl said it was the image of God.
“The queen was scandalised. I sent you away”, she
said, “to learn the customs of the west and you come back looking very ugly,
with no manners and very stupid. And you carry the image of a foreign idol
about your neck. Take them away” she said to us, “take them away and dress them
properly and teach them manners and remove their idols.’
“Mebya was not at all
pleased with these children, Thakin, and indeed I do
not think any one thought much of them, but soon they became like every one
else.”
Thus ended the queen’s attempt at introducing western
cultivation among her maids, so ended the king’s attempts after western
discipline for his troops. For they had no real knowledge of the world at all.
They had no one to help them to it, and what little half knowledge there was
that penetrated the palace, reached them in an unpleasant form.
I think it would be difficult to exaggerate the
ignorance of these children, not only of the western world but even of their
own country and their own people. They hardly ever went out of the palace, and
when they did it was a ceremonious procession. Truth could not come to them
save through a hundred filters that took from it all that was valuable,
deprived it of all usefulness. Newspapers were of course unknown in Upper Burma
and those from Lower Burma never reached there.
I asked my maid of honour once if they ever saw
newspapers or news-letters of any kind in the palace.
“No,” she said, “ there were no newspapers in the
palace. Besides, what is the good of them ? There are newspapers now and I have
once or twice read the Mandalay Times, which I have seen at my mother’s house.
It says that a man fell down out of a house somewhere and broke his neck. And
that the Japanese are taking some place I never heard of before, and that some
great ship has sunk near Belat. I do not care to know
these things. What is the use of them even if they are true ? And I do not know
if they are true. I have a cousin who helps in one of the papers and he tells
me that many of the things are not true at all. I do not see the use of
papers.”
“They are not any use,” I answered, “except to the
proprietors. I suppose your cousin gets paid for his work.”
“Little enough,” she answered. “Besides, it is a great
shame to make money by selling things that are all made up. I do not think
government ought to allow newspapers. Besides, they are very rude sometimes.”
So I suppose they have been making disagreeable
remarks about some of her friends, but she did not tell me what they were.
And so these children the king and queen lived in the
palace, not knowing very much, not caring perhaps very much, and the country
was left a prey to governors and ministers and officials, the greatest surely
of all the five evils.
The king was full of good intentions, hopelessly
ignorant of how to carry them out, and the queen was full of good intentions
too. Within her little circle of knowledge she did what she thought was the
best always. She had rigid ideas of conjugal fidelity. As. she would allow the
king no other mistress, so it was with all her people. Any complaint to her by
a wronged woman was sure to receive immediate notice.
No woman was allowed to be wrongfully divorced, to be
abandoned, to be badly treated, in her times. She inaugurated amid her
followers an ideal of domestic faith, new and unknown to the palace people,
though not of course to the people at large.
The courtiers had followed the morals of their king,
but now they were to be taught to follow the morals of their queen. For all her
sex, in palace and city, she was a sure refuge in time of trouble. Any sketch
of the queen would be imperfect if this were not fully explained and insisted
upon. Her reign was to be a reign of virtue if she could so make it. Her
punishments for any breach were terribly severe. She was like all women, cruel
and vindictive when she thought her rights were assailed, her orders disobeyed.
Her severity extended even unto her own house. There
were to be no exceptions to the laws of virtue.
CHAPTER XIV
A PRINCESS AND HER LOVER
“There was a princess, a half sister to the king and
queen, younger than he, younger than Mebya, one of
the youngest of all the princesses. She had a household of her own, as had all
the princesses, with rooms of her own apart and attendants of her own. She was
very pretty too, as were most of the princesses, and she was religious. She was
very fond of telling her beads before the pagoda in the palace, very fond of
reading in the sacred books, very fond of going with her attendants to the
monastery outside the palace near the south wall, to give offerings to the
monks and hear them preach.
“Almost every full moon day and new moon day, and the
days half way between, would she go early to the rest house by this monastery
to sit all day in meditation on the sacred teaching, to eat but one meal before
noon, to hear the monks read the sacred books. And so it happened that one
evening in the rest house she noticed behind the monk who was reading,
attending on him, a boy. All boys must, as the Thakin knows, enter into a monastery once in their lives, be accepted into the
monkhood, wear the yellow robe and live the holy life if it be only for the
months of fasting. No man is a proper Buddhist until he has done this. And the
boy had just taken the vows of the monkhood, just shaved his head and taken on
him the yellow robe, and he sat behind his teacher holding his fan with
downcast eyes as monks should.
“When the princess saw him she thought he was the most
loveable of all boys that she had seen. She could not speak to him of course.
“He was there a monk with the monks, and they may only
speak to a woman in company and in an open space. But she could go often to the
monastery to give offerings and hope to see the little novice. If she was
religious before, she was far more so now. She was always coming to the
monastery, always giving presents, till even the monks wondered. Sometimes when
she came she would see the boy, but often he was with his teacher and did not
appear, and even when she saw him it was from afar off.
“No woman may come near a monk. But when she did see
him, she forgot all the teachings of the monks, all the prayers she came to say
; when she looked upon his face she forgot all else, as girls do.
“She was in love with the novice, and she thought
always of him and of how she could tell him of her love. But it was very
difficult.
“You see, she was a king’s daughter, and king’s
daughters may only marry kings or some very high minister. There was no chance
at all that she would be allowed to marry this boy, no one knew whom. There was
no chance that she should ever see him near or speak to him except by some
deceit.
“She lived in the palace, and no man dare come near
her rooms. To any man who came near her without permission from the queen only
one thing could happen, and that was death.
“When the princess went abroad she had many
attendants, she went in full day, it would be quite impossible for her to
appoint a meeting with the boy in some quiet place. It seemed as impossible for
the princess and the boy to meet as for the stars to touch the sea.
“The queen was very wise. The palace was full of
people. Even the spirits in the great thrones told her of the secrets that they
heard.
The queen would know, must know, of all the princess
did.
“The princess knew all this, knew it better, Thakin, than I who tell you, and yet she did not despair.
She was sure she would succeed. She thought and thought and at last she hit
upon a plan. This is what she did.
“Amongst her attendants there was an old woman, one
who had been her nurse when she was little, who cared for her now more than any
of the other attendants did, who would do for her that which no one else would
do.
“And the princess called the old nurse one day quietly
and told her all about it. She told her of the boy in the monastery, and how
she had fallen in love with him, and without him she could not live. Something
must be done ; she said she must go to the boy or the boy must come to her.
Some scheme must be made, for without him she would not live. The nurse would
think of some plan.
“ But the nurse was horrified when she heard. That a
princess, the daughter of a king, the sister of a king, should fall in love
with quite a common boy in a monastery was dreadful to her. She said that she
would do nothing, have no part in this business at all. The princess must
forget; nothing but trouble would come of this. The princess must go no more to
that monastery but must try and forget. And when the princess said she could
never forget, the old nurse laughed.
“When you are young, you say that, you think that” she
said ; “we are all that way, but when you are older it is not to forget that is
hard, but to remember.”
“But the princess would not hear. Then the nurse told
her how impossible it was—all dreams, nothing but dreams.
“Whatever the princess did the queen would know and
then there would be trouble. There would be trouble for the princess, but for
the boy worse than trouble, death. Would the princess bring her lover to death
? But the princess would not hear.
“If you plan properly” she said, “it will never be
found out. You have only to think, and I will think too, and we will find a
means.”
“For the princess was quite determined she must
succeed. Not all the guards and orders of the king, not all the power and
knowledge of the queen, not all the thousand prying eyes of the palace, nothing
in heaven or earth, even the fear of death, should keep them apart.
“But the nurse was determined too. She would not go to
the boy, she would not help in this disaster, and she prayed the princess with
tears to forget—to be wise and forget.
“It was no good. Day by day the princess grew worse.
Her eyes were bright, her heart was hot, and at last one day when all her
coaxing of the nurse had been no use she rose up.
“Very well,” she said, “if it cannot be it cannot. But
also I cannot live. The garden is near and there are tanks there where the
water is cool. I will go there.’
“She ran out of her rooms and down the steps towards
the gardens and the winding waterways that lay there so cool beneath the
trees. She ran with her face hot and her hair falling behind her, running very
fast, caring not who saw her, and the nurse ran after her. Other people ran
after her too, and just as she came near the water they came up to her and she
was stopped.
“Will you promise?” she said, turning to the nurse as
they stood there beside the dark water. “Will you promise ?”
“The nurse promised. She was afraid when she saw the
princess mad like this, going to drown herself, careless of everything.
“They went back to the palace, to the princess’s
rooms, where every one was wondering what had come to the princess that she
should run thus wildly into the garden; and there the princess gave the nurse
messages to the boy, many messages, such messages as girls send, and the nurse
listened, but there was in her heart quite a different message to the one the
princess sent.
“The nurse went to the monastery that evening and in
some way she managed to see the boy. She told him that the princess had fallen
in love with him. She thought that the boy would understand all that this meant
and be afraid. But he was not afraid at all; he just laughed. And then the
nurse, getting angry, went on to say that this was a very terrible thing and
could only end in one way. No one could be loved by a princess and live. It
must be known, and the end for him would be death. There could be no other end
if the matter went on. There was only one escape and that was by flight. He
must run away, where the princess would never see him or hear of him again.
That was the only way. But the boy would not agree. He only laughed. Why should
I run away?’ he said. ‘What have I done. If the princess has fallen in love
with me, is it my fault? It is pleasant to be loved by a princess. I will not
run away.’
“So the boy said, Thakin, so
he said. If only he had known what was to happen surely he would have been wise
and gone away. But he was brave and proud. He thought it good to be loved by a
girl, better still that she was a princess. He was very happy at the news and
rejoiced; his eyes were bright and cheerful and he laughed with delight.
“Then the nurse got angry. The boy must run away. If
you do not go,’ she said, ‘I will make you. I will go at once and tell a
minister about you, and then they will send you to Mogaung at least. Probably you will be executed.’
“She was very angry that this boy would stay and
trouble the heart of the princess. She hoped to frighten him and make him run
away, and then the princess, not seeing him, would forget, and all would come
right; but instead of being afraid he was mad with pleasure. He refused to go.
He laughed at her threats. Perhaps he too loved the princess, who shall say ?
But he was as foolish as she was.
“If you”, he said to the nurse, “go and tell any
minister about it and I am arrested, I will tell all about the reason. I will
say that you came to me with messages from the princess. Everybody shall know.
Go and tell your minister. You know what will happen. If you are not punished
by the king for acting as go-between for the princess and me the princess will
have you killed for getting me into trouble; and the princess will herself come
to grief. Now go and tell. But I do not know why you should wish to make us
both unhappy.
“The nurse saw that she had made a great mistake. She
had never imagined that the boy would be proud and brave like this. She thought
to frighten him into doing anything she wanted. Her way would have been to have
gone straight to a minister and got the boy sent off without his knowing why he
was sent. Then the princess’ secret would have been kept. Now she saw that
matters were very much worse than they were before; that instead of mending she
had made them infinitely more dangerous. Before there was only a girl to deal
with, now there was a boy also, both mad.
“She went back to the palace very much dispirited, and
when the princess came to her and demanded whether she had seen the boy and
what he had said in reply to her message, she had nothing to say. At last the
nurse said that she had not been able to see the boy, that he had been with his
teacher and the other monks, and that another attempt must be made. So she hid
her doings from the princess.
“But the princess was very angry. ‘You were not true,’
she said; ‘you are not telling me true. You are playing with me because you do
not want me to see him. You are trying to put me off.’ And she began to cry as
if her heart would break. And then the nurse was sorry. She saw it was all no
good her attempt to stop the princess. If the princess were denied she would do
something dreadful: go to the boy herself, or drown herself in the moat.
Therefore because the nurse was very fond of the princess and because she too
knew what this thing that they call love is, she gave up fighting against fate
and said she would help all she could.
“Give me a letter”, she said, “a little letter that I
can hide easily, and I will take it to him. Write it tonight, and tomorrow I
will go to the monastery, and if I can I will give it to him,” speaking out of
the great sympathy in her heart for the girl.
“The princess went away and wrote a letter”, a love
letter. She wrote it very small upon a little piece of paper, which she rolled
up like one of those rolls that women wear in their ears to keep the hole open
and in proper shape when they do not wear their gold earrings. She wrote it
very secretly so that no one should know, and next day she came and put it in
the old woman’s ear and sent her to the monastery.
“The woman went. She gave up trying to fight against
the love of the princess and surrendered herself to fate. She went and gave the
letter to the boy, slipping it into his hand by stealth as she passed him on
the monastery stairs. She could not get any answer that night of course, but
the princess did not mind. When she heard that her letter had reached the boy
she was happy again; she clapped her hands with joy and laughed.”
CHAPTER XV
LOVE AND DEATH
“Do you know what it was she wrote, Thakin ?”
“How can I know?” I answered. “Young ladies do not
write me love letters. What do they write ? Tell me.”
My maid of honour laughed. She often laughs. “How do
they write ? If the Thakin does not know, should I
know? ”
“We are both very ignorant,” I said. “We do not know
much. Sometime, perhaps, we shall find out from others. But this love letter
that the princess sent the boy, what was that ? ”
“ Ah, that was not a letter at all. It was a little
love song. All women know it, and it has music to it too.”
Then she began to sing to herself in curious monotones
a song of which this is a translation. There are very many such love songs in
Burmese, songs of men to girls, of girls to men. But they do not translate
well. Of all songs love songs are the hardest to translate, their beauty
depends so much upon terms of expression, on the rhythm of the lines, the music
of the words.
“My lover is gold, he is pure gold from the furnace,
and there is no speck on him. I have loved him for all my life, my days before
I knew him were as naught, as forgetfulness. I have loved him all my life, I
will love him for ever and for ever. Do not doubt me, my lover, never let doubt
come into your thoughts, for I am not as other girls are, loving here and
there, but am true far beyond, death.
“Among the trees on the hill-top is the pagoda, you
can see it from far away, all the boatmen know it. Thither will we go and pray.
Together we will go, and we will pray that we may never part, not in this life
nor in the next, nor the next. For a hundred lives, for a thousand eternities,
we will live and love and be together.
“My love is pure gold. I would wear him as a necklet
about my neck, that should never leave me. He is my king, my lord, and there is
none in my heart but him.’ ”
That was her love song, that she sent to the boy, that
many a girl has sent to many a boy ; and the woman gave it him. Next day the
princess went in the morning with her attendant to the monastery to make an
offering, and she saw him, the boy, her lover. Of course they could not speak,
and they could only look a very little for fear people should notice, but as
they came away the boy managed to pass a note to the old woman, who hid it. She
could not give it to the princess then for fear of discovery, for there were
many people about, but kept it. When they came to the palace the princess
called her into an inner room and told her to give the letter quickly, quickly.
The woman gave and the princess read her first letter from her lover. I do not
know what was in it. I saw the one the princess wrote because it was found
afterwards, but the one he wrote her was never found.
“After this they wrote often to each other, using
always the old woman’s ears ; for they were very careful, very much afraid of
being found out too soon. I do not know how long this went on, but for several
months. And, indeed, it seemed as if this must be the end. How could these ever
be more than this, how could they ever meet—she who was a king’s daughter, and
he but a lad in a monastery ? After the fasting was over he left the monastery
and returned to his home in Mandalay city, but this made no difference. The
princess was mad. Nothing would stop her. ‘We must meet! ’ she cried to
the old nurse. ‘We must meet, you must contrive a way!’ And when the
nurse said, ‘You have his letters, cannot you be content? ’ the princess
laughed.
“Letters ! what are letters ? I want him. I want to
see his face, and hear his voice, and put my hands in his. Letters, what are
letters?
“The old nurse said no more. What was the use ? She
would do as the princess wanted, and if trouble was to come, let it come. So
the princess and nurse made a scheme between them, they planned everything, and
only waited till due time to carry it out. They had to wait some time, many
months, for it was necessary that the boy’s hair should be grown long again. It
was shaved off when he became a monk, and hair takes time to grow.
“The princess was very impatient, but there was no
help for it; even great longing will not make hair grow any faster, and after
several months the nurse, who saw the boy from time to time, told her that it
would do.
“Then one afternoon the nurse went out into the town.
She had a bundle with her and a letter.
She went down to the house of a relation far away from
the palace near the river, and there by appointment she met the boy. The nurse
gave him the princess’ letter and opened the bundle.
“The letter did not say much, only that the boy must
do as the nurse told him and all would be well. The bundle contained clothes. ‘Here,’
said the nurse unfolding them, ‘is one of the princess’ own dresses. You must
put it on quick. You must tie up your hair like a girl, and here is some false
hair to add to it.’ Nothing had been forgotten.
“So the boy dressed quickly, putting off his man’s
clothes and putting on the pink and silver skirt and white jacket of a girl.
The nurse put flowers in his hair and a pearl necklace about his neck and gold
bangles on his arms. Even there was cosmetic ready prepared for him to put upon
his face to make it look fair, as girls do.
“He made such a pretty girl, Thakin.
I saw him afterwards, ah! afterwards in the trouble. He was sad then, but by
nature he had bright merry eyes, with a laugh always behind them, and full
round cheeks. His hands were big for a girl to be sure, but then they took care
to give him big-sleeved jackets to make his hands look smaller, and many large
gold bangles to come low down and draw away the eye.
“Oh, he was very cleverly dressed. If it was the
princess or the nurse who thought of it all I do not know, but it was very well
done. No one would have guessed.
“So they went out, the nurse and the boy-girl, and
took a trotting bullock carriage and were driven to the palace gates, and there
in the half dark of evening they dismounted and passed through the western
gate, the women’s gate into the palace.
“The boy was passed in as the nurse’s niece. She had
got a pass from one of the Atwinwuns to bring in her
niece, a young girl from the country, to help to attend upon the princess, and
so the guards only glanced at her when they saw the pass and let her in.
“They went on through the gardens to the rooms where
the princess lived. And so they met at last, those two, and loved and kissed
and slept in each other’s arms with the fear of death covering them like a
cloak. But they did not care. They were so happy, and they did not think. What
did it matter ? ”
To make the end plain I must explain here what those
who do not know the Burmese tongue would not understand. There are in Burmese
two sets of pronouns. One is masculine and one feminine. Thus a man for “I”
would say “chundaw” but a woman would say “chumma” and so on. It must have been very bewildering for
one brought up as a man to say “chundaw” having to
remember always to say “chumma.” It is but a trifle
perhaps, but it was the plan wherein the princess’s little intrigue failed and
it brought ruin to them both.
“ They lived,” went on my maid of honour, “ together
for months. Of course some of the attendants on the princess soon got to know
that the new girl the princess loved so much was not a girl at all, but a boy.
But the secret was well kept. You see, Thakin, that
it was such a deadly secret that no one dared to speak of it. Had it been a
little thing no doubt it would have soon been spread over the palace ; but this
was far too serious.
“And again it did not in any way threaten the queen or
king. No doubt some of the queen’s spies soon heard of it and could have told
the queen of it. But they did not. Why should they hurt the princess ? It could
do no harm to the queen that the girl should have her lover with her. It was
her own business. I suppose the secret must have come out sometime, such
secrets cannot be kept forever. There must come an end sometime. But it might
have gone on for a long time yet if it had not been for an accident. Such an
accident who would have suspected the way of it ?
“The boy was kept very quietly in the princess’s
rooms, and there he was nearly safe. The old nurse was on the watch and no one
could come in and discover him. But he got tired of being always shut up, even
if it were with a princess as companion, and after a time when he got accustomed
to things he would go out. His dress was so good, and he was so like a girl
with his soft round face and fair skin that no one would guess. He had learnt
too in the princess’s rooms to walk like a girl and take short steps, not long
strides as a man does.
“So he would go out now and again and wander about the
palace gardens, sometimes with the princess as her attendant, sometimes with
the nurse, sometimes alone. In this way the end came.
“It was one morning that it happened. We had got to
our wait at noon, and as I came with the other maids to the room where the
queen was, near the western throne, I saw that there was some great trouble.
The queen looked very angry. She had a way of ruffling up her skirts to show
her little bare feet when she was angry, and she had ruffled them up a great
deal that day. The king was seated by her looking very troubled and all the
maids were frightened to death.
“In front of the king and queen, kneeling on the
floor, were two guards of the gate, the western gate; they had drawn swords in
their hands, and between them knelt a girl.
“The guards were explaining to the king and the queen,
and the ministers who were beside them, how the girl had come that morning near
the gate. They thought she wanted to go out and so they challenged. ‘Who are
you? ’ they said, for they did not know her face. The girl looked up and
answered, ‘ Chundaw la ? ’ ‘Are you speaking to
me ? ’ using the fatal masculine. Then the suspicions of the guard were
aroused.
“Who are you?”, they said ; “what sort of girl can you
be who answer like a man ? ’
“They arrested this would-be girl, and soon enough
discovered all about everything. There was the lad kneeling before the king,
grey with fear, for he knew his time was come. He could not speak for very
horror, and he panted for breath with quick short pants. We were all so sorry
for him, he was such a pretty boy, and all the prettier in his girl’s dress.
“Presently through the door and up the steps came the
princess. She had been sent for by the king. I do not think she knew at first
why she had been sent for, because she looked about in surprise wondering why
every one looked so very serious. But when she saw her lover there she
understood. It all came to her in a flash that the end was come, the certain
end. She became very pale and for a moment she seemed as if she would die there
at once. But quickly she recovered, she was such a brave girl, and she moved
forward, and knelt before the king, kneeling so that she could see her lover.
She did not care for any one else, only for him, she did not look at any one
else, only at him. She tried to catch his look that she might smile to him. But
he never looked at her. He looked only at the guard. I do not think he knew she
was there. He was quite distraught, and his fingers moved to and fro on the floor. The princess’s eyes became full of tears
when she saw him so.
“There was an inquiry. It did not take long, for the
princess confessed at once. It was all her fault she said, the boy was not to
blame. If any one was to be punished it must be she, for it was by her orders
that the boy had been brought into the palace. She pleaded and pleaded for the
boy.
“The king looked sorry but the queen grew more and
more angry. She was especially furious at the love letter, the little love song
which the princess had written to her lover. It was found on him with other
letters of hers, when he was searched at the gate. He had always carried them
with him. The queen said it was disgraceful that any one should behave so, much
more a princess. She, the queen, was always trying to tell the people to act
properly, and here in the palace a princess behaved as if she did not know what
modesty was.
“Ah, Thakin, it was such a
scene, a terrible end to all their love-making. I can see it now, as if it was
before me. The room with gold and red pillars, and the sad king, and the angry
queen, and the princess and ”
My maid of honour’s voice began to quaver, and she
stopped here and began to cry softly, she was K so sorry for them both. Her
tender heart went out to their trouble. What a scene it was for a child to have
witnessed.
“ Thakin,” she said, “ I am
so sorry. I did not intend to cry. But telling you of it all seemed to make it
come so near to me again. Telling you of them seemed to bring their faces back
to me as if it was not all long ago. They come to me out of the night as a
dream. But I will tell you the end now. There is not much more.
“The inquiry was soon over for there was no doubt. No
one denied what had happened. The boy, still in his girl’s dress, was led away,
and the princess followed.
“They were condemned, indeed there was no chance for
them. For though the king would have pardoned them the queen would not have it.
She was very angry. She might perhaps have overlooked the fault of the
princess but for one thing. When they came to search in the boy’s house in the
town they found a great number of letters that the princess had written to him
before he came to live in the palace, and these letters said things about the
queen that she could not bear. They were all brought to her, and she read them,
and when she read them she became furious. All pity went away out of her heart,
and she became mad. First of all she wished to make the princess into a pagoda
slave. She wanted to make her into one of those who have to attend at the
pagodas, and who are outcasts from all the people, and she consulted the
ministers about it. But they said it could not be done.
“The princess”, they said, “is the queen’s sister. If
then, the princess be made a pagoda slave, the queen’s family will be
dishonoured. She will be sister to a slave. Can the queen allow that ? The
foreigners would all say, “See now the queen of Burma, she is of a family of
pagoda slaves”. It cannot be.
“The queen agreed that it could not be, but that the
princess was to be killed.
“One day they were led out, the princess and the boy,
to the cemetery without the gates to be killed. They were put into carts and
taken through the city, and many people followed, and when they came to the
cemetery they were told to get out. So they got out and stood and looked at
each other, the girl hard and proud still, and full of love for the boy, but he
was half dead with fear. And when the princess saw him thus with lack lustre
eyes waiting the death that was to come she called out to her attendants to
give her the golden bowl of water. They gave it to her and she went to the boy
and held it to him. Take it,’ she said, ‘my last gift.’ The boy took it and
drank, and they prepared for death.
“But death did not come. For some reason the queen
changed her mind and sent to the cemetery and stopped the execution, and they
were led back. But the hope was not for long. The boy was soon taken away to
one of the islands and tied up in a sack with large stones, and thrown by night
into the waters of the great river. No one can love a princess and live.
“And the girl ? She was confined in a special prison,
and before long she too was dead. They said she caught a cold and died, but how
should I know? Death is very sudden sometimes when you are a prisoner.”
CHAPTER XVI
THE LOTTERIES
“What were all the lotteries that people talk about so
much?”, I asked. “There were many lotteries, they say, and many people were
ruined, and many committed suicide, is that so?”. My maid of honour laughed.
“Ah! Thakin, those
lotteries. Such a thing they were. They were got up by one of the ministers.
The revenue was falling short. Money did not come in as it used to do, and much
money was spent by the queen on her jewels and other things. So one day a
minister proposed a lottery to the king. It should be quite fair he said, and
it was done by many foreign governments.
“You had a lottery and gave prizes, and you paid all
the prizes honestly. But you kept a certain part of the money for yourself as
commission. .
“The people would like the lotteries, and they would
many of them take tickets. And so the people would enjoy themselves greatly,
and the king would get much revenue. Moreover the revenue would be paid as it
were willingly, and the people would not grumble.
“The king agreed and the lotteries were got up.
“There were two kinds of lottery, the little lottery
and the big one. The little lottery was this. There were sixty balls put into a
box, and one of them was a gold ball. That was the one that won. You could
stake on any number up to sixty. The way you staked was by buying tickets. In
the great lottery-house in the city were many little stalls kept mostly by
women; you went to one and said, wish to stake one rupee upon the number
thirty-six. Then she gave you a ticket saying you had staked the money on the
number and you went away. If you wanted to stake a large sum you had probably
to go to several stall holders and stake with each, for one stall holder could
not take a large sum. They were poor people who paid for their stalls to the
minister who held the lottery.
“At noon each day the lottery was drawn. A great gong
sounded, and the people came running to the lottery-house to see the lottery. A
minister was in attendance and a guard. There was a sort of drum with the balls
in it. The drum had a spout, and the balls came out one at a time.
“The gong was struck, and the drum was rolled round,
and a man stood up and called out ‘Number one? Then a ball was allowed to run
out. Number two was called out, and another ball was allowed to run out, and so
on. To whatever number the golden ball came the prize was awarded.
“Directly the golden ball came out the crowd broke up
and the winners ran away to the stall holders to get their money. They were
paid forty-eight times their stake. Thus if you staked one anna you got three
rupees. If you staked ten rupees you got four hundred and eighty rupees.
“Sometimes however you did not get the money. Perhaps
the stall holder had too much money on the winning number and could not pay.
Then if any one complained the woman was arrested, and perhaps instead of
getting your winnings a man would come to you and say, ‘What a sad thing!’ The
poor woman has been arrested and put in gaol. Will you not give something to
get her out ? ’ So you were sorry and gave a rupee or two in addition to your
losses.
“However, generally you got paid. That was the little
lottery. It was drawn every day at noon.
“The great lottery was different. There the tickets
were five rupees each, and they were numbered up to three or four thousand. The
first prize was ten thousand rupees and there were smaller prizes. It was only
drawn once a month. You could take one ticket or as many as you liked. There
was a great ceremony when it was drawn and the lucky winner was at once called
up and given a title by the minister in charge. He was called ‘The honourable
rich man’. Every one made obeisance to him. Then he was put on a gaily
caparisoned elephant, and his bags of silver were piled up by his side, and he
was paraded through the streets with a guard of honour, so that all should see
him. It was a grand affair and the man who won was nearly mad with delight and
pride.
“It was of course a great thing to win in the big
lottery, but it was not such fun as the little lottery. There you staked what
you liked, as little as one anna, and the lottery was drawn every day.
“All the palace people gambled at it. Some of the
princesses were nearly mad about it, and they staked every day. When their
money was gone they got more from the queen, and when the queen would not give
any more, they pawned their jewels and gold bracelets, everything they had.
They never any of them won. And yet they took great pains to win. They would
consult fortune tellers and stake on the numbers they told to them, and they
would watch omens, and they would dream.
“Every night they would go to bed hoping to dream of
the lucky number, and every morning there was a great comparison of dreams and
discussion of their meaning. Every one tried to dream. Still they lost.
“I think now the reason was this. They could not of
course go themselves to take tickets, and perhaps the women who took tickets
for them were not honest. Otherwise surely sometimes they would win. But they
never won and many of them were ruined quite, and the queen was very angry with
them.
“In the city it was worse. Men and women gambled and
gambled until they lost all. If they lost to begin with they went on gambling
hoping to get it back. If they won they thought they had v found a sure way to
fortune, much better than trading or working or cultivating land, and they went
on till all was lost. Then many of them committed suicide.
“Such ruin as this lottery caused through the whole
country you cannot imagine, Thakin. Men quarrelled
with their wives and wives with their husbands. Boys went and stole to get
money to gamble with and girls threw all decency to the winds and rushed to the
gaming booths.
“The losers became robbers and waited at the gaming
houses to note the winners and follow them home and rob them. Murders happened
every day.
“ It was terrible. Such tragedies as there were. One
of them I remember very well. There were a man and a woman newly married. They
were quite young and they were very fond of each other and they had a good
trade and did well. Then the lotteries began. At first they gambled just a
little, one anna or two annas just for fun, but after a little they grew fond
of the excitement and they went on and staked more and more. Little by little
they lost all they had.
“All their money went first and then they pawned their
jewels, and these went, and then they pawned their house and their clothes and
all they had. They lost and lost until one day all that was left to them of the
property that had been theirs was ten rupees.
“That night the woman dreamt a dream. She thought she
was at the gambling house watching the lottery. There were the ministers there
and the guard of soldiers and the crowd of people. The gong was rung and the
numbers were called out. She heard them called and saw the balls roll out of
the drum and the disappointed looks of those who had tickets on the smaller
numbers.
“The numbers went on and on and no golden ball came
out for a long time, and then at last it came.
“Thirty-seven!” shouted the clerk and the drum
rattled and the ball rolled out, and lo, it was the golden ball at last.
Thirty-seven had won. And amid the shouts of the crowd she awoke.
“She told her husband the dream, and they determined
that now at last a true dream had come to them and they would win. Not a word
did they say to any one, but it was decided that the husband should stake the
last money they had, their last ten rupees, upon number thirty-seven. They
would surely win, and with four hundred and eighty rupees they would be well
off again. But the wife would not go herself. ‘No’ she said, ‘I will not go. I
cannot bear it. But do you go. And if v you win then shall you do this that I
may know. If you win you shall come out of the north gate of the gaming house,
and down this street from the north that I may see you afar off, and know that
we have won. But if you lose then come out of the south gate, and up the street
the south way. Then shall I know that all is over. It is our last chance?’
“The husband went to the gaming house and waited. And
just as the wife had dreamt so it happened. The numbers came out one, two,
three, four, no golden ball; five, six, and on and on up to thirty-six, and at
thirty-seven out it rolled, the bright gold ball of hope and happiness. The man
went nearly mad with delight. He shrieked and howled and beat his arms and ran
to the stall holders and got the money and tore away home to tell his wife and
pour the silver stream before her. He was so mad with hope and with delight
that he forgot. What his wife had told him had quite fallen away out of his
memory and he ran by the shortest way to his house, the way he had always gone
before, the south way.
“And when he got home he found his wife hanging from
the cross-beam just dead. She had seen him coming running like a madman up the
south way and she had thought that he had lost and so hanged herself. The
street was long and she was dead ere he arrived.
“There were many stories as bad as this.
“It spread like a fever throughout the country. Men
and women came from far-away towns and villages to gamble at Mandalay till the
city was full of ruined houseless wretches.
“Then at last the king and queen put an end to the
lotteries. They had brought much money into the treasury, but when the king and
queen heard the tales that were told them of the ruin going on in the country,
and when they looked round and saw how many in the palace had lost all, that
the princesses were without jewels and the pages without money, the lotteries
were stopped. It was time indeed that they were ended or the whole nation would
have been ruined. Trade would have come to an end and the land would not have
been cultivated and the villages would have been deserted.
“As it was, terrible harm was done.
“But even though they had lost, the palace people were
sorry when the lotteries ceased. They were something to talk about, it was
something to do to stake at the little lottery. It was a relief from the
everlasting plotting of the palace folk to have a little gamble.”
CHAPTER XVII
THE LITTLE PRINCESS
“There were no end to the plots that went on in the
palace, Thakin. You do not suppose that the queenmother had ever forgotten how her plots failed, her
plots that she was to be the real ruler of Burma and the king but a puppet in
her hands. She had picked out King Thibaw for that
reason because he was weak, and she would be able to rule him, and now she had
less power than ever because her second daughter had obtained such control over
the king that no one else had a word to say. You do not suppose that she had
forgotten this.
“And the ministers, were they likely to forget? Under
King Mindon they had power and authority and had each his own place, and now
they were flouted and laughed at and made of no account. Do you think that they
could forget, when every day they were made to feel that there was no power or
authority in the land save that of the queen ?
They were humbled before the people and they were not
likely to forget. And so there were plots.
“What these plots were no one can be sure, nor who
took part in them, because they were kept so secret that no one could discover
exactly. But the queen suspected. She was always suspecting, and she had always
spies looking and listening to discover what was going on.
“Amongst us maids of honour there were a few Shan
girls, and these were very useful to the queen. For they had no friends in the
palace people. They were the queen’s maids, and looked only to her and cared
not for others.
“They had no relations to gossip with. Moreover, they
were stupid and wild and ill-mannered, and could do things which none of us
could do. If people were talking, one of these girls would go and sit down near
and listen.
“The talkers would not mind her. ‘It is only a wild
Shan girl’ they said; ‘probably she does not know Burmese. Anyhow, she is too
foolish to understand.’
“And again, one of these girls would suddenly walk
into the queen-mother’s rooms and sit down and see all that was going on and
who was there. Being a Shan girl, she would be excused for her rudeness because
she did not know. No one of us would have dared to do such a thing. Besides, we
would have been suspected. But these girls went everywhere and heard
everything, and told the queen.
“So it came to the queen’s ears that there was a plot.
King Thibaw was to be dethroned somehow or other, and
one of the banished princes recalled and made king. Which it was I do not know.
“This new king was to be married to her sister the
little princess. King Thibaw had married two sisters,
the elder princess and the second princess who was now queen. The new king
would marry the little princess, the youngest daughter of the queen-mother, and
so she would be queen-mother still. Such was the plot.
“The head of the plot was the queen-mother. Others
were concerned in it, of course, but I do not know who they were,
“The queen-mother being in the plot made matters very
difficult for the queen. For she was afraid of her mother.
“It is true she had usurped all the power, but
nevertheless the queen-mother was a person not to be overlooked. The queen
could not imprison her or execute her as she would have done any lesser person.
“So the queen could only watch and wait. Once or twice
she caught people who had carried messages to the princes in Calcutta, and
these she severely punished, but that could not end the plot. It went on and on
and became very serious.
“A curious accident brought matters to a climax. There
was a fortune teller in the palace, and the princesses and the maids of honour
were fond of getting him to come in and tell their fortunes. He always told
good fortunes. He said that you would be lucky and get a good husband and have
money, and so on. Only he always said that to get your fortune you must be
religious and good, otherwise the fortune would not come. Thus he was very
cunning, for if anything went wrong with one of his predictions he was always
able to say that it was your own fault, that you had not followed his advice,
you had been irreligious or wicked.
“One day it was reported to the queen that this
fortune teller had been telling the fortunes of the princesses. He had told
them that they would be queens.
“When the queen heard this there was such a
disturbance !
“The queen nearly went out of her mind with anger, and
the whole palace was turned upside down. An official was despatched in a
fearful hurry to fetch him. He was not to be found in the palace, and to save
time the official went rushing out of the west gate, the women’s gate.
“That was an almost unheard-of thing to do, but the
queen was in such a frantic state of mind that there was no time to think of
this.
“The fortune teller was found in his house and rushed
off to the palace at once. Of course he was to be executed.
“He was taken in, and as he went through the corridors
a page met him and hit him. They were only too glad in the palace always to hit
a man in disgrace. The page hit him and knocked him down, but he was pulled up
and dragged before the queen. There he sat all dishevelled, and the queen
glared at him.
“We have heard”, said the queen, “that you have been
telling the princesses that they will be queens. That is, of course, untrue. We
cannot have lies like this told in the palace, so you are to be executed at
once. Whose fortunes have you been telling?
“Then the fortune teller spoke. He was a cunning man
and knew his life was at stake, and he spoke well. ‘’It is true,’ he answered, ‘that
I have been telling the fortune of a princess. I told her fortune and the
queen’s fortune long ago, and I said they would be queens. It has been true.
Now I have been telling the elder princess’s fortune again. I said to her, “I
foretold that you would be queen. You have been queen. Now are you queen no
longer. So it will be all the rest of your life. You will never be queen
again.” That is the fortune I told her.’
“When the queen heard this her rage all went at once.
She fancied she had been mistaken. She never paused to ask if he had been
telling fortunes to any of the other princesses. The fortune teller’s reply had
pleased her so much that she forgot. All the rage went out of her face and she
turned to the king and said, ‘Truly this is what he told me long ago, that I
should be queen, and it has come true. I think, too, this man is the man who
told our fortunes when we first came to the palace. He is a worthy man. He
should be rewarded.’
“The king, only too glad to see the queen in a good
temper again, agreed. Orders were given to reward the fortune teller. He was
given a post as clerk to the chief court, and he had a lot of money given to
him, and he was ordered to be held in honour.
“And so the fortune teller who was brought into the
palace to be executed went out half an hour later a wealthy and respected man.
“Such was life in the palace. You could not tell from
one moment to another what would happen, and generally what you least expected
that was what occurred.
“But this episode of the fortune teller reminded the
queen about the plots, and the princess her younger sister. As to the other
princesses, her half-sisters, she was not afraid of them, but her younger
sister was a real danger to her and she recognised it. Something must be done.
So the queen thought and thought and at last an idea came to her.
“The plot that she was afraid of was a plot of the
queen-mother. She wanted to have a daughter as queen, and a king who would be
easily ruled. She had put King Thibaw on the throne
with the idea. She had married him to the elder princess with but this idea.
But it had failed. The middle princess had come in and spoiled the whole
arrangement. Two of her daughters were married, but a third still remained. All
the queen-mother’s hopes and plots were based on her. Without her the plots
would have no meaning. If then, thought the queen, the little princess were out
of the way an end must come to the plot at once.
“The queen saw this. She did not want to hurt her
little sister. She would not punish her in any way, for even there in the
palace you must have some justification for any punishment. She could not marry
the girl to any officer because she was a princess, and could not marry a
commoner. There was but one way, and that was that the girl must be married to
the king. Then would King Thibaw be husband to all
the queen-mother’s daughters, and there would be no use in putting up a new
king for there would be no one for him to marry.
“That was the queen’s idea. Thus would she utterly
defeat the queen-mother, and besides do an act which the people would praise
rather than blame.
“ So she sent for her little sister and spoke kindly
to her.
“You are a princess”, she said, “and I would like to
see you married. For it is a good thing to v be married and every woman ought
to have a husband. But with you it is difficult because you are a princess and
can only marry royal blood. I cannot give you to a minister or an official, so
I have thought about it, and because I have great affection for you, I will
give you to the king for his wife. Then shall we all live together and be very
happy.”
But the little princess shook her head.
“No, no!”, she said. ‘”It is very kind of you, and the
king would be a good husband. But you are very fond of him, and why should he
take another wife ? No! It would be better not.”
“Then the queen coaxed her and said, ‘See now, you
will be a queen. How fine that will be! Every one will honour you. To be an
unmarried girl, what is the use of that?’
“But the little princess would not hear of it.
“ I do not want to be a queen. To be unmarried, how
pleasant that is! There is no worry, no trouble. But to be a queen is a great
trouble. You my sister are always worried about this or about that, while I
live in great peace. I would rather be as I am. I am now very happy?
So the queen persuaded, and the little princess
refused. Then at last the queen became angry and said, “I have spoken to you
nicely and been kind to you because you are my sister and I am sorry for you.
You do not want to marry the king. But you must marry the king. It is my order,
and you must.
“The little princess was afraid with this, and at last
she gave way and agreed that she would marry the king.
“As to the king there was no trouble with him. He was
ready enough to marry any one or do anything that the queen told him. He
agreed readily enough, and there was no one else to consult. The queen was all
powerful in the palace, and if she wanted her little sister to marry the king
no one could object. It was soon done. No ceremony was required. The queen gave
her sister to the king as wife, and there was an end to it.
“But every one was sorry for the poor little princess.
It is true that she was not banished to her own apartments as was the elder
princess. She lived with the king and queen, and went about with them. But she
had a hard life of it. For although the little princess was very quiet and easy
going, and the queen had never any cause to fear that she might take the king
from her, yet she hated her nevertheless. She could not bear to have any one
with her near the king. Even her sister, the quiet inoffensive little girl, was
hateful to her. She treated her very unkindly often, and seemed to rejoice in
humiliating her before the palace people, so that people should clearly understand
that there was but one queen. Of course the little princess had never a word to
say in affairs of state. No one cared for her or consulted her. Though she was
a lesser queen she might still have been an unmarried princess for all the
difference it made.
“This act of the queen of course put an end to the
plots. The queen-mother had now no more daughters to marry. It would be no good
for her to plot against King Thibaw, and dethrone
him. Her daughters were his wives. Though King Thibaw be killed, yet could his wives never marry again. Such was the etiquette of the
court. All the queen-mother’s interest was now bound up in the king. The queen
was far too clever for her, was far too clever and too determined for any one.”
CHAPTER XVIII
THE CLOUD IN THE SOUTH
Thus amidst plots and intrigues, dangers and games,
passed away six years. While the queen had been fighting her fight in the
palace and was winning her victory, making herself the sole ruler of the
kingdom, this kingdom had been slipping slowly from her hands. While the king
and queen frolicked in their gardens and played within the palace, the
government that King Mindon their father had built up crumbled away and enemies
came and watched. There had been warnings before. The British envoy had made
remonstrance upon remonstrance, without effect.
Perhaps the fault here was not all on the side of the
Burmese government. The envoy seems to have been without tact sometimes. The
ministers were fiercely resentful of his attitude and of what they declared to
be his misrepresentation of facts. Very soon the situation became impossible,
and in October 1879, he was withdrawn amid expressions of delight and relief
from the court and the people.
The hated envoy was gone and now there would be peace.
Yet was there no peace.
Though the Indian government had now no envoy at the
Burmese court, yet it was still able to write letters, to remonstrate, to
threaten, and it did all these things. Good grounds for grievance were not
lacking on one side or the other.
Then the Burmese, fearing what might happen, tried to
make themselves friends elsewhere. They sent embassies to other European
countries to try and make friends there; they welcomed from them envoys to
their own court. Steadily, if slowly, matters grew worse, wanting but for a
spark to cause an explosion.
Then a curious belief had grown up amongst the
mercantile community of India and Burma, that Upper Burma was a very wealthy
country. It was a land they imagined full of gold and silver, of coal and
petroleum, of jade and of amber, containing the richest ruby mines in the
world. Wheat grew there and cotton; it was immensely fertile, capable of
producing all sorts of staples in enormous quantities.
The reason why all these remained undeveloped, they
imagined, was simply the bad government of the king. Remove that and no one
could estimate what would happen in the way of increased trade. The people,
they thought, groaned under a brutal tyranny, a hideous system of monopolies
that bound them down to poverty amidst immense potential wealth.
It was imagined, too, that the Burmese themselves
acknowledged this, that they were restive under a yoke that was upon them, and
would be delighted to free themselves from it. Any one would be welcomed who
would assist the people to recover their liberty which they had lost.
Now, when we know that most of Upper Burma is really a
very poor country, with a decreasing rainfall, many parts of it chronically
verging on famine, this view of the wealth of Upper Burma seems ludicrous.
We know now, too, that, while not exactly admiring the
rule of King Thibaw and his ministers, the Burmese
people preferred him to being reduced to subjection under a foreign dominion.
How any other view could have been held is the cause
for astonishment. But perhaps the truth may be that these views were not
actually, soberly considered and accepted, but rather wished for and desired
and so assumed to be true.
However that may be, the troubles between the two
Powers, that had resulted in the wars of 1825 and 1852, that had been allowed
to slumber on both sides during the reign of King Mindon, broke out again as
soon as King Mindon died.
Of the justice of the quarrel this is not the place to
consider; no doubt there were good grounds for complaints on both sides. The
Burmese were angry at what they stated was the misrepresentation of the envoy
and of the misunderstanding of their acts by the Indian government. The Indian
government, on its side, was annoyed at the treatment of the envoy, at the
missions to foreign courts, at disturbances on the frontier, which were not, it
said, suppressed as they should be.
When two governments march for several hundred miles
of frontier and are not on good terms there are plenty of things to quarrel
about. But the great disagreement was not on any of these things. Whatever may
have been the secret causes at work, the ostensible reason for the war was
simple enough.
There are in Upper Burma vast teak forests. The timber
out of these forests is the finest teak in the world. You can get teak
elsewhere—from Siam and the Andamans and a little from India—but it is not
equal in quality to the Burmese wood. For shipbuilding and any work that
requires great strength and durability there is no wood like Burmese teak.
The forests, therefore, are of great value, and the
principal ones were leased by the Burmese government to an English firm called
the Bombay-Burma Trading Corporation, Limited, which has its headquarters in
Bombay. They established agencies here and there, and had the teak girdled and
felled and dragged by elephants into the creeks. Thence the floods carried the
logs into the rivers, where it was rafted for Rangoon. The leases were granted
under certain restrictions as to the size of the timber exported and the duty
payable thereon.
Sometime in 1884, I think, the Burmese government
stated that they had discovered that these conditions had been infringed. Large
sized timber had, through the collusion of corrupt Burmese officials, been
passed through the government frontier station as undersized timber, and a
great fraud had been committed causing a very heavy loss to the revenue. A
stringent inquiry was instituted and it was proved—so the Burmese government
said—that this had been going on for a long time.
The Corporation of course denied the whole matter, but
the Burmese government were convinced, and they ordered the Corporation to pay
the revenue which they estimated they had been defrauded of, and a further
heavy sum as fine, amounting in all to about a quarter of a million sterling.
There was talk too of cancelling the leases.
The Corporation were wealthy, but a fine of such
magnitude, especially if in addition the leases had been cancelled, meant
something very like ruin, and they appealed to the Indian government.
Anxious to protect a wealthy firm like this from the
calamity that menaced them the Indian government made overtures to the Burmese
government. What the course of all these negotiations was I do not know, but
they all failed. As the previous attempt of the Corporation to win to their
side the queen and the most powerful ministers had failed, so the interference
of the Indian government in their favour failed also.
The Burmese government were firm. “This Corporation,”
they said, “are swindlers. They have been fairly tried and there is no doubt of
it. They have defrauded the government of a vast amount of revenue and
corrupted our officials to try and hide their evil doings. The king of Burma is
king and will do what he thinks just and right even should the evil doers be
Englishmen. Sentence has been passed and cannot be revoked. The fine must be
paid or all the leases will be at once cancelled.”
In words such as these the Burmese government replied
to the negotiations of the Indian government.
There was, however, no great haste to enforce this
decree. The Burmese government was in no very great hurry, and matters drifted
on through the hot weather of 1885, the cloud growing more and more black, the
certainty of war nearer and nearer. The country began to be full of rumours.
Men were uneasy, expecting they knew not quite what, sure that trouble was
about to betide them. It was said that the Burmese government sent emissaries
to the lower country to stir up sedition. An artillery colonel went up to
Mandalay to examine the defences of the city and make plans of it so that our
generals would know what they were about. He was detected but escaped in time,
the captain of the trading steamer who brought him up very nearly paying for
this assistance to a spy with his life. The Burmese government were angered at
this mission of the colonel to spy out their deficiences and wrote indignantly about it to Rangoon, where their remonstrance was treated
as an impertinence.
So matters grew from bad to worse.
Meanwhile troops were being sent over to Burma from
India and all preparations were being made for an advance on Mandalay as soon
as the worst of the rains were over. Mandalay lies on the Irrawaddy, about 700
miles by river above Rangoon and 400 miles above our frontier station of Thayetmyo, and it was by river that the expedition was to
move. Many river steamers were chartered and armed with big guns and flats were
fitted to carry the troops. The preparations were rapid and thorough.
On the king’s part, too, some preparation was made,
not very much. Some troops were sent down from Mandalay to Minhla and to the frontier on the east, and efforts were made to raise and arm more
men. But there was no discipline, no order. There was no Bundoola in these latter days to lead armies for the king. It is incredible what
ignorance, what want of knowledge and method and even common honesty there was.
Money was given to be paid to the troops, but it never reached them; arms were
paid for but not received. Nowhere was there any guiding hand, any wise head to
see the way and follow it. It is true that the Kinwun Mingyi’s advice was always for peace and for
smoothing down things and doing the best he could. But then he was butone, and what was wanted was not advice but knowledge.
If the king and queen had only understood! But they
did not. They knew nothing of the world outside of their palace. They thought
they were in power and wisdom equal to any kings in the world and strong enough
to speak with any enemy in the gate. Therefore, when the Kinwun Mingyi advised submission they naturally put down his
advice to cowardice or to even worse, to treachery.
Why should they submit ? They were sure they were
right in what they were doing. The interference of the Indian government
between the Burmese government and the Corporation appeared to the king and his
councillors to be out of place. They were sure England dared not do so with,
say, France or America or Russia; why then with them ?
That the difference lay in the fact that these nations
are strong and mighty and well able to resent interference, whereas Burma was
so weak as to be a prey to any one who chose, never occurred to them.
No one told them the truth; no one dared, on the
penalty of being convicted of previous falsehood. Knowledge remained without
the palace gates—knowledge and fear. Inside were ignorance and courage. They
lived, these children, in a dream, a beautiful dream of glory and strength and
majesty. No one dared to hint to them that they stood no sort of chance in a
quarrel with England. The Kinwun Mingyi offered advice, he dared not tell the truth. Hints of his were misunderstood,
or disregarded.
The king and his government acted all through as if
they had behind them an invincible army. All their messages of those days to
the British government are instinct with a sense of dignity and strength,
absolute confidence in their own rectitude of action, in their own power to
repulse any attempt at interference.
To me now, looking back, it seems full of the deepest
pathos, this situation of these young people. Their childish ignorance, their
terrible weakness, their dignified assumption of power and strength. Surely
nothing could be more pitiable than this, knowing as we do whither it led them.
Such was the situation at the end of the rains in
1885.
CHAPTER XIX
THE LAST FESTIVAL OF THE FULL MOON
“It was the custom,” said my maid of honour, “at the
great feast on the full moon of October, the end of our months of fasting, that
all the ministers and soldiers and officials of all kinds should come and pay
their respects to the king.
“A reception was held in the eastern throne room,
beneath the great spire of the 4 centre of the universe.’ The huge doors were
thrown wide open and guards stood on the steps in rows with bright swords and
guns in their hands and embossed spears, between whom the visitors walked into
the throne room.
“And there in the throne room amid the blaze of gold
and colour on the walls and pillars, sat the king with his great ministers.
“He did not sit upon the throne. King Thibaw never dared to sit on the throne of King Mindon. For
King Mindon his father was a great king, wise and firm and strong, knowing the
hearts of his people and the ways of the world. He was worthy of a great
throne. King Thibaw knew himself to be no man like
his father. He knew that he was young and weak and very ignorant, not at all
worthy to sit on the throne his father had sat upon.
“So the great golden gates behind the throne were
never opened, the great golden seat was never occupied. King Thibaw sat down below at the foot of the throne on a
cushion. He leaned one arm upon the base of the throne as if he would say, ‘If
I do not yet ascend the throne because I am young and not very clever, yet it
is mine. This throne is mine, and some day when I am grown older and wiser I
too shall sit upon it?’
“Perhaps that was in his mind, but the time never
came, never will come in which any shall sit upon that golden throne, hold
audience from there of all his people.
“The king sat below the throne on a cushion, with the
ministers beside him, and great numbers of people came to his audience.
“Every man who ate of the bread of the king in
Mandalay must come, ministers and judges and secretaries, soldiers and
engineers and the officers of the king’s boats. Even many officials came from
distant provinces to pay honour to the king on that day.
“Every minister wore his robe of office. Each kind of
high official had his own proper robe, and they must wear them in Mandalay so
that you could tell who each man was, and pay him due respect if you met him.
But on the reception day they wore special robes and the tall headdress which
makes the face look wise and solemn.
“While the king held his reception in the eastern
throne room, the queen held hers in her own throne room, the western room. She,
too, sat at the foot of the throne leaning her arm upon it as the king did. Thakin, she was a greater queen than any queen of King
Mindon’s, but still she would not ascend the throne. As the king did not she
could not. And she, too, was very young.
“At this their last reception the king was but
twenty-seven and the queen twenty-six years old.
“While the ministers and soldiers went to the king,
their wives and daughters came to the queen. Such a crowd there was coming
through the great doors and up the steps to the throne room. As we sat by the
queen we saw them come up the steps from the gardens to the terrace, and then
from the terrace up the stairs between the great golden pillars. Very gay they
were with theirbright beautiful silks and thin white
jackets, wearing many gold bracelets and all sorts of jewels.
“There were few old people among them. The queen was
young, and the young come to the court of the young. Very many of them were
pretty, too, and all so pleased to be received by the queen.
“She sat there by the throne with princesses and maids
of honour about her, a glory of gold and jewels, and as the new comers were
introduced to her one by one, she said a word to them, a pleasant word always.
There was nothing the queen liked more than these receptions. There were only
two a year, so she did not get tired of them, and with all these people coming
to bow to her she felt she was queen indeed.
“That was the last reception the queen ever held, the
last time that many of her people saw her face. I shall never see a sight like
that again, so gay, so beautiful, so glad.
“Then we had boat races upon the moat outside the city
walls.
“It is a capital place for boat races, as it is long
and straight and there is no current, and as only two boats race at one time
there is plenty of breadth.
“The king and queen did not go. Every one wanted them
to go but they would not. They were so fond of the palace, they did not care to
move out of it. But we had leave to go, and many of us went. We were driven
down through the city to the outer side where the races were being held, and
there was a nice covered place made all ready for us, and we sat there and
watched.
There were a great number of boats from all parts:
from Sagaing and Ava and many other places on the
river. They were very pretty with gilding, and the paddles were gilded on the
blades so that they flashed through the water like sunlight. Before the race
each boat came out and rowed about a little and a man danced and sang in the
bows and the paddlers answered in chorus.
“With the boats came a great number of villagers,
friends, and relations of the paddlers, and they ran on the bank and shouted
with the excitement. Then there were people betting great sums of money. Each
village would lay on its own boat every penny they had, and the men went to
pawn their silk head-cloths to get another rupee to put on. The ministers, too,
were betting, and the pages were like mad boys laying money here and there on
whatever boat they thought had the best style as the crew paddled. The maids of
honour also betted. When they had no money they betted their bracelets and
their jewels. I, too, betted and won twenty rupees.”
I looked scandalised, and she laughed.
“Ah, the Thakin is much
shocked. English ladies never bet; and the Thakin when he plays cards ”
"You were telling me about the boat-race,” I
interrupted. “Cards are quite a different subject from boat-races. How many
paddlers were there in each boat ? ”
“Some had sixty, some not so many, but I do not think
any had so few as thirty, all young men, so handsome and so strong. They
started away down the moat and raced towards us. There was a dead silence as
they were preparing for the start. When the boats were off there was a murmur
and then silence again, men holding their breath with excitement. The boats
came rushing through the water towards us, the white foam flying from their
sides and the paddles flashing so quickly to-and-fro. Now one gained, now another,
as they quickened and slackened. Men were so excited they fell into the moat,
and no one even laughed. At the end came the last rush, the crews shouting in
time and the bow paddlers standing up to seize upon the cane strung through the
bamboo, the badge of victory. Then came a tremendous roar, every one shouting
at once. All the dense mile of people on both sides of the water swayed and
surged and shouted as if they were madmen. Men who had won leaped and threw
their arms in the air and laughed out aloud. The friends of the winning boat
were mad with joy, and the friends of the losing boat shook their heads and
said : ‘ Never mind; next time we shall beat you into pieces. Our men were a
little tired today?
“Then everything quieted down for the next race.
“Nearly all day the races went on, and in the evening
the queen sent presents for the winning boats. She sent them down by a maid of
honour, the daughter of a high official. The winning crews were called up and
the presents were given to them in the name of the queen. And while the people
were shouting with joy and the sunlight fell in level rays upon the shining
water and the nodding lotus leaves, upon the great red waI19 of the city and
the ever-moving people, we drove away back to the palace.
“Such a day of pleasure for the people, Thakin. There are never any boat-races on the moat now for
the people to enjoy. They work hard and there are no pleasures made for them.
No one cares for them now.
“At night the palace gardens were lit up. Lamps were
hung upon the trees, and there were little clusters of lights behind the bamboo
clumps and flower bushes. All the bridges that crossed the waterways were lined
with lamps, and the summer-house was as if it were built with fire. All the
gardens both on the north and south twinkled with myriads of lights, and the
still waters of the canals gave them back again twice over.
“In front of the western throne room we had a maze. It
was built of bamboo trellis-work about two feet high at the outside, rising
gradually to the centre. In the centre was a trophy of painted panels and
gilding very beautiful, and at each corner of the maze was another smaller
trophy.
All along the trellis there were little lamps, so that
as you stood on the palace steps you saw the whole maze in gold and crimson
flame. It was great fun trying to get into the maze, but very difficult. You
must not jump over any of the partitions, but find your way properly to the
centre. Many of us tried, but few of us got in, and when we wandered along and
came to a full stop and had to come back, those outside who were watching
laughed.
“Neither the king nor queen tried the maze, but stood
and watched and laughed, and wandered now and then through the gardens to see
the lights on the bridges and behind the trees. There was music too playing,
and a dance going on in the portico, and all sorts of amusements. Overhead was
the full moon, so that even when the lamps waned and died the world was full of
light. Only the shadows were more dense. All that night no one thought of
sleep. For there were the gardens to roam in and the pwès to watch, and then there was the great weaving going on.
“For it is custom to give many presents to the monks
at the end of Lent, especially new robes, and there was always a keen
competition about these robes.
“The great ladies of the palace, the princesses and
the wives of the ministers and officials, made up parties to weave these robes.
They were woven in the palace during the night of the full moon. Spinning
wheels were brought in, and looms and dyeing vats and cotton. Nothing else was
allowed. No ready-woven cloth nor any thread, just only the carded cotton. At a
given time the ladies began to work. The cotton had to be spun into thread and
sized and dyed and woven all in a night. Such a tremendous hurry there was!
Girl succeeded girl. As soon as one was tired another began, and worked as hard
as she could for a little time, and she then gave way to another. The desire of
each party was to have their robe finished in time to present to the monks next
morning. All night long there was feverish hurry at the work, all the ladies
laughing and working and taking a little doze and working again.
“Then the queen would go round and see how the work
progressed, and encourage the workers, and perhaps lend a maid of honour here
and another there to parties that were behindhand.
“There was incessant watching to see that no
ready-used thread was introduced. Ladies when not working would go and watch
others to see that all was fair.
“Once a lady, the wife of a secretary, was caught. She
had brought in wrapped about her waist a great quantity of ready spun and dyed
thread, and she was caught with it. Such a sensation there was! And when the
queen was told she sent for the culprit to be brought before her. The lady
came, very much ashamed at being caught, surrounded by other ladies calling ‘Fie!’
at her. The queen made an inquiry, and when it was clear that the lady had
really attempted to smuggle in the thread the queen passed sentence upon her.
The skein of thread was to be hung round her neck and she was to wear it till
the morning as a badge of disgrace.
“So they hung the skein about her neck and it fell
over her bosom, and so she went away. She was very much ashamed and cried at
her disgrace, but the other ladies only laughed at her. I was quite sorry for
her, but really there was nothing to cry about, for it was all fun, Thakin.
“All night they worked dreadfully hard. The thread was
sized and then dried over hot fires and woven and then dyed in a great hurry
and dried again over the fires. It was hard work, but it was great fun all the
same. And then next day there was the glory of going in the procession offering
to the monks what you had worked hard all night to make.
“ It made one proud and happy.
“That was the festival of the full moon, the last
festival the palace ever saw, the last festival the queen ever reigned over.
Never shall »I forget it. Ah I Thakin, they were
pleasant days, those in the palace with the queen.”
CHAPTER XX
THE GOVERNOR OF THE CITY
“All this time the air was full of rumours. I was but
a child, how could I understand it all ? There came a cloud hanging over the
gayness of the palace, a cloud I knew not whence. But it was very visible and
quickly growing more and more black. Even on those days and nights of rejoicing
at the full moon we all felt that something was going wrong, that all was not
as it used to be. The king was sad and the ministers were full of care. Only
the queen seemed the same. If anything her eyes were brighter and she was
prouder than before. When the days of the full moon were over it seemed as if
we plunged at once into trouble and unhappiness. Many councils were held
between the king and his ministers. Was the queen present the Thakin asks ? Was the queen ever absent from the king?
They lived and ate and slept and played together. They were hardly ever parted
and never for long at a time; half an hour, not more. What all the councils
were about I cannot say. I heard much talk of a timber company cheating the
king, and I heard of messages from the British government and then talk of war.
Many soldiers came to the palace in those days and were sent forth in one
direction and another. The king and queen gave them audience before they left,
and the queen gave them presents, swords generally, with gold and jewels in the
hilt.
“The governors of distant provinces came too. They
were sent for I think by the king and they discussed many things. They talked
of the men they could raise and the money and what arrangements should be
made. I am a girl, Thakin; girls do not understand
those things. Talk of war frightens me. It is a horrible thing. I did not heed
more than I could help.
“But otherwise things went on much the same in the
palace. The king and the queen laughed and played with the maids of honour, the
ministers came and consulted and went away again to do as they could, no one
knowing much or caring very much.
“There was a curious thing happened just about that
time.
“Trouble had broken out in the city. Thieves wandered
about at night and stole, robbers broke into houses and murdered and robbed.
Men were getting restless everywhere, evil men scenting the trouble about to
come and bestirring themselves. When the forest is on fire, the wild cat slaps
his arm?
“It was reported that these thieves and murderers were
many of them natives of India and foreigners of sorts. I do not know if this
was true or not, but it was natural now that we were quarrelling with the
Indian government to suspect its subjects.
“Every one said it must be foreigners who were
committing all these crimes and there was a great stir about it. Merchants came
and petitioned the palace that their trade was being interrupted and they were
losing money. Stringent orders were therefore sent to the governor of the city,
the Myowun, that he must at once, at any cost, put an
end to these disturbances. It was a disgrace, he was told, that this the
capital of the great nation should be troubled at night by evil characters and
robbers. He must bestir himself and stop it.
“However, the disturbances did not stop. Patrols were
sent all over the city at night with strict orders to arrest every one found
out after nine o’clock, headmen of wards were told that they must arrange for
watches to be held and other precautions taken. But still though some of the
evil doers were caught and severely punished crime did not stop.
“Then one day there came a petitioner to the queen. It
was the wife of the governor of the city. She was a handsome woman, still
young, with beautiful large eyes, and as she came into audience her eyes were
full of tears. The king and queen were then in the little pavilion with the
fountain in front, near the tower with the winding stairs, and the governor’s
wife came in and knelt. The queen knew of course who she was, for she had been
maid of honour once and often came to the palace to talk to the queen, and
indeed the queen liked her very much, so when she came in thus with tears in
her eyes the queen was very sorry for her and asked what it was all about.
“Then the governor’s wife told this story. The town,
she said, was troubled very much with thieves and wicked men who went about at
night and robbed. The traders barricaded themselves in their houses and had
watchmen, and the poorer people lay awake all night in fear. This was a sad
state of affairs, and the king in his great concern for his people has
commanded the Myowun, the speaker’s husband, to stop
all this trouble at once. The Myowun reported to the
king that he was trying all he could to catch these thieves, but still the
thieving went on. Things were as bad as ever despite the governor’s statements
of what he did. Would the king and queen like to know how it was that the royal
orders were not obeyed but that their people were nightly plundered by robbers
?
“Then the queen told her to go on and tell the reason,
and the governor’s wife went on.
“I am ashamed to tell the queen about it,’ she said, ‘it
is shameful to my husband, shameful to me, that I should have to bring such a
tale to the queen’s throne. But this is the reason of it. My husband’s love has
left me and he has taken to himself a mistress. He has forgotten me who am his
wife, given to him by her majesty the queen, and goes after a strange woman, a
foreigner. Every night when he is supposed to be going about the city rousing
the guards, watching over the peace, he is with her. He sleeps by her side
while I, his wife, am alone, and robbers pass about the streets. These robbers
are of her kin, foreigners, and so he does not wish to have them arrested and
punished. That is the reason of it.’
“When the queen heard this she was very angry. The
wife of the governor had been one of her maids of honour, one of us, and had
been given to the governor in marriage by the queen not many years before. And
the queen hated to hear of infidelity by husbands towards wives. That was of
all things the one that made her most angry. So she turned to the king and
proposed that the governor should be immediately punished very severely,
perhaps executed if it were true.
But when the wife saw how angry the queen was I think
she was afraid. She had gone too far. She did not want her husband punished,
but only that his Indian mistress should be taken from him. So that when the
king agreed with the queen that the conduct of the governor was such as merited
very severe notice, she began to plead for him. If the king would but send for
him and warn him that would be enough. She did not want him punished or
dismissed. He was a good servant to the king. It was this Indian woman who had
beguiled and bewitched him. If the woman were banished and the governor warned
that would be enough. She pleaded hard before the queen. For although the
king’s name came to her lips it was the queen in reality.’ She it was who
decided.
“When the queen had listened to what the governor’s
wife said, she replied that due measures would be taken. Inquiry would be first
made, for it would be improper to punish any one without due inquiry. An
investigation would be held, and if it were proved that the governor was
behaving wrongly, the punishment meet for the offence would be imposed. It was
very wrong, said the queen, for any husband to treat his wife so. To take a
mistress was a scandalous thing, contrary to all law and religion, and she
would never overlook such a thing.
“See now the tears of the governor’s wife”, she said
to the princesses about her, “because of her husband loving another woman. How
much trouble and misery are caused to loving wives by the sins of their
husbands !
“Truly such an offence as this deserves punishment.
When a husband has a wife how can he leave her for other women? It is only
wicked men who can act so. Never will I permit such a thing. Wives must keep
honourably to their husbands, and husbands to their wives, or I the queen will
see to it?
“The queen was very much in earnest, Thakin. She meant all she said and more. I do not know what
the king thought of all this, whether he remembered a certain Shan princess.
But he said nothing. The governor’s wife could not say anything after the queen
had thus passed orders and presently she went away.
“She was sorry, I think, that she had come. But she
was in a passion then and did not think of consequences.
“It would have gone very hard with the governor if the
queen had been allowed to have her way. An inquiry was made and I suppose it
was proved that there was some truth in the wife’s story, for the governor was
arrested and put in gaol. He was put in leg-irons just like the other prisoners
in the gaol, many of whom he had himself caused to be arrested. It would have
gone hard with him, but that events then came so quickly one on the top of the
other, and danger gathered so fast, there was no time to think of minor things.
Perhaps the queen forgot. After fifteen days in irons in the prison the
governor was released and reinstated.”
“I should not think,” I remarked, “that he felt very
affectionate towards his wife on his release. Fifteen days in irons is not
calculated to greatly increase one’s love towards the cause of it.”
“No, Thakin,” she answered
meditatively, I suppose not. But she did
not think. Women are very hasty.”
CHAPTER XXI
THE COUNCIL OF WAR
“The air grew fuller of rumours. There was to be war
every one said. The British government did not like to see the timber company
punished for its cheating and was about to make war because of them. The
foreigners began to leave Mandalay and go down the river in the steamers to
Lower Burma. A spy had come up from the British government to look about
Mandalay and discover where it was weak and where it was strong. This was
discovered just as he fled and the discovery made every one angry. The captain
of the steamer who brought him up was arrested and tried and was sentenced to
death for treachery.
“There was great excitement everywhere. It was
reported that there was a numerous British army collecting near the frontier to
invade and attack us. Many steamers were engaged, it was said, to carry the
troops. Then at last there came a final letter from the British government. It
came up in a special steamer, and when it arrived there was a great excitement.
The ministers were sent for from all about to come quickly to the palace to
consider it.
“The king’s council was held in the little white
chamber that looks out on the courtyard where the water-tassel leaps. There is
a dais at one end of this, where the king and the queen sat, and below this
were the ministers sitting on the floor. There were great mirrors about that
chamber that gave back to you all the scene about you, mirrors at the sides,
mirrors at the end of the chamber.
“The letter was read aloud by a secretary. I do not
remember exactly what the letter said. How should a child remember all these
things of state ? But it was to say that if the king did not do this and that
and send an answer within so many days, then the English would make war upon
him. One of the things was that nothing was to be done against the timber
company, I remember. When it was finished every one was very angry.
“Then there was a discussion upon the letter— what was
to be done ? Several of the ministers spoke. The Taingda Mingyi wanted to have war. He was very angry at the letter.
“Let the king declare war’ he said, ‘against these
foreign devils. Has not the king thousands of brave soldiers who can defeat
these heretics and drive them into the sea ? Did ever any king hear such a
demand as that made in this letter ? This company has been cheating the king, and
after due and proper investigation by the proper court they have been found
guilty and fined. And the king is ordered to set aside the orders of his court
of justice and let these people off. For all this talk about another
investigation is pretence. It is all talk. If the English have their way there
will never be another investigation. This letter is full of words, but what it
means is that the king is to become the slave of the English.
“This resident, they propose to send, he is to be the
king. This is their way. Did not the English take the kingdom of Arracan and Pegu from the king’s ancestors ? And now they
are not content but must try to rob the kingdom of Ava. That is the meaning of
such words.
“But let the king make war. We have many brave
soldiers and this war shall not be as the last. In this war the king shall be
victorious. He shall drive the English from their places and reconquer these
countries even as the great Alompra did. The king’s
army has been trained now as the foreigners’ army has been trained. The palace
is full of guns and ammunition. These English are but animals without faith or
honour or religion as all the world knows. English faith is a byeword among the nations. Let the king make war.’
“He said a great deal more than this, Thakin, his words were full of wrath against your government.
“The queen was glad when the Taingda Mingyi spoke, for her mind and his were at one in this
business. Indeed I think that many of those hearing were glad at the brave
words of the Mingyi. They were angry at the letter
and wanted revenge.
“Then the king turned to the Kinwun Mingyi and asked what he advised. ‘What has the Kinwun Mingyi to say in this
matter ? ’ And the minister bent forward and said,
“The letter is an evil letter. It is difficult for the
king to accept such a letter. It is full of insults and hard words. And it is
true that the meaning of it all is that the English want the country. But still
war is very difficult. I, the king’s minister, have been to foreign lands, to
India and France, and I have seen these armies of the English. They are very
numerous and very well armed and savage. My lord’s army cannot yet fight with
them. Therefore let my lord keep the peace for yet a few years. What matters
this resident and this company of timber traders ? They are wise men who can
forget small things and remember great ones. Let the king forget these
annoyances and remember his great kingdom. In a few years the army will be
better trained and more numerous, and the king may have friends among the other
nations. He can bide his time and strike when the blow will tell. But now it
would not be wise to make war.
If my king would send an answer to these English that
their requests shall be fulfilled, then if indeed it be necessary to fulfil
them, it can be done slowly, and meanwhile preparations can be made. In a few
years there may be war, and success, but not now.’
“Such words said the Kinwun Mingyi, the cunning old minister whom King Mindon had made,
trying to soften the wrath that the letter had caused. But it was all of no
use.
“The other ministers were very angry and the queen was
more angry than all. She had always hated the Kinwun Mingyi, although I think, Thakin,
that he helped her husband to his throne. She hated him because he often gave
advice contrary to hers. He was for going softly and carefully while the queen
was always in a hurry. She always hated him, and if he had not received from
the old king an order giving him assurance against any form of death or
punishment, she would, I think, have tried to have him degraded long ago. She
was very angry, and as I sat behind her I could see her shiver all over and her
cigarette went out because she breathed so fast she could not smoke it, and she
leant back for another. I rolled it quickly and lit it and gave it to her, but
it soon went out and she forgot about it.
The other ministers spoke too. I think they all urged
the king to make war. I think the Kinwun Mingyi was the only one who wanted peace at the council.
“They pressed for war and spoke of all the
preparations that were made. They spoke of the Immortals of the king’s guard,
who were tattooed with charms and made proof against bullets and sword cuts,
and that they could withstand the English troops with ease and destroy them.
They told the king how a Chinaman had invented a mirror with which the sun’s
rays could be reflected on the enemy and his army utterly burnt up.
Many speeches were made. And whenever any one spoke of
war and how the king would win, the queen’s eyes brightened and she looked at
him and smiled. Men were glad, Thakin, when the queen
smiled at them. It meant many things in those days that the queen should be
glad at a man’s words.
“But the king sat still and silent and said nothing,
nor smiled at all. I do not think he liked the idea of war, even successful
war. He was a religious man, and had been told that all war is very evil. Such
men should not be kings, Thakin.
“Great kings are those who are savage and cruel,
delighting in ravaging other countries and killing the people, making the rest
slaves. Great kings are those who rejoice in conquest and in the death and
misery of others. They are robbers and murderers in high places. King Thibaw was not like this.
“So they all pressed the king to make war, and the
talk went on from the time it would take the sun to sink from the zenith to
yonder roof. It was a very long council.
“Then at the end the Kinwun Mingyi spoke again and advised the king to make peace. ‘Did
not one of my lord’s ancestors make war and lose Arracan,
and another make war and lose Pegu? Let my king be advised, lest quickly he
lose Ava also.’
“The king’s mind was bent towards the Kinwun Mingyi. All those at the
council could see that the king was not agreeing with those who would have war.
He knew the Kinwun Mingyi was wise, and his words fell into the king’s mind.
“Then at last the queen spoke. After all the low deep
voices of the ministers her voice sounded clear as a silver bell in the white
chamber. ‘I too, the queen, the king’s wife, have something to say to the king
upon this subject. Is my king a servant of these foreigners that he should
suffer these things?’
“ She stopped for a moment, and when she went on the
words fell slowly from her lips as drops that fall from a tree after rain.
“The Kinwun Mingyi has said that if the king makes war he may lose his
kingdom. Let it be that this is true. Better it were to lose the Golden Kingdom
than to listen to orders like a slave. Is my lord in his palace to be but as
the governor of a province, to do this and that at the bidding of a greater
than he? My lord is a great king, and his sword is sharp. He shall reply with
its edge to those that contemn him. Sooner shall we die with our soldiers than
live with chains of words about our necks. But all this talk of defeat is the
talk of old men and cowards. There is no fear. The brave soldiers, the
Immortals, shall soon conquer the enemy and drive him into that black sea
whence he came, sea devil that he is. The Taingda Mingyi shall command, and all shall go well.’
“Then she turned from the king and looked at the Kinwun Mingyi, and her voice was
full of scorn and hate.
“As to the Kinwun Mingyi, he is old and afraid. He is not a man, a minister,
but a woman, an old, old woman. Look, my maidens shall bring him even now a
petticoat and a fan that he may dress as becomes his words, and when he goeth forth from the king’s presence the world shall know
him for what he is.
“The queen stopped speaking and was silent. Her face
flushed and her eyes were very bright, then slowly one by one tears came into
her eyes and she put her hands over her face and cried.
The tears ran down her fingers and dropped from her
rings, and a sob came out of her throat. We were all very much afraid, for we
had never seen her cry before, and it was terrible to see a queen cry in a
council. The ministers were all bowed forward with their clasped hands before
them on the rugs and their faces to the ground. Within the chamber all was
still, but from without there came the laughter of the water falling into the
basin and the cry of birds. Outside all was gay with sunshine and happiness,
but inside it was still and sad as death.
“Only the king’s eyes wandered to and fro, passing down the rows of ministers in their state
dresses and white fillets till his eyes fell upon the Kinwun Mingyi, the wise old minister whom his father had
honoured, whom his queen had dishonoured. Then he looked away through the
pillars to the white courtyard where the sun was shining and the trees waving
their green fingers to and fro. All the fate of the
nation was in his thoughts.
War or not war ? Who was to prevail, the queen or the
old minister?
“If he could only have seen into the future, Thakin, only have known a few days ahead. But all the
looking across the gardens, even to the purple hills far away in the distance,
could not tell the king what was to be in those next few days.
“His eyes came back from far away and fell upon the
queen sitting there by his side on the purple cushions, and at last he spoke.
“I have heard,” he said, ‘what the ministers have
advised, and there seems to be no other way than war. Only by war can we save
our kingdom from dishonour. But that all things be done in proper order, let
there be now assembled a great council of ministers as the custom is. Let them
meet as soon as may be, all the ministers whom custom orders, in the Byedaik, and deliberate on this subject as the law of the
kingdom has always been. When the decision is made, orders will be issued?
“Then the king rose from the dais and turned towards
his own apartments, and the queen followed and we followed the queen.
“I saw her face as she went, and it was quite white
now, but her eyes were very bright. She looked glad and yet sorry. I looked
back as we went out, and saw the Kinwun Mingyi going away. His face was sad and he was ashamed; but
the other ministers were merry and jested as they went.
“Ah! Thakin, I shall always
remember that council, but I cannot tell it you all word for word. How can a
child remember everything? I forget many things and get confused sometimes.
“Thakin, you have seen how
the wind is strong and the clouds are fleeing fast, the blue sky comes in
glimpses now in one place now in another, shows for a moment till the clouds
cover it up again. That is the way my memories come back to me. A scene, a
word, a face, comes to me; it stays but for a moment, and forgetfulness covers
it.”
CHAPTER XXII
FINAL STEPS
“So a great council was held in the Byedaik, a building on the north of the palace. To this
council all the ministers above a certain rank were called, the Mingyis and the secretaries and the governors. Many
ministers came to the great council. For it was the old custom of the state
never to declare war without holding a great council and receiving its consent.
It was the custom always to discuss serious questions of state in this
council, and to take its advice upon all points.
“But of course the real ruler was the king. If he
wanted to declare war he did so, but few kings would do so if their ministers
disagreed.
“Messengers were sent everywhere to summon ministers
to come to the council. They ran on foot through the city and on horseback to
those who dwelt in the outer town and summoned them in haste to the palace, and
they came up quickly, riding or in bullock carriages.
“The king and queen sat in the little garden pavilion
and waited for news from the Byedaik. It was not the
custom for the king to go there, but only to send his orders as to the question
to be debated. It really did not matter very much, as it was only a matter of
form.
“It was very hot that day in the gardens. The rains
were over and the south-west wind had stopped and the north wind had not yet
come. Not a leaf moved. The waters lay in the tanks like mirrors reflecting the
green banks and the trees, without a broken ripple on them.
“No one spoke much. The king and queen sat side by
side as they did always, and now and again the king would say something to the
queen about the council or about the news from the frontier. But the queen did
not answer much. She seemed to be tired with what had occurred that day.
“Presently the queen’s mother, the Sinpyumashin,
came round by the west of the palace' to join the king and queen. She had two
or three maids of honour with her, carrying her fan and betel box and cushion.
“She came to the pavilion and sat down beside the
queen. ‘ We are waiting to hear the decision of the council” said the queen to
her mother. “You have heard that they are now discussing the answer to that
letter from the foreigners?”
The queen-mother said she had heard. “I heard
everything” she said, “what the Taingda Mingyi said
and what the Kinwun Mingyi said and what you said, Su, Su. I am very sorry to hear it all”
The queen did not say anything, but looked at her
mother and then looked at the king. There was a long pause.
“When the queen-mother came and sat down by the queen
her maids of honour came up with her and found places beside us. One of them
came and sat next to me. She was a Shan girl with such a fair face and pink
cheeks. But she was not pretty because her face was round and chubby. Round
faces are not pretty, but only long ones.
I had never been near a Shan girl before, and I looked
at her very curiously. Another girl was a girl I knew, whose father was a
Chinaman in the king’s service. I recognised her at once and tried to whisper
to her, but she held up her hand. So I saw that the queen-mother was in a bad
temper, and it was better not to try and talk to any one, or she might hear and
be annoyed and we might get into trouble. I kept quiet. We waited and waited
till the time seemed dreadfully long. Afar off on the east of the palace we saw
through the trees that people were coming and going continually. They were very
busy there. Once a cannon went rumbling out dragged by elephants, and this
reminded us of the war and of the council that was going on, which I had almost
forgotten.
Then at last we saw a herald coming through the garden
towards us. He came along fast, and when he came to the pavilion he knelt down
and spoke. He spoke very loudly and very
clearly, and he used all the long and difficult words that people use when they
talk of state matters. I do not remember exactly what he said, but his meaning
was this :
“There had been held a great council, and all the
great ministers were there. He named them, the Kinwun Mingyi and the Taingda Mingyi and the Hlethin-atwinwun and the Myowun,
and many more. They had considered the affairs of state and read the letter
from the foreign government, and many ministers had spoken. Some had spoken on
one side and some upon the other, and in the end when all sides had been heard
then each gave his opinion. And the opinion of the great council was this, that
an evasive but friendly answer should be sent to the foreign government. They
did not think it would be wise to have war.
“Thakin, you never saw any
one so angry as the queen was when she heard that message. The king too was
annoyed. It was an unheard-of thing for the ministers thus to oppose an order
of the king.
“The king had declared war, and the council, his
council, declared for submission. The king was very vexed. If he had known
beforehand that the majority of the ministers were for peace he too, perhaps,
would have declared for peace. But now he had ordered war and he could not go
back, could not say he was wrong and would change. War he had said and war it
must be.
“When a weak man makes up his mind, Thakin, he is far harder to turn than a strong man.
“But if the king was vexed the queen was furious. ‘See
now, Maung, Maung,’ she said, 1 what sort of ministers yours are. You give them
orders to declare war and they send you a message that they think peace would
be better. Your father the great king would have executed or dismissed them.
“And then the queen’s mother interposed. ‘Nay, but
consider,’ she said. ‘This is a dreadful thing that you are bringing upon the
country, that the king who used to be a monk should declare for war, which is
such a wicked crime. It will bring nothing but trouble, nothing but evil. And
every one is against you. Even your own ministers are trying to save you.
Consider, therefore, and be careful.’
“What the king would have replied to the queenmother I do not know, but he had no time to speak.
The queen turned upon her and spoke very fast, very angrily, ‘What is the good
of talking now ? ’ she said ; ‘war is decided upon. It is no use to argue. And
besides war is right.’
“But the queen-mother would not be so silenced. ‘You
are throwing away your throne,’ she said. ‘Who put you on the throne but me ?
Who plotted for the king and did all things for the king but me ? And now that
I see that throne about to be upset, shall I not speak ? ’
“But the queen would not listen. She was furious. She
forgot that it was her mother who was there pleading to her, and she answered
bitterly:
“Whether you gave the king his throne or not, I do not
know. But you understand nothing of these affairs. They are affairs of state
that do not concern you or any one except the king.
‘“All who do know state affairs are against you”,
answered the queen-mother. “There is your council, all the old ministers who
are trained in business, they say that there should be no war. But you who are
young think that you know better than the old ministers of the king your
father, and you will have your way. There is the Kinwun Mingyi, why do you not listen to him ?
“If the queen was angry before, she was twice as angry
now. Listen to the Kinwun Mingyi,
him whom she hated ? She turned her face upon her mother, and it was pale with
anger, and her eyes shone and her hands trembled.
“The Kinwun Mingyi”, she answered slowly. “Yes, you and the Kinwun Mingyi are a pair. You
should be married, or go into a retreat together as hermits. You are a good
match.”
“There was a dead silence. The queen was sitting, with
her lips tight set one against the other, staring across at the palace. The
king looked at the queen in dismay. Never had such words been used by a
daughter to a mother. Though the king did not want to listen to her advice, yet
would he never have spoken so to the queen-mother. It was terrible. But he was
afraid to interfere.
“ Then the queen-mother rose up from her place and
went away without a word more. She went down from the summer-house and across
the garden to the west side of the palace, and then round to the north, where
her rooms lay, walking very slowly. I did not see her face, but there were
tears surely in her eyes. It was a terrible thing to see a mother leaving her
children like this.
“We sat and looked at each other sideways in turn,
fearing we knew not what would come after this. Never had the queen been so
before.
“Suddenly the queen spoke to the king, cheerfully,
brightly, with all the anger and bitterness gone from her eyes.
“Maung, Maung,” she said, “come let us go to the
palace. For orders must be given about this war, and the matter must be settled
at once and the answer sent to the English. Let us go to the palace and call
the secretaries.”
“Then the king and queen arose and went together to
the palace. What the queen said, that the king did. So the king and queen went
to the palace, and the ministers and secretaries were sent for, and there was
more consultation. But now it was all about war. There was no' more talk of
peace, for that was all decided and done for. War was to be, and the only
question was now about the way.
“That day, and for many days after that, the king was
very busy with his ministers and secretaries. The answer to the English
government was made and sent, and it said that the terms could not be.
accepted. They were impossible. And a proclamation was made out to issue to the
people.
“War was declared, it said, between the king and the
government of India. There would be fighting. But the people were not to be
alarmed nor disturbed. Though there should be war, yet would they not be
troubled. For the king had many troops, many brave and glorious soldiers, who
would attack the heretic foreigners and drive them into the sea. Let the
people, therefore, not concern themselves, but buy and sell, plough and reap,
marry and perform their religious duties as they were wont. The king was a great
king, and he would protect them. Such was the proclamation.
“Preparations were made too for the war. Orders were
sent out to all the governors of the provinces to raise men and money and to
assist in the war. Officials were sent down from Mandalay to the frontier. The
river was to be blocked to stop the steamers, and forts were to be armed. Such
a hurry there was all day long in the palace, men coming and going and orders
being issued. On the south side of the palace in our gardens all was always
quiet, but on the north side, where the arsenal was and the stores, men were at
work all day long, and rifles and cannon were always being issued. Whenever we
went round to the north garden we could see the work going on.
‘‘The queen liked to go and watch the cannon and the
guns being got ready. She took great interest in all these things. Whenever an
officer left Mandalay to go to the frontier to command the troops the queen
ordered him to come and see her before she went. And when he came she would
talk to him and tell him to fight well for her and for the kingdom. She would
give presents, too—a diamond ring, a gold-hilted sword—and tell him when in the
fight to look upon these and remember the king and her. Great, she said, was
the honour and glory due to the soldier who fought well for his country. The
young officer would listen, and would swear to the queen that he would win, and
would drive out the foreigner and rescue all those of their fellow-countrymen
who were slaves on the lower province.
“Ah! Thakin, the queen knew
how to make men faithful to her. She spoke to them so kindly and so sweetly;
when he was young, and unmarried, she promised one of the maids of honour as a
wife when he returned.
“So be sure and fight well”, she said, “and remember
that there is awaiting you on your return honour and favour and wealth, and
perhaps a wife.” Then the queen would laugh, and the young soldier would laugh
too.
“Amongst others that were sent for by the ministers
and ordered to take command here or there was my father. He was told that by
great favour of the king he was appointed to command one of the gunboats on the
river, the one called the Bundoola. He was to take
charge of her and put her in fit order, and then go down to the frontier to
join the other boats and destroy the English steamers. •
“But, alas ! Thakin, when my
father went to the steamer, he found it was all of no use. The boilers were
rotten and the pipes broken and the guns jammed. Besides, he could get no money
to make repairs with. . He asked and asked, but it was of no use, and the
steamer was never sent down. It would have been no good. That was the way of
many things.”
CHAPTER XXIII
THE OTHER SIDE
Meanwhile in Lower Burma there was no indecision nor
doubt. It had been decided by the government long before that it would be
necessary to go to war with Upper Burma sooner or later. The execution of the
king’s sons in 1879 very nearly brought on the war, but the outbreak in
Afghanistan caused it to be postponed.
Nevertheless, the plan of campaign had been carefully
worked out, and preparations had for long been made for the eventuality. Long
before it was known whether King Thibaw would accept
or no the demands of the Indian government, troops had been brought over from
India; Warlike stores had been collected, and the expeditionary force which was
to march on Mandalay had been organised.
The column that had advanced on Ava in 1825 had gone
by land. It had marched wearisomely through the roadless country on the left
bank of the Irrawaddy, keeping with it a flotilla of boats that served as
transport.
In the war of 1852 no column had entered Upper Burma.
The Indian government had merely seized on Lower Burma, without caring to
attack the king himself.
In 1885 other means were adopted. Since 1852 a great
fleet of river steamers had been established on the Irrawaddy by the Irrawaddy
Flotilla Company, steamers of small draft, capable of plying even in the dry
weather, with considerable length and beam. These steamers, too, were able to
tow a large flat on each side, and thus more than double the accommodation for
troops and the tonnage available for transport of stores. It is only 400 miles
by river from the frontier station of Thayetmyo to
Mandalay, and as these steamers, even with the needful delays when carrying
troops, cover sixty or eighty miles a day, it will thus be seen how much better
in every way it was to proceed by river than by land. Many steamers were
accordingly chartered for the conveyance of the troops and commissariat. One or
two of these were armed with sixty-four-pounder guns to batter any forts that
might be encountered, and others were fitted up for troops.
The force, which numbered about ten thousand men,
assembled at Thayetmyo, and there awaited the day
fixed by the ultimatum. When the steamer that was to bring the answer to the
ultimatum came down empty, it was known that war was resolved on, and when, on
November 9th, the letter from the Burmese government, refusing to comply with
the demands of the Indian government, was received, all was ready for an
advance.
The first reconnaissance into Upper Burma was made on
November 14th, when a launch went up above the frontier and captured a Burmese
government steamer, one of that mosquito fleet of which the Bundoola was a member. She was taken without fighting, save that an attempt was made to
explode gunpowder on board her as she was taken. Being moored to the bank at
the time with no steam up, she was an easy prize. How this story got changed on
its way to Mandalay will be seen later. On November 15th the whole force
crossed the frontier, and, moving slowly and cautiously, it came to Minhla on the 17th. Minhla was
the frontier station of the Burmese government. There was a fort here on the
right bank, a square structure of brick, which could be easily knocked into
pieces by shells, and not much resistance was expected here.
But on the left bank some entrenchments had been laid
out by the foreign engineers in the service of the king of Burma, and they were
said to be well armed with artillery and manned by good troops. Consequently
the main part of the column was landed on the left bank to attack these
entrenchments, while a comparatively small detachment was landed to attack the
fort.
The first attack succeeded completely. Instead of the
completed, well-armed, well-manned works the troops expected to take, they
found but halffinished ditches, with no artillery
and but very few men, armed with wooden guns for the most part. The Burman
skirmishers came out to meet their foe, and put up their guns at them, and put
them down, and put them up again. It was merely playing at war like a child.
The money which had been paid to buy rifles and good arms had been stolen, and
wooden toys substituted. The army, which ought to have been fifteen thousand
strong, was barely fifteen hundred unarmed villagers. Such was the queen’s
army, which was to retrieve her honour and to save the kingdom. Some of them
were shot, and the rest ran away.
On the right bank a better resistance was shown to the
Madras regiments which were landed to the attack. The fort held out bravely for
a time against the assault of the troops and the battering of the big guns.
Once or twice the assault failed. And then, at last, the door was smashed in by
artillery and the place stormed. It was only a little place, and the commander
died fighting to the end. Our loss was trivial. A force armed with artillery
and breechloaders does not suffer much from a foe
armed with flint-locks and wooden guns. Thus fell Minhla;
so ended the only fight of the war.
Later on, when the people rose against us, they showed
very different behaviour to this, though their arms were not much better.
After the victory at Minhla,
the flotilla continued its way up stream, shelling a place now and again, but
meeting with no resistance.
Proclamations were distributed by the general as he
went, declaring that the war was only with the king and the government, and
that if the people remained quiet no harm should come to them.
This assurance the people consider was violated when
the country was afterwards annexed.
From Minhla to Myingyan is about three hundred miles or a little less, and
the flotilla breasting the broad stream of the Irrawaddy took seven days to reach
so far. It was on the 24th that they came to Myingyan,
and with the big guns bombarded some entrenchments that lay above the town. It
is necessary now to return to the palace.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE KING’S FOREIGN MERCHANTS
“That council Thakin, was
the end of all our pleasant life in the palace. A little longer it went on, but
it was never the same again. All the joy and gaiety were gone out of it. All
the remainder of the reign of the king and queen was as one of those days when
the rains are coming on; when far away down in the south the lightning is
playing in the heart of a dense cloud, when the air is heavy and still, and the
beasts are going to shelter. Overhead the sky is still blue, the sun still
shines, but the thunder moans now and again and gusts of wind come whirling by,
full of warning. So it was in Mandalay.
“The king and queen still reigned, the ministers held
councils, and the business of government went on much the same as ever. But the
air was full of fear and of rumours. People knew that away down there in the
south events were taking place which would change everything. Those who rejoice
in trouble and reap their harvest during times of war came forth boldly; but
those who like peace were afraid and hid.
“Business came almost to a standstill, many there were
to sell, but who was there to buy, never knowing what might happen to him and
to his goods? Merchants and traders kept their money and put it in safe places;
many of the foreign merchants fled to Lower Burma, those who were left made
their houses into strong places of defence and collected there in companies.
Everywhere was suspicion and doubt. The foreigners feared and doubted the
people of the city, that if any trouble came they would arise and burn the
houses and loot such property as they could come by. The Burmese looked with
suspicion upon the preparations of the foreign merchants.
“Surely”, they said to each other, “these men are
plotting. Why else should they barricade their houses and prepare weapons and
stores of food ? They are plotting against the government.”
“One afternoon, I think it was the very next day after
the great council of the Byedaik, a minister came and
sought audience of the king. He was not either of the Mingyis,
but another minister, one who had much power, but not so much as they had. He
came in to the king as he was sitting in his rooms in his palace. The queen was
with him, of course, and I too was there sitting behind the queen. They talked
of one thing and of another, of the news from the frontier and of the troops
going down there, and presently the minister began to speak of the city. It was
in a bad state, he said. Notwithstanding the efforts of the officials the city
was much disturbed. Men were afraid and trade was stopped, and there was much
talk and many strange stories were current. There was an absurd idea abroad
that the foreigners were gaining some success on the frontier.
“All the trouble, said the minister, was clearly
attributable to the foreigners who lived in Mandalay. It was because of foreign
timber traders that the quarrel between the two governments had arisen. And now
the foreigners in Mandalay were spreading all sorts of tales against the king
and the government. They seemed to have no confidence in the king. They were
even barricading the brick houses which they had built. They pretended that
they were afraid of robbers, but no doubt the truth was that they were plotting
against the king. Probably they were about to raise an insurrection in the
city. They were quite capable of such a thing. And then the minister
recommended to the king to arrest the foreign merchants and execute some of
them as traitors to the king. So spoke the minister, and because he was an old
and well-tried servant of the king the king listened to him, but as the
minister went on the king’s face grew more and more disturbed, almost as if he
was angry. It was quite strange to see the king like this, sometimes before he
had been sad and troubled, but never angry. I thought he was agreeing with the
minister about the foreign merchants, and was angry against them. All of us
thought to hear him pass some order against them at once. I think even the
queen thought so, for she never interfered at all, never said a word, just
awaited the king’s reply. Then the king answered the minister.
“I have heard what you have to say,” he said, “I have
heard and I have considered. It is shameful that counsels such as these are
should be brought to me. The minister wishes me to arrest and execute my
foreign merchants. But indeed such an act would be a disgrace. For what have
these men done? They have done nothing. They are afraid and hide in their
houses and make them strong because of fear, because my officials do not govern
the city well. Is that a thing to arrest them for ? They are the guests of the
king in his city, and shall meet with all protection and all care.
They shall not be imprisoned, but shall be encouraged.
If they rebel are we not strong enough to put it down at once ? It would be
indeed an unseemly thing if the king were afraid of a few foreign merchants in
his city. But they will not rebel, they are afraid, that is all.
“Thakin, the minister was
very much surprised when he heard the orders of the king. He came thinking to
please him with his foresight, and the king turned upon him like this. The
minister was much ashamed, and crouched lower and lower as the king went on.
The queen too was surprised, and looked at the king with raised brows as if she
had never seen him before like this, as if this was a new spirit come to the
king. All of us were surprised to see the placid king so excited.
“The king was not contented with rebuking the minister
for his advice and with repudiating his proposals. When he had finished with
the minister he paused a few minutes thinking, and then he turned to a
secretary and gave an order.
“I desire,” said the king, “that all the foreign
merchants be summoned to the palace. Write an order to the Myowun to warn them all to come. They are not to be afraid, but are to come in full
confidence that the king wishes them nothing but good, and will take care that
no evil befals them.
“Next day the audience was held in the great glass
chamber. The foreign merchants were brought there, and when they were all
assembled the king and queen walked there from the little white pavilion, and
we followed behind.
“They were a strange sight, Thakin,
those foreign merchants. All kinds were there, Europeans and Indians, and men
from Turkey and many other places. There were all sorts of faces, round and
long, bearded and smooth, all tints from white to very black indeed. And they
wore many kinds of dress, but none so gay as our dress. They looked a sad crowd
indeed compared to what a crowd of our people would be, and they sat awkwardly
as if not accustomed to that way of sitting. Many of them seemed very nervous
as not knowing why they were called here. A speech was read to them by a
secretary, a speech that the king had made ready before. This is what the
speech said :
“The king of Ava, of all white elephants, king of
kings, and ruler of the universe, to his foreign merchants. We have heard that
the foreign merchants are disturbed, that they are afraid of what may come
about, and that they are hiding in their houses from fear. And so we the king
have sent for our foreign merchants to tell them to be of good courage. If
there be war between the king and any foreign power that is not a matter to
alarm the merchants. That is a question of governments and soldiers.
“There will be fighting, no doubt, but it will be far
away. No one shall hurt the merchants of the king. Let them forget that there
is war. Let them trade as before, buy and sell, and go hither and thither
trading, and think only of that. As they were wont to act before let them act
now.
“And if there arises any difficulties in any matter,
who shall put that right but the king? Whatever the merchants require let them
tell the king, and he will see to it. The king has been told that the merchants
are in difficulties because the trading steamers have ceased running. Let them
be of good heart about that.
“If the company’s steamers will not run, then will the
king see to it. His own royal steamers shall take their place, and run up and
down the river. For steamers are necessary that trade be carried on properly.
The king will command his officials to see to this.
“Let the merchants consider what they require, and
tell the king, being sure that he will listen to them. Evil men have brought
the king reports against his foreign merchants, but the king has not believed
them. Let them be sure that he will not believe any reports against them, but
will protect them always, as is the duty of kings”
“Thakin, I think that was
his own speech. I think that, of all the acts done under his rule, that was the
only one he did himself. For those were his own words. Not the words of the
queen or of the ministers, but his own thoughts. He was always kind and good tempered,
hating to see any one troubled or in danger, and for this once he spoke for
himself. He might have been even a good king in time if he had remained to grow
old.
“When the merchants heard the speech they seemed to be
all very pleased, and they cried out at the goodness of the king, and thanked
him for his mercy extended to them. After some more speaking, they went away.
“All this audience the queen sat by the king, but said
nothing. I do not know whether she agreed with the king or not; perhaps she did
not care very much. Perhaps she saw that it was a kingly thing to do, and would
bring honour to the king, and could do no harm. But I do not think she would
have done it herself. She would not have allowed the execution, but she would
not have sent for the merchants to make them a speech.
“The merchants went away lauding the greatness of the
king, and none of them were ever hurt, either themselves or their property, as
long as the king was in power. He kept his promise to them, and no one dared to
disturb them or injure them after the king had spoken his orders so firmly.
“But you cannot stop a storm with words. The lightning
and the rain care nothing for all these; and all the people saw the storm
coming up the river. All, I think, but the queen, who could not but believe
that she and her king were stronger than any storm. The storm came nearer, and
the people were more and more afraid.
“My mother came now and again to see me, and said that
my father and many others of the people were blockading themselves in their
houses, and making plenty of provision of food and arms, fearing outbreaks in
the city.
“Thakin, when I look back,
that time seems to me longer than all the time besides that I spent in the
palace. And yet it was but twenty days. From the beginning to the end not more
than twenty or twenty-one days came and went. But they were as long as a bad
dream, that takes you through years of trouble, in what, if you were awake,
would be but a moment of time.”
CHAPTER XXV
WHAT NEWS?
“The first news of the war that came to the palace was
of a fight between the king’s steamers and some English steamers below Minhla near the frontier. A messenger came with news from
there for the council, and it was said that there had been a great fight and
many men killed, but that in the end the king’s ships had been victorious and
two English steamers were taken.
“You know, Thakin, and I
know now, that this was not true, that it was a mere pretence of the commander
of the frontier to prevent the bad news coming to the palace, which would
perhaps have caused him to be dismissed or even punished. But every one in the
palace heard it and believed it. The queen herself told us of it, and was very
glad, thinking it was the beginning of many victories.
“That night a great pwè was ordered in the palace on
account of the victory. It was held as usual in the great porch before the
southern face of the palace. The king and queen and princes and ministers sat
upon the space before the large audience-room with the glass panels. The
dancers danced below; and around them in the great portico were all the lower
people of the palace, the soldiers and the servants and followers, many
hundreds of them, I think. As you sat up on the high place you looked down and
saw the open circle where the dancers danced, and then a great sea of faces all
around them; from the children sitting on the ground in the inner row to the
men standing in rank behind rank, away into the gardens even. The lights under
the portico were so bright that outside the night seemed very dark. It was as
if the dancers were held in a great ring of faces and the faces held in a ring
of night closing and pressing them in.
“It was a great pwè, and the actors in the play made
speeches on the greatness of the king and queen and the value of their armies.
They laughed at the foreigners, and at the idea that they could come and do any
hurt to the kingdom. The great and brave army of the king would soon drive them
away into the sea and the kingdom be restored as it was in the days of Alompra.
“It was very beautiful to see the dancers dancing,
dressed in wonderful dresses of silver and of gold that the queen had given
them. The best dancers and singers and the most beautiful women were there
acting before the king and queen that night. Down where they danced it was very
bright with the torches and lamps; but where the king and queen sat there were
not many lamps, only you could see the diamonds glitter around the queen’s
neck, and the golden bangles shine as she moved.
“When the best actress had danced, and had sung a
beautiful song to the queen of how great and gracious she was, like the full
moon beside the king her sun, and how the people loved and feared her, and how
the foreigners were like the night that wished to darken the kingdom, the
actress was called to come to the queen. So she came from out the circle to the
steps that led up to the place where the queen sat, and there she knelt down.
“ The queen ordered that it should be said to her that
she had sung well, but that' soon there would be more to sing of than the
capture of little ships. When Rangoon was taken and the foreigners driven out
and the Burmese of the lower country made again free men, that would be
something to sing about. Let the actress consider what she would sing then. If
her song was beautiful now, why how much more must it be beautiful then ?
“A maid of honour, one of the oldest maids, who was
not shy, then came forward and repeated in a loud voice so that all the people
could hear what the queen had said. And she gave to the actress a beautiful
gold bracelet with jewels in it that the queen took from her arm to give the
actress.
“When all the people round saw the bangle and heard
the gracious words of the queen a murmur ran through them as when the wind
blows in the trees.
“The king too gave a present to the chief actor and
money to be divided amongst the other actors; and all night long the music
sounded in the palace; the music sounded and the actors sang and the people
laughed, till at length, far away, you could see the summits of the Shan
Mountains black against the dawn.
“No one slept all that night in the palace, for they
were drunk with the beginnings of victory. They had their fill of rejoicing
that night; no one ever rejoiced again. No more were any victories reported,
there were no more pwès in the palace. That was the
last dance the king and queen ever saw—ever shall see—for I fear there are none
to amuse them, Thakin, in their prison across the far
water.
“After all that was confusion. More messengers
came—messengers were always coming—but there was no certainty to be made out of
the reports they brought. Sometimes they spoke of victory and said that the
foreigners were being defeated and driven down the river, sometimes that the
foreigners were ascending the river. But they were only being allowed to ascend
the river so as to be more severely defeated. When they had come up a certain
way the river would be blocked behind them and they would be entirely destroyed.
I cannot say, Thakin, whether the ministers received
true reports, or not; I can only speak of what we heard, of the rumours that
flew from lip to lip about the palace.
“Then, after a day or two, the rumours became all of
one kind—that we had been severely defeated, and that the foreigners were
pressing on up the river. Every one heard these rumours, and faces looked sad
and frightened. All faces looked sad but the queen’s. She never spoke of
defeat, but of victory, always of great success and of victory.
“The foreigners were being destroyed and the armies of
the king were successful everywhere.
Why did we look sad? she asked; and because none of
us dared to tell the queen of the rumours that were spread about, we pretended
not to be sad, but glad. We must rejoice, she said, because of the good news of
the armies. How much of the truth the queen knew I cannot tell, whether the
ministers told her of all they knew, or whether they were afraid to do so. But
whatever she knew, she was always very cheerful. When she was with the king she
was always happy and confident, and spoke to hm merrily of how they would go in
state to Rangoon when it was conquered and see the ships and the great sea.
Indeed, Thakin, she went there very soon and saw the
ships and crossed the sea as she said she would, but how differently to her
thoughts—ah! how differently!
“But Mebya had doubts I am
sure. She did not know what was true. Behind all her smiling face and happy
manners she was very much afraid that things were not right. For see, now, what
she did. One morning early the queen went out to walk in the gardens on the
north of the palace, and she called only one maid of honour, myself, to follow,
and forbade the rest ; so I went behind her with the golden box of tobacco and
the cigarette papers. These were the gardens where we used to play at
hide-and-seek with the king and queen in those days which were but yesterday,
but already appeared long ago.
“There were canals there in the south gardens and
ponds of water, and long avenues of trees that wound to and fro,
and you crossed the canals by narrow foot bridges and climbed up little hills
where there were rocks and ferns. It was very cool there in the early morning
in November when the mist hung like a veil upon the water, and the flowers were
covered with dew, and the queen was fond of walking there along the canals and
watching the fish swim to and fro. As you stood in
the gardens you could see the palace so beautifully through the trees, the
palace with its red and golden walls, and the carved roofs of the audiencechambers, and, above all, the great spire gleaming
in the early sunlight and sending out a myriad sparkles from the mirrors let
into the gilding.
“Beyond these gardens at one end is the white Boddhi pagoda, and some open ground where the children of
the palace officials used to play. The queen went to this end, walking slowly
under the trees, and stopped behind a great tamarind trunk and beckoned me to
her side; and she looked beyond, and there were many children playing by the
water, running and laughing ; some of the boys playing football. Then she
ordered me to go and call one of the children to come to the tamarind tree, but
not to say the queen was there. I went and called a little girl I knew about
eight years old, the daughter of one of the secretaries, and the child came
with me and took my hand, and we went to where the queen was standing alone,
behind the tamarind tree in the shadow.
“When the little girl saw the queen she was much
afraid and wanted to run away, but I told her there was no fear, that the queen
only wished to give her a present because she was such a pretty little girl, so
the child stood with me before the queen.
“Then Mebya the queen told
me to ask the child what she heard her parents talking about in the evenings
before the lights were lit, and I coaxed her, and she said that her father and
mother talked of the fighting, and how our soldiers had run away, and that the
foreigners had taken a fort down the river and killed many of our people, and
were advancing up the river.
“She also said that her parents talked last night that
it would be necessary to bury all their gold and silver, and that her mother
had told her she must give up her gold bangles to be buried, for that wicked
foreigners were coming to Mandalay and would steal them all.
“You will understand, Thakin,
that the child did not tell it all like this, but bit by bit; with coaxing and
care she told all she knew, and she cried a little at the end, partly because
she was afraid of the queen, and partly because of having to give up the golden
bangles that foreigners might perhaps steal.
“While little Ma Than was speaking the queen did not
say anything. She only listened, and as she listened her face grew whiter and
whiter and her eyes larger. When the child had finished the queen gave her a
gold jewel from her wrist and bade her tell no one of what the queen had asked
her, only to say that the queen called her and gave her a jewel. So little Ma
Than ran back to her friends very pleased and delighted with the present the
queen had given her ; and I called another.
“Altogether I called four children, and they all told
the queen the same, that their parents talked only of defeat and loss, and two
said that their parents were going to run away from Mandalay when the
foreigners came in a few days.
“When they had finished the queen went away slowly,
and I followed her. As she left the tree she said to me: ‘Thou hast heard what
the children have said. They are too young to have learned to lie. It must be
all true. It is the ministers and generals who dare not tell me the truth. But
thou who hast heard what they say, forget it, and dare not to speak to any one
of it.’ Then she went down the garden, and she looked so sad, ah, so sad!”
“It is terrible, Thakin,
that when an enemy is advancing to destroy a great kingdom the queen can only
hear the truth from children, who are too young to have learned how to lie. Of
all the ministers and generals she had raised into power, of all her thousand
servants whose lives lay in her hands, there was not one to tell her truly of
the ruin coming up the river. They were afraid of her, Thakin.
“She had forced on the war believing her army was a
good army, her ministers honest men, her generals brave and experienced
soldiers. Some of the ministers tried to save her from making war, but she
would not. And now they were afraid to tell her of the disaster she had brought
on the kingdom. There was no one now who dared to tell her the truth, who even
cared to tell her.
“She, the great queen, who had through her husband the
king ruled the Burmese nation and the Shan princes, who had sent hundreds to
death and given to hundreds power and wealth, whose palace was full of gold and
silver and precious stones, had no one to help her in her trouble. I was only a
little girl, Thakin, and I could not understand so
well then as I can now, looking back; but I was very sorry for the queen.
“The queen walked back through the arches of the
trees, and near the west entrance she saw the king come out and go towards the
garden pavilion. When she saw him she walked quickly and came up to him, and
asked him aloud if there were any new victories of the troops reported that
morning. Her voice sounded gay and she laughed, and all the sad look had gone
from her face.”
CHAPTER XXV
SURRENDER
“So we went on for a day or two, the news always
growing worse and worse, till at length no one tried to hide what it was. There
was consternation everywhere. The foreign maids of honour had left, and also
many of the other maids. There was so much fear of the foreigners who were
coming up the river that fear of the king and queen grew less, and people did
things that a month ago they would never have dared to do.
“Still, there were some who kept a good heart, or at
least pretended to do so, and the queen looked always happy and smiling when in
public with the king. For she was of great courage. Till at last something
happened that made it no longer of any use to even hope that things would turn
out well.
“After the queen had been into the garden talking to
the children, I was ill with fever, and could not go to attend upon her. I lay
in my room sick and hot, and my mother, when she heard I was sick, came to the
palace to attend to me, and I heard but little of the news that went on. It was
one morning, and I was in my room, and my mother was stroking my head because I
had a headache. Suddenly there was a great commotion and the noise of people
running to and fro and talking. My mother went out to
see what it was, and left me alone. I was afraid, because I was sick, and could
not go out and see what the matter was. I thought there must be some terrible
news come, or some catastrophe happened in the palace, or a rebellion. I
dragged myself to the window, and, looking out upon the gardens, I could not
see any one there, for the day was hot; a strong wind was blowing up from the
south right into my window; and, as I stood there and listened at the window,
there came on the breeze a low, soft sound, like thunder far away in the mountains,
and after a minute it came again and again. I did not know what it was. I could
see no thunder-storm; the sky was blue, with little white clouds flecked
across it. There was no sign of any thunder. I could not make it out, and my
head was too heavy to think, so I went back from the window and lay down again,
and soon my mother came in. I asked what the trouble was, and said I had looked
out of the window, but could see nothing. My mother said, ‘Did you hear no
sounds?’ and I said, ‘Yes; a sound as of thunder far away.’ Then she told me it
was the great guns of the English firing down the river.
“There was no doubt what it was, and there was
terrible confusion in the palace. I suppose the king and queen knew that the
foreigners were then close by, coming up. By that time it had become too late
to conceal anything, and it was known that the steamers and soldiers of the
Indian government were near by.
“To be told in words is one thing, Thakin;
to hear with your own ears the thunder of their guns is very different. You may
believe the words, but when you hear the cannon, then you know. I was very much
afraid myself when I heard that the noise was the guns of the enemy. My fever
seemed to get better, and I got up and dressed. My mother wanted me to go with
her at once, and leave the palace, but I would not. I wanted to see the queen
again, and not leave her yet. For I could not run away, as many of the maids of
honour had done, and leave the queen after all she had done for me. So I rose
and joined my company, which was waiting upon the queen.
“ I found there was a council taking place. The king
was there, of course, and the queen, and as many of the ministers as could be
called in a hurry. And it was decided very quickly to send down messengers to
tell the English general to stop; all would be agreed to if only the army would
stop. So the ministers counselled, and the king agreed. But the queen said
nothing. Surely it was a bitter thing to her to have to submit like this. But
she saw it was all at an end. The enemy was at the gate, and there was no hope
now of successful war. The only chance was to submit.
“The last time the English came up”, said the Kinwun Mingyi, “when the king
agreed to terms they stopped their army, even though it was as near Ava as the
present army is near to Mandalay. They stopped their advance, and returned to
their own country. It will be the same now. Let us therefore send at once to
the English general, and say that all demands will be fulfilled, and that he
and his army can return.”
“So two ministers were sent off in swiftly paddling
boats down the river to meet the English fleet. And in the palace, though there
was humiliation, yet also there was the peace of knowing that all was ended.
The English army would return, and the strain would be over, and if the terms
were bad, well, it could not be helped.
“The council was very soon over, and the ministers
sent away. There was nothing more to do, only to wait until the answer came. It
was next day in the evening that the answer came. Ah, Thakin!
such an answer. For the English general would not agree, would not stop, would
not return.
“ He would make no terms. Tell your king” he replied
to the ministers, “tell your king that I
am coming to Mandalay. If he wants peace then let him make peace at once. Let
him surrender and tell his soldiers to surrender. Then will he gain the best
terms. But no promises will be given”.
“Then, Thakin, was held the
last council of the king. It was held as was the first council, in the same
room, and with the ministers there just the same. But what a difference! Then
all was pride and now all was humiliation, and only seventeen days between the
two. In seventeen days all this had come to pass.
“The ministers who had been to see the English general
gave their message. A month ago no one would have dared to bring such a message
to the king, and even now. the ministers were greatly ashamed, greatly afraid,
at telling such a message. But it could not be helped, and so it was told.
“Then came a great dispute in the council. As before
the war there had been two sides so were there now. As before the Kinwun Mingyi wished peace and
the Taingda Mingyi war, so it was now.
“Let the king surrender”, said the Kinwun Mingyi. “Let him surrender and await the arrival of
the English. For yet all may be well. They are a great people, and they will be
merciful. They will make great demands, and we shall have to grant them. But
still all may be well. It is better to trust them than to fight and lose, and
fight and lose again, till all be gone.
“ But the Taingda Mingyi would not hear of this.
“Never surrender” he said. “Fight, and fight, and
fight. What if you have lost a little ? That is nothing at all. We have not yet
begun. What if the English are near Mandalay ? they have come by water, they
have no foothold on the country. What if they take Mandalay ? the king can go
to Shwebo, where the great Alompra lived. That is not near the river where steamers can get at it. I say let the
king fight.’
“But ah! Thakin, the other
ministers were against him. They were on the side of the Kinwun Mingyi. For the king, what did he know of fighting?
He had been a monk, and since he became king had lived all his days playing in
the palace. What sort of fight could he make ? Only the queen agreed with the
Taingda Mingyi. She would have fought. If she had
been king there would have been no surrender. But they were all against her,
even the king. Her power lay only in her influence over him, and it was shaken.
For it was she who had forced on the war, and now see what had happened. She
had begun even to distrust herself, so that her speech was not so strong nor so
assured as before.
“That was a sad council, that last council in the
palace. Men spoke in low voices as if they feared the spirits that lived in the
palace, in the throne, and in the great pillars might hear.
“It was a long council because there were long
silences when no one spoke at all. It was almost dark when it was finished. The
shadows were gathering in the great chambers about the tops of the pillars and
in the far-away recesses. And when it was all over and the message sent to the
English general and all orders given the king and queen rose and went out into
the gardens. Far away in the west a scarlet sunset hung, and the air was
odorous with the coming night.
“The queen waved to us to keep behind, and we fell
back. Then in the dark the king and queen walked to and fro and talked to each other in broken sentences, and when we returned to the
palace we saw that there were tears in their eyes.”
CHAPTER XXVII
THE LAST DAWN
“All that night we slept little from fear. For the
English were coming, and who could tell what might happen ? There was great
unrest and fear. There were innumerable rumours. But we could only sit and
wait. Nothing could be done, nothing but wait till they came. Nearly all day
the king and queen just sat and looked at each other and were silent.
“Then in the evening we heard that the English would
come next day, next morning. All that night I lay awake wondering and fearing.
What would happen, what would happen ? All that night no one slept in all the
city and palace of Mandalay. The city was full of disturbances, sometimes shots
were fired, and sometimes there were great shouts, and here and there the sky
was lurid with a fire.
“I was weary of lying awake and thinking, thinking,
and I was glad when my room mate came and called me to go and attend upon the
queen. So I dressed and went. She was sitting there in one of the rooms looking
out into the garden, where it was yet dark. The king was not there, but the
queen-mother was beside the queen.
“Since the meeting in the summer-house the queen had
not spoken to her mother, but now in their desperate trouble they came again
together. They sat in front of us looking out into the garden, and they wept
and put their arms about each other, and now and then they said something to
each other.
“What is it they say?”, asked the maids of each other.
“Can you hear ?”. But no one could hear. Then the maids told me to keep near
and listen.
“And I being a child crept near in the dark and
listened to what they said: Seven years as seven days. Seven years as seven
days.’ That was what mother and daughter said to each other over and over
again. ‘Seven years have been as seven days.’
“So they watched the last dawn come. Far away behind
the great Shan mountains the morning came clear and fresh, a spring of silver
light. The silver turned to gold, and the gold to pink and crimson. We watched
it slowly growing brighter in the gardens, brighter and brighter, and at last a
long golden finger shot across the sky and fell upon the palace spire, kindling
it into a flame. The beams came lower and lower till all the world was full of
light. The birds called in the garden so merrily as they flitted from tree to
tree, the fish leapt in the water-tanks, the flowers opened their hearts to the
day. We watched it all sitting there, knowing we should see it no more, our
seven years had gone as seven days.
“Once the queen spoke to us and told us we had better
leave the palace soon, before the troops came. ‘Who can tell what may happen’,
she said, ‘when those soldiers come? I should be sorry that any harm should
come to any of my maidens. You must go each to her home, those who have any
other refuge must take it, for no longer can I give safety here. Any place will
be better than this. But those who have not must stay with me, and I must stay
with the king.’
“We did not want to go, Thakin.
Those who had not cared to stay had already gone, but we who had stayed wished
to stay still. And so we prayed to the queen to let us be with her. But she
would not. We must go, she said, such of us that could, and she named us, for
she knew us all. As soon as the troops were reported to be arriving at the
landing-place we must go.
“When the queen gave an order no one could answer or
disobey, so I said nothing, but my throat choked with sorrow. For I loved the
queen.
“It was just after breakfast-time, about an hour or so
before midday, that a report spread through the palace that the Indian
government steamers were come. A messenger came and brought the report to the
queen. And when she heard it she rose from where she was sitting and passed
through the corridors and chambers till she came to the little courtyard below
the round tower, where the look-out is, the same which my father built.
“The sentry was
always kept on the top of that tower night and day watching. For from there you
can see all the country. You look over the walls of the palace into the city,
and over the great walls that surround the city, to the country far beyond. You
can see right away to the foot of the Shan mountains on the east and north and
south, till the country melts into purple distance. And you can see to the west
over the crowded outer town right away down to the river, the great Irrawaddy,
two miles broad and more, flowing between Mandalay and the grey Sagaing hills.
“We all followed the queen as she came to the
courtyard, and we looked up and saw the sentry looking towards the west,
looking as if he were watching. The queen ordered Ma Shwe Hmin to call to the sentry, and she called. The sentry looked down and the queen
ordered to ask him what he could see, and the maid of honour asked. The sentry
answered that he could see the steamers of the enemy coming up the broad reach
that leads to the Mandalay landing-place. There were many steamers, he said,
and they came on fast.
“The queen waited and ordered that the sentry should
call down from time to time what he saw. Presently the sentry said that the
steamers were making fast at the landing-place, and that crowds of the city
folk were watching them. The queen asked if there was any firing and the sentry
answer ‘No’.
“Quickly, as the news spread through the palace,
secretaries and others came thronging to the courtyard to hear, and there was
a great crowd; but near the queen was an open space where no one dared to come
save we who were attending on her. I do not know where the king was. I had not
seen him that morning.
“There was a long wait, and the queen asked again if
the sentry saw anything. Then the sentry answered that he saw troops
landing—soldiers with horses and cannon, and still more soldiers—and that they
were beginning to march up the long straight street that leads to the city
gate.
“When the queen heard this, that the foreigners were
indeed marching through the streets to the golden city, she realised that all
was lost. Perhaps before this she had some little hope; many things might
happen, but now all was lost. The golden kingdom of Ava was destroyed and the
king and queen with it, and who could tell what would happen when these troops
came to the palace ?
“Suddenly she threw herself upon her face on the white
pavement, and her hair fell about her face and she wept. When the people saw
this they all went away, and there was no one left in the courtyard but the
queen and ourselves.
‘‘The queen rose upon her knees and beat her breasts
with her hands, and cried aloud that she only had brought ruin upon the king
and the country. ‘It is I—I alone—I the
queen that have brought destruction to the king my husband and my people. It is
I—I alone.’ And again she threw herself upon the white pavement and beat it
with her hands, and her whole body shook with sobs.
“We did not know what to do, Thakin.
We were all heart-broken to see the queen thus, but what could we do ? Half as
long as it takes a pot of rice to boil she lay there upon the flags of the
courtyard, but it seemed like a year.
“Even so, Thakin, shall I
last remember my queen, even so, lying in the courtyard, mourning for her
vanished kingdom and her ruined king.
“Then at last she rose, and a maid of honour knotted
up her hair and arranged her disordered dress, brushing off the dust, and she
turned to go. But as she turned she remembered. She remembered us, her maids,
and spoke to us.
“The foreigners,” she said, “are upon us. You have
just time to escape from this palace where misery has come. I have told you to
go, go then quickly, that my sorrow be not increased by any trouble to my
maids.’ She waved her hands and went away with the few maids of honour who remained
to her.”
“We watched her go past the little white pavilion,
past the fountain where the water still leapt, till she disappeared in the
inner chamber of the palace. She went to have her tears washed away and jewels
put about her neck and arms, that she might appear before her conquerors the
queen she was. She vanished from our sight, and there was a long pause. And
then we all dispersed.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
VIE VICTIS
“I went to my room and found my mother waiting me
there, and very hurriedly I put my things together to go.
“Then, with a man behind us with my things, we went
out. There was no trouble getting through the gate now, the guards hardly
looked as we came up and asked that the gate be opened. They were talking
amongst themselves in great excitement at what should be done.
“We passed through and the gate shut behind us for
ever. Four years I lived there in the palace with the queen, such years as I
shall never live again, years when I was very young and everything was so
beautiful. I have never been near the palace since. How can I bear to go and
see the places where the queen lived turned into other uses ? I see the spire
afar off as I go on the steamer up and down the river, never shall I want to
see it nearer. Our palace shall remain in my memory fresh and beautiful for
ever, girt about with its strong walls, guarded by its guards. It shall be to
me always as when I knew it—the dwelling of a king.
“All the city within the gates was quite still as we
passed through it. There were crowds of men gathering here and there sadly and
sullenly, but there was no talk. We crossed the city and passed the great gates
and over the drawbridge across the moat. The gates were open, no one was caring
for them. The orders had been given to leave them open for the foreigners to
enter. When we came across the moat we heard a curious sound like rippled
thunder coming up the street. We could not make it out, but were afraid and ran
into a house. We looked out from the verandah and saw
the English soldiers come along, each man putting his foot to the ground at the
same time as the others. That was what made the sound. They went along tramp,
tramp, and the people looked at them in silence. They were very hot those
soldiers and their faces were red. There were many of them. They came and came,
and some passed into the city, and some went round north, and some went south,
marching along by the moat.”
I will just add a few words as to what happened after
my maid of honour left the palace. The column was met half-way between the landingplace and the city by the Kinwun Mingyi. The troops surrounded the palace, and guards
were placed outside the gates while the political officer went in.
There, in the little pavilion in the garden, where
they had spent so many happy days, the king and queen surrendered. The
queen-mother was with them. This was on the 28th of November, 1885.
The next day the general had an audience of the king
and queen, who were then surrounded by the ministers. They were informed that
they were to be sent to Rangoon, and at once preparations were made for their
departure.
One of the ordinary bullock carts with trotting
bullocks, used as hackney carriages in the city, was procured, and the king and
queen were put therein; other carriages followed with attendants, and, escorted
by mounted infantry, the procession started from the palace for the shore. It
was late in the afternoon when they started, and the escort lost their way, and
wandered nearly out to the Arracan pagoda, so that it
was dark when they came to the steamer landing-place.
The streets were crowded with people, who mostly
looked on in silence, but every now and then cries of hate broke out against
our troops. “ It almost broke our hearts,” said an official, “ to see our king
and queen carried away thus in a common hackney carriage, with no respect of
honour shown to them.”
And now I will let my maid of honour finish her story.
“When it was rumoured through the city, and the rumour
fled like a fire, that the king and queen were to be taken away, I went down
with my father and mother to a house near the steamer landing to see the queen
for the last time
“It was nearly dark when they came, and a lamp had to
be lit. The carriage stopped and the king and queen got out and stood there.
They stood as if wondering at what was happening as if not understanding. Near
by were the English troops, and far away as you could see, crowded on every
place whence they could get a view, were the people.
“The officer signed to the king to walk along the
gangway, but the king hesitated and held back. Ah! Thakin,
it was hard on him to take his foot from off his kingdom, from off the land
that was his.
“And so he hesitated. Then the officer grew impatient
and signed again, and the queen went forward and put her hand in that of the
king and led him up the way to the steamer as a mother leads her child when it
is lost and afraid.
“They went on board the steamer, and my queen was lost
to me for ever.
“In a few moments the steamer let go her moorings and
stood out in the great river. I watched and watched from the bank and saw her
lights go farther away till they were like a row of stars upon the water. At
last I could see no more, for the boat went fast down stream, and my eyes were
full of tears.
“Thakin, you may say she was
not a good queen, he was not a good king, but they were our own. Do you think
we can love a foreign master as we loved our king, who was, as it were, part of
ourselves.
“Even now, though many years are past, the people
cannot believe that they are gone for ever. They believe that they are in
hiding somewhere in the mountains, and will return. If you were to take that
hope from them, Thakin, that some day they shall be
again a nation, you would break their hearts.
“But my queen will never return again, never—never see
again the golden turrets of her palace and the pleasant faces of her people.
There is only the great strange sea before her and the memory of what has been
to tear at her heart for ever.”
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