Read Online The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma by Thant Myint-U - Free Book Online Page A

previous kings had unified the Irrawaddy Valley, Bayinnaung proved an even more ambitious conqueror, vanquishing an impressive array of neighboring kingdoms and even marching over the highlands and defeating Burma’s archrival Siam. At its height, his writ ran unchallenged from parts of modern-day northeastern India right across to the borders of Cambodia and Vietnam, an empire the size of Charlemagne’s with a striking imperial capital to match. European visitors were in awe of his wealth, the gilded palaces and jewelencrusted costumes, and marveled at the military might of his war elephants and Persian and Portuguese musketeers. For today’s generals, and others of a more belligerent nationalist persuasion, Bayinnaung represents a glorious past, something to be missed, and a sign, however distant, that Burma was not always so lowly in the eyes of the world. Far back enough in time not to be tainted by the colonial humiliations tocome, yet close enough that he and his heirs subjugated peoples and places still around today, he is an untarnished hero for these militaristic but lackluster times. 2
    And there is something else. For many Burmese today the stories of Bayinnaung and his contemporaries are the stories of a nation naturally inclined to fracture but which through heroic action can be welded together and made whole, of a country that will fall apart without the strong lead of soldier-kings, where greatness will only follow an iron fist. For some this was an exciting tradition, even if for others the past meant something altogether different.
    In the early fourteenth century, after the last Mongol horsemen had quit the central plains, a number of little principalities and kingdoms cropped up: Ava, Prome, Mongmit, Pegu, Martaban, Toungoo, Bassein, and many others, in both the Irrawaddy Valley and the highlands toward China. 3 Most were nothing particularly impressive, just a little walled town, with a wooden palace and wooden gates, a moat and a bridge, and a few Buddhist monasteries and nearby pagodas, holding sway over dozens of surrounding villages and pretending through their ceremonies and rituals to be successors to the great kings of Pagan. It was for a while a time of inwardness as well as cultural and intellectual creativity. There were fewer connections with the outside world, especially with Bengal and South India, and a replacement of foreign influence with more confident homegrown styles. This was true in literature as well as in the arts and architecture, and the Burmese language, once a new thing, grew into a widespread vernacular and the idiom of still-classic works of poetry and jurisprudence.
    The richest and most powerful of these successor states was Pegu. Pegu is about an hour’s drive north of Rangoon, on the road to Mandalay. It’s now far from the ocean. But in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was a port of some significance, the silting up of the Sittang River in the meantime having cut off the town’s access to the Andaman Sea. The people of Pegu then spoke Mon, a language related to Cambodian, which had become the mother tongue of the Irrawaddy Delta. Under a line of especially gifted kings, the Mon people at Pegu enjoyed a long golden age, profiting from foreign commerce and defending themselves ably against all challengers. Peguers traveled overseas to make money, and traders from across the Indian Ocean—Bengalis and Tamils, Greeks, Venetians and Jews, Arabs, and Armenians—all cameto do business with the king of Pegu and his royal brokers, filling the city’s warehouses with gold and silver, silk and spices, and all the other stuff of early modern trade. 4
    The city also became a famous center of Theravada Buddhism. Its kings and queens were great patrons of the faith and gave their weight in gold to the Shwedagon Pagoda at Rangoon, today the emblem of Burmese Buddhism, raising the ancient stupa toward its present height and form. The kingdom established strong ties with