Cover illustration: “The Audience Hall and Reception of the Envoy,” from a sketch by Capt. Yule
Printed and bound in Thailand by Parbpim Co., Ltd
This portrait of Dr. Clement Williams, carved on his tomb in Florence, Italy, is the only purported likeness of him yet found, courtesy of Pam Hobbs.
Author’s note
The spelling of Burmese names, places, titles, and words varied widely in English during the 19th century. The Irrawaddy River shows up as the Irawaddi, the Irawadi, the Irrawady, or the Ayeyarwady. Bhamo can be Bamò, Bamo, Bamó, or Bhamô. The council of ministers appears as the Hluttaw, the Hlot, the Hlottan, the Hlotdan, the Hlutdaw, the Hlwotdaw, the Hloht-daw, or the Hlot-dau. A theatrical performance is sometimes a puey, a poey, a pué, a pwè, or a paoy.
For the sake of clarity and simplicity, while recognizing the risk of appearing nostalgic for the bygone days of empire, I have mostly followed Clement Williams’s usage in his book and diaries – Burmah for Burma, woongyee for wungyi, pongyee for pongyi, and so forth – though neither he nor I are always consistent. At the same time, I have left the original spellings in quotations from period documents and books to avoid littering the text with [sic].
The Burmese know King Mindon as Mindon Min, the Mindon King, but I have chosen the more familiar usage in English. On the other hand, I refer to the royal princes, to take his brother as an example, not as Prince Kanaung, but as the Kanaung Prince, since that was his title and not his name, just as we don’t refer to Britain’s Prince William as Prince Wales. I also take Williams’s lead in referring to the Burmese ministers by their familiar titles in his time rather than by their family names or subsequent honours.
I am sensitive to the many legitimate issues involving foreign writers creating “a Burma imaginary that was populated with European concepts of ethnicity, race, geography, historicity, religion, and the like.”1 The shelves sag with scholarly studies and popular novels about Anglo-Burmese relations, particularly from a British male point of view, at the cost of a more comprehensive understanding of the place and its peoples by Burmese scholars and novelists writing in Burmese.
Nevertheless, while I have striven to access other points of view through primary and secondary sources available in English, my modest ambition has been to shed new light on the Court of Ava and its last great king through the life of Dr. Clement Williams. Not to praise or condemn him as an imperialist, not to conscript him into the service of a thesis or analysis, but to situate him as an eyewitness in Mandalay during the 1860s and 1870s with as much accuracy and objectivity as possible and, thereby, allow others to make of him what they will.
Henry Yule, maps of Burmah in 1822 and 1856 (detail).
Prologue
Burmah, the archaic spelling of the country now known as Myanmar, is a tropical land surrounded by India and Bangladesh to the north, China to the east, Laos and Thailand to the south, and the Bay of Bengal to the west. Within that ring of pine-scented forests, verdant hills, and palm-fringed beaches lies the broad, flat valley of the Irrawaddy River. Rich in rice, teak, and precious stones, Burmah was dubbed the Golden Land in ancient times. Its cities were fabled for their carved palaces and gilded pagodas. Its kings were mighty warriors who had seized Arakan from the Arakanese, Pegu from the Mon, and Tenasserim from the Siamese. At the height of its power in the late eighteenth century, the Burmese empire extended from the foothills of the Himalayas to the Gulf of Siam. Over-extended, to be more accurate, for it soon began to fall apart under the pressure of foreign enemies, civil wars, dynastic feuds, and weakening leadership.
This was the point at which the British marched onto Burmese soil and into Burmese history. They had been next door, so to speak, ever since the East India Company built a trading base on the site of present-day Calcutta in 1690. English traders came and went in relative harmony during the eighteenth century, along with the Portuguese, the French, the Armenians, and the Chinese. But the two empires began to bump into each other when the Burmese pushed northwest into the mountain kingdoms of Assam and Manipur and the British drifted southeast towards the coastal provinces of Arakan and Tenassarim.
King Bagyidaw, the seventh of the Konbaung dynasty, overestimated Burmah’s military preparedness and underestimated Britain’s commercial ambitions, and a little sabre-rattling was all that was needed to provoke the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1824.1 The fierce conflict, lasting almost two years, claimed tens of thousands of lives, drained the treasuries of both sides, and ended in a humiliating defeat for the Burmese. Under the punitive Treaty of Yandabo of February 26, 1826, Bagyidaw was forced to surrender Arakan and Tenasserim, give up all claims to Assam and Manipur, accept the presence of a British representative at his court,
Clement Williams, “View from Mandalay Hill,” MAA P.45682.GOS.
“Mandalay, the Capital of the Kingdom of Burmah,” The Illustrated London News, 24 August 1867, based on photograph by Clement Williams.
Chapter 1
“I write from a peaceful city, enjoying now the most delightful climate imaginable,” Clement Williams reported from Mandalay on December 30, 1861. “Nothing has occurred to vary the dull monotony of the life of the human inhabitants beneath the Golden Feet. It is monotony without being routine, for this latter implies the existence of some order.”1
Mandalay was still a work in progress, four years after the preparatory clearing away of fields, forests, and villages and two years after its formal inauguration as Burmah’s new capital. Perhaps Mindon was simply following the custom of the Konbaung kings to establish their own palace-fortress as a form of political legitimization, spiritual renewal, and self-aggrandizement.2 Perhaps he hoped that its location, five kilometres from the Irrawaddy, would be less susceptible to attack, disease, earthquake, drought, congestion, and noise. Perhaps he wanted a new and more glorious capital to be a sign to the people, demoralized by two defeats at the hands of the British, of a new and more glorious epoch.3
Dubbed the Royal Golden City, it was located on the central dry plain between the Arakan Mountains to the west and the Shan Hills to the east and laid out in Southeast Asian fashion as a square within a square. The larger square, more than one and a half kilometres long and just as broad, with an eight-metre-high brick ramparts, forty-eight ornate bastions, and a not-yet-completed moat, was a compound of government buildings, official residences, its own pagoda and monastery, a military barracks and armoury, formal gardens, daytime shops, and the elaborate shed of the Sacred White Elephant that was worshipped for its supernatural powers and auspicious blessings. The smaller square, set behind a wooden stockade and two brick walls, contained the palace itself, a long and interlocking arrangement of dozens of teak pavilions of various heights and dimensions, elevated on posts a couple of metres off the ground and stretched along an east-west axis.
“The King” (detail), from a sketch by Henry Yule
“From the distance at which we viewed the King, he seemed a somewhat portly man, having features of a much more refined character than are common among his subjects, exhibiting indeed the national physiognomy, but much more subdued. His expression was good and intelligent; his hands delicately and finely formed. His dress was a sort of long tunic or surcoat, of a light-coloured silk apparently, but so thickly set with jewels that the fundamental material was scarcely discernible.”
Henry Yule
Chapter 4
While away from Mandalay, Clement Williams received some good news that offset the disappointments of his expedition.
On March 9, 1863, by order of His Excellency the Governor General of India in Council, he was promoted from “correspondent” to “agent” to the chief commissioner of British Burmah, a singular honour for a young neophyte who was neither a career diplomat nor a military officer.
“Dr. Williams has now been some time at Mandalay,” Colonel Phayre advised Calcutta, “has acquired a knowledge of the people, has good temper and ability, and will, I think, give satisfaction in the appointment. Everything depends on the tact and discretion with which he discharges his duty, for the King would strongly object to having an officer at his Court with the rank and position of the former Resident, or to any one [sic] who assumed such a position; yet an Officer with discretion may acquire much influence.”1
With the promotion came a doubling of his correspondent’s pay to Rs. 1,000 a month and a mandate letter outlining Williams’s new duties, which mostly related to the implementation of the commercial treaty and the safeguarding of British subjects. No matter how capricious or contradictory the king’s wishes may seem, the instructions read, “in all cases you will, of course, act in a conciliatory manner; and your personal knowledge of every one about the Court will enable you to see them in a friendly way without ceremony.”2 To which Calcutta added, in an extra note of caution to Colonel Phayre, “Dr. Williams should be warned strictly to conform to these instructions, and to refer to you on every doubtful point.”3
Mindon had been compelled to agree to the appointment of a British agent to the Court of Ava after a twenty-two-year hiatus as a condition of the commercial treaty of 1862, and he seems to have overcome his previous intransigence because Phayre had promised to appoint Clement Williams specifically. Even before the treaty was signed, the king had suggested that Williams should remain in Mandalay as the British chargé d’affaires for mercantile matters – or so Williams claimed – wishing to have “a man of sense and trustworthiness” who was acquainted with both British and
Clement Williams, “King Mendoon Min’s teacher,” ROM 2016.66.8.67, and the illustration in Williams’s book.
San Di Ma, the king’s venerated teacher, was a rare adept in both scripture and meditation. He was also, according to legend, a strict disciplinarian. He once asked the young Mindon to keep a large, delicious fish for him, but the prince lost it before it could be eaten. The monk punished his student savagely with a cane, saying, “How can you rule a country safely and successfully if you can’t even be trusted to look after a fish?”
When the king was asked by the Kanaung Prince why he hadn’t appointed their favourite teacher as patriarch of the sangha, Mindon explained, “My dear brother, our sayadaw was not good at these worldly affairs.”
Williams, “San Di Ma’s monastery,” ROM 2016.66.8.69
Clement
Chapter 6
As political agent to the chief commissioner, Clement Williams was understandably preoccupied with matters of war, commerce, industry, and government. Most of his days were spent in meetings with ministers, officials, courtiers, and traders. Most of his evenings were devoted to filing his regular reports to Rangoon, dealing with his voluminous mail, and supping with other important members of the foreign community. From time to time, however, he played hooky from work to watch an elephant race, attend a ceremonial pageant, or escort a distinguished visitor around town.
In September 1864, just a couple of weeks after Williams’s reappointment, a British traveller named Walter Courtenay Pepys showed up in Mandalay with an introduction to Father Abbona, who gave him an introduction to Mr. Camaratta, who gave him an introduction to Dr. Williams, who offered him a room in his house and his services as a guide.1 Pepys, kin to the great diarist, left a lively description of his tenday visit, much of which would be remarkably familiar to today’s tourist: the craftsmen making metal gongs and lacquerware, the marble carvers, the markets selling jade and silk, the stalls smelling of fish and spice, the pony trip to the ruins of Amarapura, the taming of wild elephants, and the extraordinary footbridge stretching more than a kilometre across Taungthaman Lake. He met Chinese merchants dealing in tea and opium, Shan traders tattooed from neck to ankle, and idle woons chewing betelnut and smoking cheroots. He visited Kanaung’s “pet” iron foundry. And most days he joined Dr. Williams on a tour of the major Buddhist sites for which Mandalay was – and remains – renowned.
Mandalay’s origins, layout, and construction were intricately intertwined with Burmese Buddhism. Its site had been ordained by the legend of the ogress who, having cut off one of her breasts and offered it in devotion to the Buddha, was to be reincarnated 2,400 years later as the Tuesday-born king of a great city at the foot of Mandalay Hill, which the Enlightened One himself was believed to have visited. That king,
Williams’s copy of the 1867 Treaty (excerpt), ROM 2016.66.8.41.
Chapter 12
On October 23, 1867, Clement Williams sent the chief commissioner an overwrought, point-by-point, twenty-eightpage letter to the chief commissioner, to which he attached 103 pages of appendices, miscellaneous cases, and additional evidence from his brother Howard and Mr. Camaratta, accusing Captain Sladen of imprudence and vacillation, of lies and perversions of fact, of special pleading and a fatal paralysis of judgment.
“I have had to contend with the full weight of that representative of our Government,” he complained to Fytche, “who has directly and indirectly exerted himself to thwart the business transactions of my self and friends, and to procure us loss and disaster, that officer not hesitating to ally himself with the most questionable characters of the place, so that malicious falsehoods, and even false charges in the Burmese Courts, have been supported by the great influence of his official position.”1
But Williams’s complaints fell on deaf ears, for Colonel Fytche was in Mandalay at that very time on a very important assignment from Calcutta – to secure the revised commercial treaty that had eluded his predecessor – and he needed his agent’s “valuable services” more than ever.
Albert Fytche and Edward Sladen were cut from the same British cloth, army men, hardline jingoists, doing their duty to queen and empire, and they shared the view that firm and frank language was the most effective way of managing the Burmese, which meant reminding King Mindon that the British possessed the forces to put a new king on the throne or take all Burmah for themselves whenever they wished.2 “You might tell the King at once that the British Lion never withdraws his paw from any hand that it has once put its foot on, and there is no hope of our relinquishing any territory,” Fytche instructed Sladen. “Any other power but the British would have gobbled him up long ago, and that he ought to be content with what is left to him.”3
Sladen concurred. Mindon, he said, “hates an international negotiation and its anticipated consequences with all the obstinacy of an obstructive Burman. Nothing but strong pressure or necessity would induce him to
Artist unknown, “A rare portrait of King Mindon dated 1873,” in John Stuart, Burma Through the Centuries.
“Naturally possessing a robust and vigorous constitution, and abstemious as regards the pleasures of the table, the King has for a long time successfully defied the ravages which excessively indolent bodily habits, and other indulgences of a more questionable nature, have surely, if insidiously, made therein.
“The tremulous hands and unsteady gait that now distinguish His Majesty afford unerring signs that nature resents being trifled with, and coupled with his occasional fits of melancholy prostration, gives colour to the impression that His Majesty is ‘fast breaking,’ if not to the fear that he is tainted with the madness hereditary in the race of Alampra.
“Just as far as is compatible with his person or with State interests, the King exhibits intellectual ability of a rare order, distinguishing him as the most learned and talented man in his own dominions, and (judged by his opportunities) perhaps one of the most gifted Sovereigns in the world.”
A.R. McMahon,
1874
Chapter 16
Major Alexander Ruxton McMahon had hardly settled into his job as the British agent in Mandalay before he had his first run-in with Clement Williams, though one left over from Sladen’s time.
Eight months earlier, on May 8, 1869, a local timber trader named Shaik Potun had shown up at the site near Ava where H.J. Williams & Co., co-owned by Clement and his brother Howard, were storing some 150 teak logs for eventual sale.1 Potun claimed ten logs for himself, two for the local governor, and ownership of seventeen elephants that he had mortgaged to Williams, and he ordered a gang of men to haul away what he said was his. “Thus it is placed beyond a doubt that violent measures are on foot to forcibly seize and carry away our property and elephants,” Clement Williams alerted Sladen. “That as Burmese officials there are in a measure parties to these steps, we feel that we are not able to cope with them without your assistance.”2
Clement Williams, “Shaik Potun,” ROM 2016.66.8.33.
Sladen duly informed the Pakan Woongyee of the dispute and suggested that the Burmese should take possession of the logs and the elephants until a civil suit decided the proper owner. When Potun appealed on the grounds that he needed the elephants to be able to carry on his business, Sladen sent a second petition to the woongyee, now advising him merely to issue an order that the elephants not be “lost nor removed” for the time being. Though Potun subsequently confessed that neither the logs nor the elephants were rightfully his, it was too late: the government declared that, because he owed the king some money for his timber concession, it would keep the elephants for itself, no matter who turned out to own them by law.
Unknown photographer, King Thibaw, 1880, Wikimedia Commons
“A desultory conversation of the most commonplace character with many painful pauses ensued. One of the ministers then presented each of us in the king’s name with a ruby ring, two silver cups, and a fur coat of some value. We thanked the king and another pause ensued during which he seemed uneasy and nervous. This is not surprising considering his age and that this was his first reception of Europeans. The young king is nice looking – remarkably like his father as I remember him ten years ago. He is very fair, almost white. He is about five feet eight inches in height and is rather inclined to be stout than to be muscular if one might judge from his appearance. He has bright penetrating eyes and a well set mouth. His appearance conveys the impression of intelligence and determination.”
Kirkman Finlay
Chapter 19
Clement Williams had known Thibaw ever since the prince was a student at the Church of England school that King Mindon had endowed in 1869, partly to make an ecumenical gesture towards the Christians in Mandalay, partly to curry favour with the British in Rangoon, and partly to offer a few privileged Burmese boys the benefits of a Western education.1 Thibaw subsequently spent three years in a Buddhist monastery, where he earned high marks for his scholarship and a reputation for piety. Though his father was said to have been proud of him, no one ever imagined that Mindon’s forty-first son would sit on the throne one day. On the contrary, according to the Rev. Mr. John Ebenezer Marks, the school’s founder, he was “a quiet, inoffensive, docile lad, without any particular vice or virtue to distinguish him from the other boys of his age.”2
Within weeks of ascending the throne, however, Thibaw began to exhibit what Williams described as “most irreligious and unkingly qualities” and “indiscretions of temper,” twice jabbing a courtier with a spear for offering a bit of unsolicited advice and not wearing the proper uniform, frequently railing against the foreigners and his own ministers, and generally “playing the fool worse and worse.”3 He had inherited, Williams thought, “the passionate and harsh character of his mother,” Mindon’s Shan-born queen, who had been exiled from the court for having an affair with a monk and was now living as a nun.4
J. Jackson, “Mission School,” Sladen papers, British Library.
Artist unknown “The Departure of King Thibaw from Mandalay,” c. 1887, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Epilogue
Clement Williams’s passing drew notice in newspapers from Calcutta to New York. The (London) Times paid tribute to “his perfect knowledge of the Burmese language, his great tact, clear intellect, and capacity for business,” which earned him “singular influence at the Court of Mandalay.”1 But his premature death denied him a greater renown.
To the British, he’s a minor player at a minor court in a distant corner of their vast empire, a place best known by a poem by Rudyard Kipling. To the Burmese, he’s just one in the long parade of British officials who showed up during the nineteenth century to control, plunder, and ultimately conquer them. He was neither the first nor the last to explore the trade route to China via Bhamo, which proved impractical anyway. His book didn’t become an oft-reprinted classic like those of Henry Yule and James George Scott. His papers weren’t preserved for posterity like those of Edward Sladen and Alexander McMahon. He didn’t have the retirement years in which to pen a comprehensive history of Burmah like those of Arthur Phayre and Albert Fytche or a slim volume of reminiscences à la Horace Browne and the Rev. Mr. Marks. He hadn’t died a martyr to the Empire like T.T. Cooper or Augustus Margary. Even his photographs were attributed to his nephew, Allan Goss.
One can only speculate as to whether Williams, had he lived longer, would have become an important public figure in British Burmah or built a successful business in Rangoon. On the one hand, he had experience, intelligence, ambition, charm, and connections. On the other hand, he was petty, querulous, litigious, arrogant, and self-defeating. Good with argument and details, he lacked the strategy and vision to be better and remained, by temperament and background, a middleman from the middle class.
But could he have been an effective interlocutor between King Thibaw and the British warmongers, perhaps keeping open a line of communication and helping to avert the final conquest? The evidence suggests not.
