Mandalay Myanmar Palace...

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Mandalay city is on a very flat plain, the right environment for bicycle and small motorbike, they are moving and parked everywhere now in the evening their owners were sitting in teashops, talking away the time.

Some thickly-bearded Myanmar’s of  Indian origin pass the Mandalay teashops, people from India came in mainly during English colonial times.

There was no important reason for Mandalay's existence, King Mindon the father of King Thibaw  - the last Myanmar King- reigned from 1853 to 1878, in 1857 he gave the order to move the capital from Amarapura to a new site named Mandalay. Chosen was a suitable place near the holy mountain, Mandalay Hill.

King Thibaw and Queen Supayalat the picture is from 1880 have been the last Myanmar Rulers they were deported by the British colonialists afterwards into exil in India.

King Mindon in Mandalay - Myanmar Burma

It took around 4 years to complete the royal palace in 1859 and it was a masterpiece of contemporary architecture. A composition in teak and brick with lots of artworks in the buildings  On the advice of the Brahmin astrologers an exemplary mass-sacrifice was arranged, including that of a pregnant woman. According to the old Mongolian belief the spirits of mother and child would unite in death to form a composite demon of exceptional malignancy.

This would be animated by an implacable desire for revenge, directed — with seemingly defective logic — against the king's enemies. As a Buddhist scholar of renown and the leading authority of his times on Pali texts, Mindon probably disapproved of this stone- age practice. If he permitted the woman to be buried alive, he did so in the same spirit as a socialist cabinet minister might dress for dinner - not because he agreed with the principle, but because these things were expected of him; and, after all, there was nothing to be lost one way or another. In 1858 the foundations for the Mandalay Palace wall were laid out. The fortified Mandalay Palace City, built in the form of a square with brick walls, is 8 meters high and 2 kilometers circumference. The Mandalay Palace wall has 12 gates equidistant from each other, 3 are on each side. A moat (picture below) 66 meters Mandalay Palace Moat   wide and 3.7 meters deep, surrounds the city with four bridges leading to the doors in he wall. Mandalay Palace Building Myanmar Mandalay Palace Rain Tree Myanmar Mandalay Palace Sunset These sacrifices probably established a Myanmar or Myanmar record for short-lived efficacy. Twenty-nine years later Mandalay fell to the British without the slightest attempt at defense, either ghostly or human. The Mahamuni Temple in Mandalay is one of the most venerated in

Mahamuni Temple in Mandalay Myanmar

It was finally obtained in 1784 by King Bodawpaya, who is declared, in an inscription at the pagoda, to have drawn the image to its present resting place by the charm of his piety. In fact an expeditionary corps of thirty thousand men was involved, after
elaborate precautions to deprive the image of its magic power had
first been taken by Myanmar wizards disguised as pilgrims.

I had been told that only in Mandalay would real Myanmar - Myanmar works of art, wood-carvings, bronzes and ivories, be found; and that the colonnades of the Mahamuni Pagoda would be the most likely place in Mandalay itself.

As in the Shwedagon Pagoda at Yangon, the roofed-over approaches were lined with stalls selling devotional objects; flowers, votive images and triangular gongs. In Myanmar or Burma art is always intertwined with religious or magic motives. The life of the Myanmar - Myanmar people still has a high spiritual component. As a result lots of creative energy is diverted into pagoda-building, from which it is expected to derive not mere aesthetic pleasure, but a substantial spiritual reward. Mandalay is a good example for this, pagodas and temples, white and golden, on the hills around everywhere, in particular at Sagaing on the western side of the Ayayarwady or Irrawaddy river.

A permanent crowd was gathered before the railings of Mandalay's Mahamuni shrine behind which the twelve feet high image is placed, but they were quite ready to make room for a foreigner to take a photograph. Gold-leaf is sold in packets and the purchaser was entitled to apply it himself, clambering as reverently as possible up the sacred stomach to reach the face. Pilgrims from many parts of Myanmar waited their turn to perform this illustrious task.

Out in the courtyard, stacked hazardly against a wall, we found the six survivors of the thirty magic images of Ayuthaya, captured by Bayinnaung when he went to Siam for white elephants, and took and sacked the Siamese capital. These potent bronze monsters, triple-headed elephants and snarling, armor-clad demons, were now, at least, put to a useful purpose by Myanmar children who played hide-and-seek about their legs. During the second world war the citadel cum palace — the Centre of the Uni­verse — was bombed by the Japanese and totally destroyed and burned out. In the 198X ties the whole has been rebuilt within the wall and moat. And it was here by the water' edge, before the heat of the day had gathered, that, of all places in Mandalay, it was most agreeable to saunter. The gilded royal barge is home of a restaurant now and some lotuses, and other aquatic plants came back to the moat.

When in 1858 the foundations of the Mandalay Palace wall were laid, three carefully selected persons had been buried alive under each gate-house, and one at each corner of the wall. Four more were entombed under the Lion Throne, and yet others at strategic points, scattered throughout the fortress. The grand total was fifty-two, a figure considered by the Board of Astrologers to err on the side of parsimony. They were taken from all walks of life, and included the pregnant woman, indispensable to the composition of a satisfactory foundation-sacrifice.

While this was happening, King Mindon, a kind of Myanmar Edward the Confessor, was probably splitting hairs with his theologians over obscure scriptural passages. There was a comfortable dualism about the state religion as interpreted by the Myanmar kings. The Myanmar population was en­joined to follow the tenets of the purest form of Buddhism; which forbade the destruction of even the most noxious forms of life, but in matters of state policy the king fell back on his Court Brahmins, Indian specialists in statecraft and occult matters, who were always ready to agree that the means were justified by the end. Why should it have been supposed that those who had died in such terrifying circumstances should be content, after death, to guard the city of their murderers? And did it ever occur to the victims to warn their executioners that they would refuse to accomplish what was expected of them

Every city in Myanmar and nearly every bridge and weir had its complaisant ghosts who, according to popular belief, were always ready to drive off intruders, human or otherwise. As in the Far Eastern countries the living and the dead are divided by the most diaphanous of veils; the guardian spirits sometimes took on human form, fought with the weapons of their day, and were even wounded.

A case in point was observed on the occasion of the annihilation of the Myanmar army by the Mongols of Kublai Khan, when the guardian spirits of the Myanmar cities, who had gone armed, presumably with spears and javelins, to the battlefield, were put out of action by the deadly archery of the Tartar horsemen.

The Myanmar Glass Palace Chronicle describes the incident tersely: . . on the same day when the, army perished ... the spirit who was ever wont to attend the King's chaplain returned to Pagan and shook him by the foot and roused him from his sleep saying, "This day has Ngahsaunggyan fallen. I have been wounded by an 'arrow. Likewise the spirits Wetthakan of Salin, Kanshi and Ngatinkyeshin, are wounded by arrows." Perhaps the fifty-two spirit guardians of Mandalay were similarly handicapped by out-of-date weapons when the British gunboats began their cannonad­ing from the river.

The atmosphere of Mandalay in the days just before the British occupation must have been more macabre than that of Moscow under Ivan the Terrible in his madness. There was a ghastly combination of modernity and crazed medievalism. The telegraph had just been introduced and the town was served by the very latest in steamboats; but wizards went mumbling through the streets, and an English official could be seized and threatened with instant crucifixion if he failed to subscribe to the national lottery.

With a sense of inferiority that. was engendered in the knowledge of weakness, every attempt was seized upon to humble the pride of the foreigners, unless the king felt that there was any hope of extract­ing from one of them any of the secrets of their regrettable supremacy in certain matters. Shway Yoe quotes a typical dialogue of the kind that took place between King Mindon and any fresh wanderer to arrive in the city. 'What is your name?' John Smith.' 'What can you do?' `May it please your Majesty, I am a sea-cook.' 'Can you make a cannon?' Where upon John Smith, if he were a wise man, would agree to make the attempt. A lump of metal would be made over to him, and he would chisel and hammer away at it, and draw his pay as regularly as he could get it.

The contempt for Europeans was rooted originally in Myanmar cosmogony, according to which the true human race was concen­trated in South-East Asia, which was seen as a symmetrical land-mass, in the centre of which were located, not unnaturally-, the Myanmar holy places. To the north were the Himalayas, and beyond them a kind of fairyland containing the jeweled mountain of Meru and the magic lake in which all the rivers of the world (i.e. the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Menam and Mekong) had their source. To the south were dismal seas, and in them the `five hundred lesser islands' on which dwelt the interior people front across the sea. The attitude, with less justice, duplicated that of the Chinese.

In the days of Ava the Myanmar were outraged that embassies should come from the Viceroy of India, and not the Queen of England, and when the envoys came they might be obliged to live, ignored by the court, on an island where bodies were burned and criminals executed. When called to audience they were forced to walk long distances bare-footed and bare-headed in the sun; to pass through a postern-gate in the palace-wall that was so low that the shortest man was compelled to bend. For their benefit the carpets normally covering the floorboards were removed, and their feet were lacerated by the nails which were purposely left protruding.

With the death of Mandalay's King Mindon the atmosphere of mania thickened. The ministers of state had maneuvered the supine Thibaw into the kingship in the mistaken belief that he could be more easily controlled than any of the more intelligent of Mindon's numerous descendants. The stage was now set for a traditional and regularly recurrent Myanmar drama, but one which, on this occasion, provoked an unwonted flurry owing to the presence of a foreign colony. All the king's half-brothers and sisters who might have been considered dangerous to the succession and had been promptly popped into jail, were now, according to the current Myanmar euphemism, 'cleared'. The English were much impressed by the preparations for this ceremony, which consisted chiefly in the making of a large number of capacious velvet sacks, a piece of exquisite sensibility on the part of whoever was in charge of arrangements. The `clearing' was completed in a festival lasting three days, in the course of which the victims were placed in the sacks and respectfully beaten to death; princes, by light blows on the back of the neck; princesses, on the throat.

The ingenious purpose of the red velvet was to camouflage any unseemly effusion of royal blood, an advance on the method of Thibaw's ancestor, Bodawpaya, who burned to death all his surplus relations, complete with children and servants. Thibaw had shown, too, consideration for the modesty of the female sufferers, an aspect of inquisitional burnings which was never found altogether satisfactory.

The Myanmar have always been ready to excuse such methods of State, as the lesser evil; and even survivors of the Thibaw massacre told English friends frankly that, placed in Thibaw's position, they would have done the same thing. The trouble is always ascribed to the harem system, and the superfluity of potential heirs that it produced. Myanmar apologists find excuses for this too. It was expected by the king's feudatories and allies that he would take their daughters into his household, and not to have done so, in the face of immemorial custom, would have given offence. In this way, too, the Empire was held together.

Certainly, Myanmar history does not show the kings as unduly concerned with family matters. The only concubine who is highly praised in the chronicle for her capabilities, is one who knew where to scratch the king's back without being told where it itched. For the rest, the kings are represented as not even being informed of the chil­dren born to lesser queens. A principal queen could be returned at her own request to an old lover:

The fantastic tests which Brantome reports as carried out by Renaissance princes to ensure they married virgins, would have filled the Myanmar kings with amazement. Even when a queen was seduced, the royal reaction reads more like irritation than wrath. It seems that the kings were content to procreate a polite minimum of a hundred or so descendants, and leave it at that.

The wars between the Myanmar or Myanmar and their Thailand or Siamese neighbors were usually undertaken — in theory, at any rate — for the acquisition, or recovery of the white elephants. These picturesque symbols of power. 'The king in his title,' said Ralph Fitch, writing in 1586, 'is called the king of the white elephants. if any other king have one, and will not send it to him, he will make war with him for it; for he had rather lose a great part of his kingdom than not conquer him.' In spite of the alleged rarity of albinism in elephants one could be relied upon to turn up sufficiently often in the days of imperial expansion to keep both kingdoms in a state of devastation.

The whiteness of the Myanmar elephant was nominal, and its sanctity depended upon so many esoteric factors, beyond the layman's grasp, that a sub­stantial body of literature on the subject grew up. The pinkness of the outer annulus of the eye entered into this, as well as the length of the tail, and the number of toe-nails. Ten toe-nails instead of the normal eight were required in a successful candidate. Black elephants possess­ing this number were collectors' items, although not entitled to adora­tion, and were classified as white elephants debased by sin in previous existences. The final test, when all others had been passed, was the water one. If the skin, whether black, grey or otherwise, took on a reddish tinge when water was poured on it, the animal was conclusively white. It was elevated immediately to the position of first personality in the land after the king, adorned with white and golden umbrellas, given the revenues of a province, diverted daily by a corps de ballet, lulled nightly to sleep by a sweet-voiced choir, and if of tender years suckled daily by a line of palace women — an honor eagerly contested by those in a position to aspire to it. But of all these spectacles and splendors, not a vestige remained.

The cannons in the Myanmar palace at Mandalay were never fired, there could be no objection to their being fakes, with enormous intimidating bores and twenty-foot-long barrels. The kings were usually ready to offer its weight in silver for any piece of ordnance however old or cracked, and the palace of Mandalay where all the firearms in the country were stacked up, was a repository of strange museum pieces. They were drawn, when mobile, by teams of auspi­ciously marked bullocks, which were trained at the word of command to kneel and bow their heads to the ground.

The gunners' personal kit was stored in the muzzles. Occasionally a cannon would become, like Alaungpaya's three-pounder, the centre of a cult, and receive offerings of flowers and libations of brandy.

By the end of Mindon's reign it must have been clear that nothing could save Burma or Myanmar. The Myanmar, together with all the rest of the Easterners, except the Japanese, were the prisoners of a cosmology composed of interlocking systems, all complete and perfect, and founded in error.

Everything had been decided and settled once and for all two thousand years ago. No question had been left unanswered. It was all in the Three Baskets of the Law, its commentaries and sub-commentaries; dissected and classified beyond dispute: the seven quali­ties, the five virtues, the six blemishes, the eight dangers, the ninety-six diseases, the ten punishments, the thirty-two results of Karma.

Although Burma or today Myanmar was a young nation it had inherited a civilization with the hardened arteries of senility. By comparison with the certainties and self-sufficiency of Eastern Asiatic thought, the people of medieval Europe lived in intellectual anarchy. When the end came, the Myanmar or Myanmar's were beaten not so much by nineteenth-century gunners, as by the Galileos of three centuries before.

The Myanmar Princess was the daughter of a Siamese lesser queen, and was also considered too insignificant for inclusion in the massacre. She was only fourteen when her mother took her by the hand and they went together out on to their balcony to watch the British troops march in. All she remembered of them was the shining helmets and the plumes. The Myanmar, who had expected a sack and massacre of the traditional kind, were much amazed at the mildness of the soldiers.

On the whole the Prince and Princess seemed to regret the old colonial days. Perhaps this was natural because, since Myanmar or Burma had be­come a colonial free nation, their allowance had been reduced from eight hundred rupees each a month to four hundred rupees. The Prince also complained of the lack of intellectual nourishment these days, and asked me to try to send him a volume of Thomas Hood's poems from England.