Pandaw Magazine

British Burma, and in Royal Burma up to Mandalay.
Despite such good relations, King Mindon was said to have
moved his capital to Mandalay from Ava in 1855 out of irritation at
the sound of passing steamer’s whistles. Though he made efforts to
establish a flotilla of his own, the company prospered in Royal
Burma thanks to the close relationship between the company agent,
Dr Clement Williams, and the king.
Burma now possessed a king of some sagacity. A devout
Buddhist and patron of the arts, Mindon pursued a conciliatory
policy towards the British. Mindon was worldly enough to realise
that his country needed peaceful reconstruction. Unlike his
predecessors he had learnt the hard way that the British Raj was to
be treated with, not insulted. In 1855 Arthur Phayre the Governor of
640
1187
1.24m
9m
5
326ft
11000
IFC IN NUMBERS
Number of ships in 1942 (267 powered)
Number of ships ordered between 1864
and 1948
Tonnage carried per year
Number of passengers carried per year in
IFC heyday (half the post-War population
of Burma)
Days to Rangoon to Mandalay by Express
Steamer in the 1930s (today it takes 10)
Largest (Siam) class of vessel, licensed for
4000 passengers
Local staff employed in heyday, under 200
mainly Scots expatriates
Lower Burma conducted a mission to the king, and the Scots
orientalist Henry Yule’s Narrative of the Mission to the Court of Ava
(1858) provides a fascinating snapshot of Burmese royal circles.
Rangoon quickly grew into the capital of Lower Burma replacing
Moulmein as the main mercantile and port centre. Gradually Lower
Burma became rich and prosperous from its own markets and
resources and as the gateway for Upper Burma. Agriculture
flourished as rich paddy lands were reclaimed from jungle.
At the same time Royal Burma, with its magnificent new palace
city at Mandalay, prospered under the reforming hand of Mindon
Min. A commercial treaty with the British in 1863 allowed the
Irrawaddy Flotilla, then still in the hands of the Rangoon
government, access to trade. The British Resident, Dr Clement
Williams, pioneered the river by steamer as far north as Bhamo,
anxious to explore the possibilities of a trade link to China.
On his retirement from service Williams stayed on as Company
Agent and 1868 the company began a regular Rangoon-Mandalay
steamer service and in 1869 a service to Bhamo, the gateway to
China and once rather optimistically known as the ‘Chicago of the
East’. Mindon introduced coinage and reformed administration with
proper salaried officials rather than feudal ‘town eaters’.
Mindon cleverly played off British against French interests and
in 1872 despatched the Kinwun Mingyi [Prime Minister] as Burma’s
first ambassador to London and Paris.
In 1878 Mindon died without appointing a successor and in a
palace coup power was seized by the Kinwun Mingyi, who in alliance
with the chief queen crowned a puppet-to-be, Thibaw. However the
Kinwun did not reckon on Thibaw’s wife Supayarlat who rapidly
established dominance over the young king. The ‘Massacre of the
Kinsmen’ – an old Burmese institution – was revived, and over
eighty relatives were put to death by the traditional mode for
members of the royal family. They were placed in velvet sacks and
clubbed to death.
Relations with the British took an immediate turn for the worse.
The old Manipur border problem that had started the First Anglo-
Burmese War resurfaced. Extortion and maladministration led to a
influx of refugees into Lower Burma. To cap it all, Thibaw flirted
excessively with the French, upsetting his father’s delicate balance
and jeopardising British commercial arrangements.
A Burmese embassy lingered in Paris threatening to upset the
entire balance of power in Indo-China. The business lobby feared
that the French would be first into China and seize the rich economic
pickings before them. By 1879 the situation in Mandalay became so
tense that an Irrawaddy Flotilla steamer was kept under full steam
in midstream in case of an emergency evacuation.
To cap it all in 1885 the Burmese government fined the Bombay
Burmah Trading Corporation a ridiculously large sum over a
trumped-up charge.
In the 19th century the world’s oceans were patrolled by the
Royal Navy in the name of ‘free trade’ whilst protectionist Burma
resisted foreign pressure to open its rivers. The Glasgow and
Manchester chambers of commerce demanded that she send teak
and rubies downstream and receive corrugated iron and Singer
sewing machines upstream. But Burma was stubborn and
unyielding and her kings, earthly manifestations of Hindu deities
made flesh to protect the great Buddhist faith, were convinced of
their invulnerability.
They inhabited ‘forbidden cities’ styled the ‘Centre of the
Universe’. Supplicants had to take their shoes off and crawl before
them. Power was total and of course democracy and “human rights”
entirely unheard off. They knew nothing of the technological