Four years in Upper Burma

by W. R. Winston

I remember on one occasion unwittingly making what, in Burmese times, would have been a serious breach in my manners, and it shows how easy it is to do that in an Eastern country. It was at Pagân, a town on the Irrawaddy. Happening to be there one day when the Chief Commissioner of Burma, the representative of our Queen-Empress, was expected, I went down to the river bank, where many Burmans were assembled to see him, and do him honour as he landed from the steamer. The day was bright and the sun very hot, and as usual I put up an umbrella I always carried with me, of the ordinary English alpaca, but with a white cover, for additional protection from the sun’s rays. I saw the Burmans looking and making remarks, but being in blissful forgetfulness that I was holding an umbrella at the time, I never thought it referred to me, until suddenly I remembered that there was I, in the presence of the representative of royalty, assuming the white umbrella, and, according to Burmese etiquette, guilty of something approaching to high treason! I hauled down my flag at once.

The royal titles of the King of Burma were perhaps the most pompous and pretentious of any monarch—“His most glorious and excellent Majesty, Lord of the Tshaddau, King of Elephants, Master of many White Elephants, Lord of the Mines of gold, silver, rubies, amber, and the noble serpentine, Sovereign of the empires of Thuna-paranta and Tampadipa, and other great empires and countries, and of all the Umbrella-wearing Chiefs, the Supporter of Religion, the Sun-descended Monarch, Arbiter of Life, and great King of Righteousness, King of Kings, and Possessor of Boundless Dominion and Supreme Wisdom.”

As may be surmised from this lengthy and extravagant title that ancient doctrine known as the divine right of kings was held in Burma out and out, without the slightest qualification or limit. Every subject was the king’s born slave, with no legal right to any property. The king was the absolute master of the lives, the liberties, the property, and the very labour of his subjects. There was little or no private ownership of land; the land belonged to the king. The cultivators were merely the king’s tenants, raising produce for his benefit, he graciously allowing them to have some of the produce for their own support.

But there is a principle of compensation running through all human affairs, and even absolute monarchs cannot have things all their own way; and a throne is not always a bed of roses. The more grinding the despotism the greater the danger of revolution. Hence the only real limit to the power of the king was his dread of assassination, and this was a very real and well-grounded fear, especially in the case of a ruler like King Theebaw, with a faulty title and with no natural ability for wielding power. The King of Burma was little better than a prisoner in his own spacious palace and grounds, for he could scarcely ever leave them, for fear of the palace, and the arsenal close by, being seized in his absence by some pretender to the throne. If that should happen there was small chance of his recovering them. The chief cause of the king’s insecurity was the unbridled polygamy of the Burmese court. This resulted in crowds of queens, princes and princesses, all possible claimants to the throne, and it sometimes happened, as in the case of King Theebaw, that there was no rest for him till most of them were put to death.

The Burmese Government was throughout characterised by oppression and misrule. No fixed salaries were paid to officials, but princes, ministers, queens, concubines and favourites were supported by the grant of a province, and known by the title of “Myo-tsa” (province-eater), a title which only too aptly indicated its own meaning. It was the policy of the Myo-tsa to squeeze as much revenue as he could out of the people, in order to pay the required amount at Mandalay and to pay himself. Subordinate to the province-eater came the functionaries in charge of circles of villages, and then of the individual villages; and in each case it was the same thing, all intent on making as much as they could out of it. This was with regard to the tax levied on each family or house. The same primitive and essentially vicious methods applied to the other items of taxation—viz., that on produce, fees on law cases, and occasionally, extraordinary contributions to Government for special needs—gave rise to the same kind of fleecing of the people. Towards the end of King Theebaw’s reign things grew worse and worse. The sale of monopolies became very common, and state lotteries for the benefit of the revenue did great harm amongst a people naturally fond of gambling. When at last Burmese rule came to an end it was a clearing away of much that was rotten and hopelessly out of date, and on the whole it was a great blessing to the people to substitute for it British rule.

CHAPTER XIV.
BURMESE HOME LIFE.

The Countess of Dufferin’s fund for the training of female nurses in midwifery, for the benefit of women in the East, is nowhere more sorely needed than it is in Burma, for there are among the Burmans, in connection with that critical period, usages that render some more enlightened method of treatment urgently to be desired. Immediately on the birth of the child, it is the earnest endeavour of those in charge to place the mother as near as possible to a very large fire. Hot bricks are applied, rugs and blankets are piled upon her, irrespective of the state of the weather, in a country where for two months of the year the thermometer stands at 110° in the shade of the verandah. This continues for seven days, and is with a view to dispel the noxious humours supposed to be generated. This treatment, in addition to the drinking of much medicine at the same time, renders that crisis of life more than usually hazardous to the mother.