J. Leider - Coastal Expansion

Bangkok 10-13 October 2007
Discovery of Ramannadesa
Date of print : 30/08/2007
Jacques P. Leider
Ecole franaise dExtrme-Orient (Paris)
Coastal Expansion Arakanese-Mon (Lower Burma) Collisions in the Context of Maritime Burma (14th 17th c.)
Coastal Burma........................................................................................................................................................... 1 Coastal Expansion..................................................................................................................................................... 2 Decades of Disorder (c.1370- c.1430)....................................................................................................................... 3 Decades of War (c. 1596-1638) ................................................................................................................................ 6 The Fall of Pegu and its Aftermath ........................................................................................................................... 8 Depopulation and Mon warriors ............................................................................................................................. 10 The most warlike king on the coast ..................................................................................................................... 11 Coastal Perspectives................................................................................................................................................ 16
Coastal Burma
In October 1999 a conference was convened in Amsterdam under the title Coastal Burma in the Age of Commerce. Speakers focused on Arakan, on Lower Burma and on Tenasserim or on the relations of these three regions with neighbouring countries such as India or Thailand. But no paper did actually deal with Coastal Burma as a whole. So one may wonder (as the editors of the conference volume did after the event) if the conception of Coastal Burma is anyhow useful for historical analysis. In this paper I would like to investigate Mon, or rather, Lower Burma Arakan encounters and collisions. In which framework should this be done? Neither in traditional Burmese historiography nor in colonial or postcolonial historiography of Burma do the Mon or the Arakanese appear otherwise than as supporting actors of a single dramatic play where the Burmese were the main actors. I think that today we should recognize that there were plays in progress on several stages, not only on one. The stories are intertwined, but action was seen on different stages. I think that Coastal Burma was such a supra-regional stage. In this paper I will make my point that Coastal Burma is a meaningful geographical concept to synthesize the maritime orientations of polities in Burma. It offers a framework for conceptualizing agency inside the wider geographic space of the Bay of Bengal where contacts, rivalries, interaction and exchange happened between historically distinctive but culturally similar regions that were connected by the same seacoast.
August 2007 Jacques P. Leider (EFEO) DRAFT - CONFERENCE VERSION - No quotation before prior notice
Coastal Burma should not be seen as an artificial or wilfully vague notion to merely re-arrange well known facts. Arakan, Lower Burma and Tenasserim can be posited as historically individualized spaces that claim an autonomous history. But while autonomous history as a conceptual approach has its merits, it bears the risk to simply foster alternative ethnocentric discourses. Moreover the focus on particular regions or ethnicity narrows once more the spatial and temporal scope and falls short of establishing a broadly viable category for historical investigations. We should not fall into this trap. The political, social and cultural histories of Arakan and Ramaadesa (the Mon country) were connected and shared. But in conventional representations, the temporal and spatial identities of coastal Burma have been relegated to the background. Once we drop the geopolitical approach as taken from inland Burma, Mon and Arakanese history release a distinct flavour that recalls maritime Southeast Asia. The Mon and Arakanese polities were sea-linked and outward-looking; their ports thrived on trade and were nodal points of the Indian Ocean trading network. In post-colonial Burmese history studies, our minds have been formatted by a centre/periphery-oriented approach that privileges Upper Burma and minimizes, implicitly, claims of autonomous developments happening outside the immediate scope of the centre. So we have been led to accept that because, as the successors of the Pyu, the ethnic Burmese/Bama/Myanmar were key players and historically dominant, the main focus of historical studies in Burma should be the success stories of Burmese dynasties connected to their mythologized home in Central/Upper Burma. But this ethnocentrist approach of Burmese/Myanmar history dispossesses the Mon and Arakanese who thrived in coastal Burma, but also other inhabitants at the maritime frontier such as the Burmese themselves, Malay, Indian, Chinese and say even Portuguese and Thai, of their share in its history. After firing this obligatory broadside at the usual mono-directional concept of Burmese/Myanmar history with its clear-cut hierarchy of historically relevant people, I have to stress that the aim of this paper is not to write some names bigger than they have hitherto been but to shift the focus of attention and try to recover a past that need not to be lost.
Coastal Expansion
Coastal expansion describes, in the context of this paper, the historical fact that the Mon and the Arakanese kingdoms, at the height of political strength, rather expanded along the coast than towards the interior. The historical concept of expansion generally entails the idea of territorial enlargement and the extension of political, administrative and economic control over contiguous territories and their population by means of warfare or diplomatic coercion. By coastal expansion, I mean the extension of political and economic power along the coast obtaining political influence and maintaining control over the economic activities of outlying coastal ports and cities. Coastal expansion could depend both on sea and land connections, but its key instrument was a fleet in charge of military campaigns, marshalling a sea-borne force of dissuasive strength, able to pursue rapid action and keep up control of vital support lines along the waterways, and, eventually the setting up of permanent garrisons. This paper will successively focus on Mon and Arakanese coastal expansion during two distinct periods of their history: the late fourteenth to early fifteenth century and the end of the sixteenth up to the early
decades of the seventeenth century Coastal expansion cannot be confused with the building of a maritime empire. Unlike the Portuguese or Dutch, Ramaadesa and Dhaawati-Rakhaing did not want to monopolize trade routes, regulate trade supplies and patrol the seas. Like other Southeast Asian polities, they wanted to stand up to competition and neighbourly rapacity by maximising manpower. In the early modern period, the cooptation and integration of foreigners into the armed forces was the rule, not the exception. Coastal expansion differs from territorial expansion in so far as it converged on the control of trade and maritime activities rather than the extension of agricultural surplus, on links and communications rather than on the formation of agglomerate territories, on the enforcement of alliances rather than wholesale subjection. Mon incursions into Arakan and Arakanese invasions of Lower Burma did not result in long-term subjection and large-scale territorial occupation. Mon or Arakanese kings did not engineer high-intensity expansion so typical of expanding land empires. Heroic conquerors are rare in coastal history. This is probably why the record of traditional Burmese historiography has carried on relatively little of the unobvious maritime periphery. I do not see that either of these expansions was driven by mainly ideological grounds (e.g. possession of a white elephant, a predefined territorial claim or mandala). Coastal expansion was circumstantial and as such symptomatic of emerging regional powerhouses; it was opportunistic and filling up political vacuum. But these aspects should not distract from its historical relevance. In the case of Arakan, the political pragmatism and the flexible and unprejudiced recourse to foreigners also underscore the symbiotic nature of coastal expansion. Expansion also depended on the number of your troops, but against the grain, I would not argue that coastal Burmas demography was historically weak before the sixteenth century 1 .
Decades of Disorder (c.1370- c.1430)

At the end of the fourteenth and in the early fifteenth century, Ramaadesa under Razadharit tried to extend its control over Arakan. One reason for this was that the Burmese of Ava wanted to control Arakan. The quest for trade with the Bay of Bengal may have been the key motivation for this expansion from the interior to the coast. According to Arakanese chronicles, confrontations between Arakanese and Mon go back to the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. After Mon raids against Kyeintali (in southern Arakan), the Arakanese king Rajasu (1256-58?) invaded Pathein/Bassein and the area north of it2 . There is a record of Burmese raids against Am and Talak 3 and Mon attacks against southern Arakan (CL 1, 370) in 1313 during the reign of King Min-thi (1298-1389) 4 . These aggressions fit into the wider picture of Pagans decline in the late thirteenth century. U Kalas Mahayazawingyi (vol.1, chap. 377) states that after the departure of the Chinese in 1303, revolts broke out all over the Shan country and in the 32 myo of Bassein, i.e. the western
1 Exploring distinctive regional cultural identities in the light of cultural exchange along the coast would be a welcome complement in this paper. For reasons of space, such a study cannot be included. 2 Candamalalankara, Ashin 1931-1932. Rakhaing Mahayazawingyi [New Chronicle of Rakhaing] Mandalay, Hamsawati Pitakat, [hereafter quoted as CL] vol.1, 358. 3 Am and Talak are two Arakanese localities that have given their names to a couple of important mountain passes leading from the Irrawaddy valley to Arakan. 4 The dates of these events have to be considered with caution as the chronology of the kings of the Laung-krak period (thirteenth-fourteenth century) has not yet been safely established.
Irrawaddy delta neighbouring southern Arakan. The Arakanese took their revenge and raided the Burmese and Mon countryside (CL 1, 371). These early raids reflect the basic pattern of Burmas geopolitical division as far as coastal Burma was concerned in the fourteenth and fifteenth century: a central Burmese/Shan centre at Ava that inherited the Pagan legacy, the Mon polity with its centre at Martaban, then at Pegu after 1369 and the fledgling Arakanese kingdom centred at Laungkrak. One may complicate this tripartite coexistence of polities by integrating the Shan territories and Lanna/Chieng Mai, as well as Tenasserim and Ayutthaya as they were either players or stakes in the context of cross-regional warfare. There was no singularly dominant player. The end of the fourteenth and the early fifteenth century were a confusing period of Arakanese history and the data we find in the Burmese, Arakanese and Mon sources cannot be easily harmonized. One may wonder if there was anything like a unified Arakanese kingdom. Often Sam-tw (Sandoway) in the south looks like a separate polity, a zone for refugees from the Irrawaddy delta but also a coastal territory easily conquered 5 . In the Mahayazawingyi, we are told that around 1380, the king of Ava Mingyiswa-Sawk placed a Burmese prince on Arakans throne. Apparently this man did not last for very long. The Arakanese chronicles say nothing about such a Burmese appointee, but neither do they agree on the list of Arakanese kings that reigned during the last decade of the fourteenth century In 1403, according to the Mahayazawingyi, King Minkhaung decided to send his son against Arakan after the Arakanese had raided the area of Laungshe. The Arakanese king, we are told, was killed, his son Narameitlha fled to Pegu and Anoratha-saw, Minkhaungs son-in-law, was put on the Arakanese throne. This prompted an invasion by King Razadharit [in 1407?] who supported the Arakanese refugee prince Narameitlha and installed him on the throne with an entourage of Mon supervisors. In an alternate version, the prince is called Man Khari and identified as the brother of Narameitlha who is said to have reigned under the supervision of a Mon minister. Countering the Mon hegemony, Min Khaung of Ava invaded Arakan once more and Narameitlha ran away to Bengal. This provoked a new invasion of the Mon in 1411. They retook Sam-tw as well as Laungkrak and put once more Narameitlha on the throne. In the alternate version, Narameitlha could return to Arakan with the help of Bengali Muslim soldiers and re-ascend the throne only in 1428 or 1429. The chronological discrepancies in the Arakanese historiography are considerable and neither Mon nor Burmese sources are helpful. The U Kala Mahayazawingyi uses information taken from the Razadharit Ayedawpon that does not match with the story told by the Arakanese tradition. No Arakanese chronicles says that Narameitlha was a Mon appointed pretender on the throne. So far so good for the confusion of political facts in the sources. Our investigation in Mon-Arakanese relations raises the question about the reasons why Arakan became a bone of contention between Ava and Pegu and how the intruders fared after taking control. The chronicles do not provide a straightforward answer to the first question but suggest some answer to the second one. The Burmese invaders put up enough determination and manpower to invade and take power in central Arakan. But this was where their competence stopped. Arakan was not an easy prey, but it was probably easier to
5 Around 1388, a rebel Mon governor fled to Samtw (Fernquest 2006 SBBR 4, 1, 8-9).
conquer than to rule from afar. The Mons apparently succeeded much better in staying in Arakan. Mon hegemony over southern Arakan may even have lasted until the reign of Min Khari alias Ali Khan (143351). From Lower Burma Arakan was simply easier to reach and Pegu probably had the better means to do so. Razadharit may have commanded superior naval forces that were adapted to the harsh conditions for navigating along the coast and thus maintained transport communications that allowed the Mon invaders to back up their claims on Arakan. One may agree with Jon Fernquest who argues that the possession of Arakan allowed the extraction of a portion of the lucrative maritime trade 6 . But this argument weighs probably much stronger with regard to Ava than to Pegu. We actually do not know if Arakans maritime trade was very lucrative at this time. There is little doubt that Burmese kings had a keen interest in safeguarding a maritime connection with the Bay of Bengal. When there was no prospect of linking up with the Indian Ocean trading network in the south (which was the situation in the early fifteenth and in the early sixteenth century), Arakan was the second best route to export rubies and other precious stones. The Mon kingdom may not have had a similar compelling need to control Arakan unless it wanted to deny this privilege to Ava. In the middle of the fifteenth century, the political balance became more stable in Burma as Arakans geopolitical position had improved. It was no more a victim of external aggression, but became itself a regional power. In 1454, an exchange of letters took place between King Narapati of Ava and King Basawphyu of Mrauk-U. The letters appear as isolated and out of context pieces in the Arakanese and Burmese chronicles and they are written in a pompous and formulistic style that defies at first sight a clear political interpretation. But they contain one substantial point: an agreement on the border between the two kingdoms, i.e. the watershed of the Arakan Yoma mountain range. With their mutual proclamations of friendship, the letters suggest moreover that both kings were dealing with each other on a par. In Ava diplomacy had taken precedence over war. This change of policy makes even more sense when we also hypothesize a mutual interest in trade. One can hardly imagine a similar agreement between a Lower Burma polity (be it Burmese or Mon) and Arakan. Situated on the same coast line and competing for opportunities in a similar economic environment, they were naturally rivals. Either the vast poorly populated tracts of Western Lower Burma (the region south of Bassein) helped to overlook each other or, if their forces to expand were sufficient and under ambitious leadership, they would be drawn into confrontation. This does not imply that Arakanese and Mon were hostile neighbours for any ethnic or historical reasons. We may assume that peaceful cultural and commercial exchange went on for centuries along the coast. But it is striking that in Arakans historiography there are hints at a religiously tainted and undoubtedly politically motivated anti-Pegu bias at the Arakanese court while no such signs of hostility transpire concerning Ava (Leider 2005).
6 Rajadhirat discovered from spies that Ava was marching south to Arakan so Rajadhirat marched quickly to Bassein to meet the challenge. Ava quickly took the capital of Arakan and the son-in-law of the king of Ava, Gamani, was installed as ruler with the intention of extracting a portion of the lucrative maritime trade that passed through the town. (Fernquest 2006, SBBR 4, 1, 12) Note that in the Rakhaing Mahayazawingyi, Min Khaungs son-in-law is called Anoratha-min-saw.
So much for fleshing out with a plethora of assumptions the bare information provided by the chronicles regarding the geopolitical situation of coastal Burma in the fourteenth and fifteenth century.
Decades of War (c. 1596-1638)

One and a half century later, at the end of the sixteenth century, the political landscape of Burma/Myanmar was a very different one. The Coastal Burma empire built by Tabinshwethi and Bayinnaung in the succession of the Mon kings of Pegu was falling apart after King Nandabayins disastrous wars against Ayutthaya had bred systemic disloyalty on behalf of Upper Burmas lords and driven the rural population into the jungle. This opened the door to a great chapter of Arakanese history: the expansion of Arakanese power into Lower Burma. It is generally only linked to the military role played by the Arakanese in the fall of Pegu in 1598-1599. But the Arakanese involvement in Lower Burma and its political, economic and social consequences form a longer and more complex story than the centralist historiography concedes. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Arakanese kings maintained a permanent fleet counting hundreds of war-ships, the most prominent being galley-like sea craft that moved swiftly along the coast and on the rivers. The ability to lead rapid attacks and to block the waterways provided the Arakanese not only with a short term advantage, but it gave them a lasting strategic edge over their rivals in southeast Bengal and Lower Burma. From Western and Indian sources we know that the psychological impact of the fleets appearance was part of Arakans effectiveness in aggressive warfare. For four decades, until the end of the reign of King Sirisudhammaraja (1622-38), the fleet was a military threat as well as a tool of political pressure in the hands of the Arakanese kings. I will proceed in two steps happily taking the risk of some repetitions. As I do not expect many people to master the intricacies of political and military events, I will first give a short overview. Then I will discuss some of the controversial information contained in the sources. The preliminary narrative compiling the main facts and events will also help along our investigation of Mon/Lower Burma-Arakanese relations. After 1592, the central power of King Ngasudayaka alias Nandabayin steadily declined as the supreme Burmese lord failed to maintain authority over the dependent local lords (bayin). Villagers who were requested to fill the ranks for pursuing war against Ayutthaya fled conscription in increasing numbers. Nandabayin abandoned his palace in 1599 after a protracted siege of his capital Pegu by forces of the lord of Taunggu (Min Ysihasu) and the king of Arakan (Min Rajagri). It is unclear what kind of political projects were nurtured by these two gravediggers of the Burmese empire who observed each others moves. But in the short time none of them was materially in the position to revive a united Burmese kingdom. 7 In 1600, an army led by Naresuan, the king of Ayutthaya, arrived in Pegu but the city had already been burned to the ground and the spoils divided between the Arakanese and the king of Taunggu. The Thai King immediately went to lay siege to Taunggu. But after a couple of months, the troops of Ayutthaya had to
7 The rebirth of a Burmese kingdom re-establishing its claim over the whole Irrawaddy valley took its start further north, in Central Burma with the lord of Nyaung-yam at the moment the shrunken empire was still falling into parts in the south.
abandon the siege as they were unable to obtain provisions in the countryside which had been depopulated and devastated by the ongoing warfare. For the Arakanese, the campaign in Lower Burma had an extremely positive outcome. The anonymous Portuguese author of the Questo (1606) writes that before invading Lower Burma, Arakan had been an under-populated forest and the Arakanese had been so miserable that they had to use copper instead of silver coins 8 . This may be a slight exaggeration. But by any measure, the spoils of war must have been considerable: the wealth treasured at Pegus palaces was enormous; among the prestigious goods that the Arakanese acquired there was a white elephant and a princess who was a daughter of the emperor. More valuable, in military terms, were several thousand Mon who were deported and resettled in Arakan. Second, an Arakanese fleet had occupied Syriam, one of Burmas major ports. Indian Muslim and Portuguese traders rivalled at the Arakanese court for the kings favour so as to obtain a foothold in the new territorial acquisition. Finally King Min Rajagri entrusted Syriam to one of his Portuguese captains, Felipe de Brito, expecting yearly customs revenues to be sent to Arakan. But soon de Brito made himself independent and against the odds, succeeded to establish and maintain for a decade his personal rule over Syriam by concluding alliances with local Mon lords and by obtaining the recognition of the Portuguese authorities of Goa. In 1612-3, the Burmese troops of King Anauk-phet-lwan of Ava forcefully put an end to De Britos principality and its local alliances. This marked a decisive step towards a united Burmese kingdom where Ava soon became the de facto capital while Pegu still remained for some time the provisional headquarters. But the forces that had been set loose in coastal Burma by the fall of the Taunggu Empire did not die away as fast as the Upper Burma lords might have expected after doing away with de Brito and local Mon autonomy in Martaban and Moulmein. The appetite of the Arakanese kings had been whetted by their earlier successes in Lower Burma. The Arakanese were never in a position to invade Upper Burma and to challenge the military strength of Ava. But in the Coastal Burma setting, in the Irrawaddy delta up to Pyay and along the coast down south to Tenasserim and Mergui, they could compete and take advantage of their naval superiority. Even after the re-conquest of Syriam in 1612, the Burmese control of Lower Burma was challenged by two Arakanese warrior kings, Min Khamaung (r. 1612-22) and Sirisudhammaraja (r.1622-38). For twenty-five years, they put diplomatic and military pressure on Lower Burma by raiding and plundering again and again the coast. This overview could be acceptable as an introductory text-book account; but it betrays little of the complexity that still faces historians when they delve into the questions that contemporary sources raise. To get a deeper understanding of Lower Burma in the first decades of the seventeenth century and particularly Arakans involvement, we have to take a closer look at the record and pay attention to the long-term consequences of the destruction of one of the wealthiest cities of early modern Southeast Asia. I would like to focus on three matters of interest relating to cross-regional warfare:
8 Questo in A.M. Marques Guedes Interferncia et Integrao dos Portugueses na Birmnia c. 1580-1630. Lisboa , 2004, 220.
First, the fall of the city of Pegu in 1599. Second, the deportation of thousands of Mon to Arakan, and third, Arakans aggressive policies towards the revived Burmese kingdom of Ava.
The Fall of Pegu and its Aftermath

We have several Burmese, Arakanese, Thai, Portuguese, Italian, Latin and Dutch accounts that relate the fall of the city of Pegu in 1598-9 or contribute some information to the events that happened during the period from 1580 to 1615. One may stress indeed that there is no singular period in Burmese history for which such an array of various sources exists though the contents are often sketchy. King Nandabayins doomed reign did not end with a defeat on the battle-field or with his assassination in the golden palace of Pegu. It ended when Nandabayin gave himself up to the king of Taunggu, one of his vassal lords as well as his brother-in-law. His surrender was the consequence of a siege of several months that started in 1598 and pushed Pegus population on the brink of starvation. The success of this siege resulted from a cooperation between the king of Arakan Min Rajagri and the lord (bayin) of Taunggu. The contemporary Relatione del Tesoro of Melchior Botteglio (1614) states that the two kings were at that time the most powerful in the country. But none of them was in the position to simply take over the supreme power. In the case of the Arakanese king, it is likely that he had no such plan. With Pegu burned to the ground, Syriam abandoned by its traders and a large part of the population scared away by ruthless conscription and marauding invaders, there was indeed not much to rule in the short term. The arrangements made between the kings of Taunggu and Arakan, so it seems, provided for a sharing of the spoils, the dethroned Nandabayin remaining in the hands of the king of Taunggu and the Arakanese returning home with their booty 9 . According to the Dhanyawati Ayedawpon, an Arakanese source, the Taunggu king had already sent messengers to Arakan in 1596 making promises of substantial spoils if Min Rajagri would join his campaign against Pegu. The existence of a formal coalition is not confirmed by the generally well informed Jesuits who were in Arakan at the time. It is even contradicted by the Nga M Yazawin, another Arakanese chronicle 10 , which though rather confusingly - states that it was Nandabayin himself who had appealed for the help of the Arakanese king. According to the Mahayazawingyi, a Burmese chronicle 11 , the Arakanese fleet had already taken control of Syriam in 1597 and so the Arakanese role in the siege of Pegu looks rather as the outcome of an ad hoc agreement between Taunggu and the Arakanese (UK III, 98). The brief contemporary account of Peter Floris, a Dutch in the service of the East India Company, gives a different description saying that Nandabayins surrender to Taunggu was a last resort as the Arakanese king threatened to invade his country and the sharing of the spoils was a way for the Taunggu king to get rid of the Arakanese (Floris 1672). The king of Taunggu clearly was the instigator of the final onslaught against Pegu 12 . To trump his fellow competitors in Burma, he had earlier promised the king of Ayutthaya 13 to join a Thai-led campaign against
9 This is as far as the sources would agree. Botteglio also states that the other lords were supposed to become tributaries which, in the given circumstances, sounds rather illusory. Si unirano insieme due Re li pui possenti di questi, e furono quello di Arracam e quello del Tang, presero sopra di esse il carico della guerra, con conditione che quello che acquistassero fosse il loro, e gli altri liberi restassero da tributi. (Guedes 1994, 228). 10 Nga M Yazawin (manuscript) British Library OR 3465. 11 U Kala 1960. Mahayazawingyi. Rangoon: Hamsawati Press. 3 vols. [hereafter UK] 12 The Thai royal chronicles emphasize the advice he received by a cunning monk.
Pegu. But actually, say the Ayutthaya chronicles, he schemed to dissuade the Mon lords of Lower Burma from joining the Thai forces. Naresuan must have felt betrayed, but he did not want to loose a major chance for a new campaign against Pegu and decided to invade Hongsawadi once he heard about Nandabayins self-abandonment. Mind that in the Thai royal chronicles, Naresuans invasion is rather presented as a support mission for Mon lords of Lower Burma who had declared their intention to submit to Thai overlordship. Contemporary sources seem to agree that the Thai advance was the major cause of the king of Taunggus move back to his own city where he immediately set out to erect further fortifications. He took King Nandabayin along together with Pegus invaluable treasures (in February 1600 according to the Mhannan Yazawindawgyi). Naresuans troops crossed Three Pagodas pass, took Moulmein by force but then they found Pegu burned to the ground and the emperor taken off as a prisoner to Taunggu. The Thai forces laid siege to Taunggu, but after two months, lacking provisions, they were starving and had to retreat. The Nga M Yazawin and the Mahayazawingyi agree that the ruin of the Thai campaign was mainly due to the Arakanese fleet which cut off the Thai provision lines by blocking the Sittang River. Once the Thai army was retreating, the Arakanese massively pursued them and once more obtained a rich booty 14 . Curiously, the Thai chronicles mention neither the role of the Arakanese in the siege nor the hardship the Thai army itself had to endure on behalf of the Arakanese. Nandabayin was assassinated in Taunggu by Natshinnaung, the son of the Taunggu king. According to the Mahayazawingyi, this happened after Naresuans siege of Taunggu. But such timing does not sit well with the record of the Portuguese Jesuit Andre Boves who was at Min Rajagris court in Mrauk-U when the news of the death of Nandabayin arrived (at the end of 1599). The Arakanese king went mad as the killing of Nandabayin went allegedly against an earlier promise the king of Taunggu had apparently made. Maybe more importantly, Min Rajagri felt deprived of his share of the dead kings treasures and decided on the spot to lead a campaign against Taunggu to where the king of Taunggu had moved the treasures from Makhaw, a fortress near Pegu. Following Thai, Arakanese and Portuguese sources, Naresuans siege of Taunggu and the Arakanese campaign that had the declared aim to pressure Taunggu to give up some of the emperors riches took place during the first half of 1600 15 . The Mahayazawingyi implies that the Arakanese arrived before the Thai army in Pegu. It states that when the Arakanese heard about the arrival of the Thai, they plundered the city, sent valuable things back to Arakan and burned the houses and monasteries to the ground. But Father Boves account suggests that it was the Taunggu bayin who had already turned Pegu into a desert 16 . According to Botteglio and Boves, the Arakanese king picked up in Makhaw what the Taunggu king had despised,
13 R. Cushman, The Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya, Bangkok: Siam Society, 2000, 162. 14 According to one Arakanese tradition, the brother of the Thai king (i.e. Ekathotsarot) was taken hostage and later exchanged against a set of precious statues. This story is highly unlikely as the statues seem to be the originally Cambodian statues that Bayinnaung had taken from the Ayutthaya palace to Pegu and that were part of the spoils when Pegu was plundered. 15 Father Boves went with the Arakanese fleet and was in Lower Burma in March 1600 and the Thai army abandoned the siege before the start of the rain season in the same year. For more than ten years, the relations between Arakan and Taunggu were a sequence of on-and-off alliances and confrontations reflecting politically unstable times. 16 Hosten Jesuit letters 74.
silver and precious stones valued at 3 millions scudi which were indeed a modicum compared with the value of 700 millions ascribed to what 12 or 17 caravans had already taken to Taunggu. But apart from this, the Arakanese also took along 3200 canon. It seems that for his latest campaign the Arakanese king had called up for service an unusually great number of Portuguese from the communities who settled in the northeast Bay of Bengal. One of them was appointed as governor of Syriam, the audacious and hardy Felipe de Brito. The wealth of Pegus court was baffling and the detailed lists of precious stones, jewellery, valuables from the palace and of the quantity of gold provided by Portuguese writers raised the envy of the Portuguese State in Goa 17 . The Arakanese sources focus on prestige goods such as a white elephant, sets of the tipitaka scriptures, Nandabayins third daughter who enjoyed still a long life as an Arakanese queen 18 and the Cambodian bronze statues Bayinnaung had brought from Ayutthaya. The fall of Pegu and its aftermath marks a critical moment in Burmas history. Successive invasions, plundering and depopulation left Lower Burma in an unstable and weak condition for a very long time. In the context of Arakans coastal expansion, the Lower Burma campaign of 1598-99 marked the start of over three decades of Arakanese involvement in Lower Burma 19 . In 1600, the Arakanese could hope that thanks to their control of Syriam coupled with unchallenged naval power, Lower Burmas momentary desolation could be turned to their advantage by a revival of trade.
Depopulation and Mon warriors

Like in every continental Southeast Asian monarchy, Arakans rulers felt that they lacked a sufficient population to sustain their need for manpower and their expectations for revenue. A major bonus of Min Rajagris invasions of Lower Burma was the deportation of thousands of Mon families to Arakan after the fall of Pegu. In the Rakhaing Mahayazawingyi, we read of altogether sixty thousand who were settled in various villages in the Kaladan valley 20 . But one should not forget that earlier on, many Mon families had freely settled in Arakan as they took refuge in Sam-tw during Nandabayins forced conscriptions. The Nga M Yazawin says that three Mon ministers were given appanages by the king in Tan-lw, Sam-tw and Laung-krak. The Arakanese deportations of Mon resulted in the formation of elite Mon units that were integrated in Arakans army. Recent historical research on Arakan has stressed the importance of Portuguese and Muslim
17 Botteglios Relatione del Tesoro demonstrates the keen interest of the Spanish court in the value of these treasures because Felipe de Brito lay hold on them when he took possession of Taunggu in 1607. 18 She is variously called Shin Htwe or Khin (Ma) Nhaung. 19 On the fall of Pegu, see M. Charney The 1598-99 Siege of Pegu and the expansion of Arakanese Imperial Power into Lower Burma Journal of Asian History 28, 1 (1994), J. Leider Le Royaume dArakan, Birmanie. Son histoire politique entre le dbut du XVe et la fin du XVIIIe sicle. Paris: PEFEO, 2004. On de Britos Syriam (1602-1612) and the Portuguese in Arakan in general, see Charney, Arakan, Min Yazagyi and the Portuguese: The Relationship between the Growth of Arakanese Imperial Power and Portuguese Mercenaries on the Fringe of Mainland Southeast Asia 15171617, MA Ohio (1993), S. Subrahmanyam The Portuguese Empire in Asia 1500-1700- A Political and Economic History. London/New York (1993), Guedes 1994, Leider The Portuguese Communities along the Myanmar Coast Myanmar Historical Research Journal 10, 2 (2002) and S. Yimprasert The Portuguese in Arakan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Manusya 7, 2 (2004). 20 The Mon are called Talaing and/or Auk-tha (people from below) in Arakanese source texts. Mention is made of a thousand who tried to escape from the circle of Kywe-d in 1604 (CL 2, 154).
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mercenaries in the Arakanese forces. But the Mon were undoubtedly an important element as well as they formed a standing force at the disposal of the kings. This is confirmed by the early seventeenth century Baharistan i-Ghaybi whose author, the Mughal general Mirza Nathan 21 states that in 1615 an Arakanese army marching against Bhalwa (in southeast Bengal) counted 80,000 men of whom 10,000 were Mon (BG I, 332-4). Shiabuddhin Talish, another seventeenth century Indian chronicler says that the Arakanese soldiers were called Telingas which is his rendering of Talaing (Sarkar 1907, 414). In a letter from 1638 to Islam Khan, King Narapati talking about his own troops refers to the Ferangis [Portuguese] and Telangis (Askari Hasan 1960:211). When in the middle of December 1656 rumours spread in Mrauk-U that a Mughal governor of Bengal was assembling an army to invade Arakan, a provisional army of a few thousand Mon soldiers was immediately dispatched to Dianga south of Chittagong to fend off the invaders 22 . A Mon guard unit at the royal palace existed until the end of the Arakanese kingdom (1785), as we know from the sittan of Dhanyawadi of 1802 (Leider 1998). In 2005 I told about the village of Pan-Myaung, a few kilometres northeast of Mrauk-U; it has a population whose unusually fair complexion betrays its Mon descent that is confirmed by oral traditions.
The most warlike king on the coast

Arakans rise to the status of a regional power broker hit on the constant problem of manpower. The pampering of the Portuguese adventurers and traders from southeast Bengal, the enrolment of Indian Muslim warriors and the deportations of Mon or Bengali country folk were part of the answer to this partly military, partly economic problem. On the other hand, the appropriation of a part of the colossal wealth of Pegu had filled the royal treasure and given the Arakanese kings the funds to build forts, support garrisons and maintain a permanent fleet. As we said, in a short-term perspective, invasion, conquest and deportations produced excellent results. But the long-term project of building a Coastal Burma empire under Arakans authority was fraught with problems and contradictions such as (a) the demographic situation of a devastated Lower Burma that needed repopulation and not further depopulation (b) the re-emerging Burmese inland kingdom that wanted to reconnect with the Bay of Bengal trade network and boasted a politically uncompromising vision of conquest and subjection (c) the rebelliousness of the Bay of Bengal Portuguese who in the early seventeenth century espoused similar visions of coastal expansion as the Arakanese. Despite this deterring constellation of hostile conditions, a broadly imperial vision was actively pursued both militarily and diplomatically by Min Khamaung (r. 1612-22) Sirisudhammaraja (r. 1622-38). At the end of 1600, Min Rajagri was only the master of a thinly populated land that needed to recover. To sustain long-term Arakanese ambitions and protect Arakans stakes in Coastal Burma, parallel efforts were needed to resurrect maritime trade that had broken down and to re-settle the refugees who had fled to the jungle. Trusting his Portuguese lieutenants to construct first a fortress in Syriam and appeal to the remaining local Mon population to come and settle in the vicinity of Syriam were first steps to exploit the
21 Nathan, Mirza, Bahristn-i-ghaybi, a history of the Mughal wars in Assam, Cooch Behar, Bengal and Orissa during the reigns of Jahngir and Shhjahn, Gauhati (Assam): Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies, Narayani Handiqui Historical Institute (1936), [hereafter quoted as BG]. 22 Oral communication by Stephan van Galen quoting a letter of 22 February 1657 by the VOC representatives in Mrauk-U.
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potential of Syriam as a tax revenue bonanza. This Coastal Burma vision was efficiently realized thanks to the political genius of Felipe de Brito. But he did this much less to the advantage of the Arakanese king than to his own when he played the local card allying himself with the ruler of Martaban and the transregional card re-aligning himself with the Estado da India in Goa. In dramatic battles, de Brito fought off a couple of times (1607, 1609) his former Arakanese master who tried to retake exclusive control over Syriam. Relations went sour, but they never completely broke down. De Britos Syriam was not just an alien enclave whose power derived from the sea and whose policies were oriented towards Goa
23
. His Coastal Burma
perspective was focused on resettlement, the strengthening of local alliances and port activities with an obvious preference for the Portuguese trade network in the Bay of Bengal. It stood in stark contrast to the vision of territorial subjection represented by the Burmese lord of Taunggu, Minykyawthin, or by the powerhouse of Ava under Anauk-phet-lwan. These men needed to conquer the land, enforce the allegiance of local lords and expand their central authority. In the case of Taunggu, the political ambitions were hampered by a narrow manpower basis, the lack of access to the Mon dominated Lower Burma ports and the inevitable rivalry with the strengthened Upper Burma kingdom. For King Min Rajagri it had still been more convenient to accept an autonomous Portuguese-dominated Syriam at the periphery of his kingdom than to see a newly powerful Burmese kingdom re-emerge despite the loss of direct control over Syriam and the loss of regular revenues. In 1612 Anauk-phet-lwan went on the offensive against de Brito. But neither a Portuguese nor an Arakanese fleet, sailing forth to Syriam, saved him. On the other hand, the conquest of Syriam by Anauk-phet-lwan in 1612-3 and the disaster of the 1615 Portuguese armada on the Kaladan River (see below) eliminated the competition and the direct threat that the Portuguese represented to the Arakanese. The local Bay of Bengal Portuguese were domesticated in Arakan and in Burma while Goa remained an interested and interesting partner in regional power brokering for another twenty years. To the Burmese reconquest of Lower Burma culminating in the conquest of Syriam, King Min Khamaung (r. 1612-22) and King Sirisudhammaraja (r. 1622-38) reacted with a policy of alternate naval attacks against coastal Lower Burma and diplomatic pressure. It is unfortunate that many if not most Arakanese raids and even large scale invasions were not recorded in either Arakanese, Burmese, Mon or Western descriptions 24 . The absence of such information is only incidentally spotted. We have earlier focused on two major campaigns of Min Rajagri in Lower Burma. But a contemporary Portuguese source (century 1606) refers to altogether five or six Arakanese invasions of Lower Burma. They preceded the
23 Lieberman The Transfer of the Burmese Capital from Pegu to Ava Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1, 218, (1980). M. Ana Marques Guedes has shown that de Brito took a realistic approach of Burmas fragmentation and the opportunities offered to the Portuguese, an approach espoused by the Jesuit fathers Francisco Fernandes and Andrea Boves as well as the later Dominican ambassador Francisco de Anunciaao (1994, 189ff.). De Brito did not pursue daydreams of large-scale conquests (such as produced the doomed 1615 Goa expedition against Arakan) but combined a keen sense of diplomacy with an apt integration into the regional power grid. 24 This is also elsewhere the case in Thai and Burmese historiography where battles are not recorded by chroniclers that historians, with the benefit of hindsight, would consider as historically relevant.
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move against Taunggu (that followed the assassination of the emperor) and resulted, says the anonymous writer, in the deportation of innumerable people to Arakan 25 . In early 1614, Anauk-phet-lwan (r. 1605-28) requested the Arakanese king to return Nandabayins white elephant. Pushing the issue - and probably to deter Arakan from fresh attacks -, Anauk-phet-lwans troops invaded southern Arakan in November 1614. They raided Sam-tw and even reached the island of Cheduba (Man-Aung) where the confrontation reached a standoff and the Burmese had to retreat 26 . In October 1615, the Arakanese navy with Dutch naval support defeated a Portuguese armada sent by Dom Hieronymo de Azevedo who had hoped to put his hand on Arakans accumulated treasures. Just two months later, the Arakanese fought off a new Burmese invasion in a naval battle that took place on 10 January 1616 near Cheduba 27 . Anauk-phet-lwans conquest of Syriam apparently marked a reunification of Burma. But he failed to get the better of the Arakanese who could for twenty more years raid Lower Burmas coasts at leisure. Probably it was only the incessant wars fought in Bengal that prevented them from putting greater weight on their hegemonic claims over Lower Burmas ports 28 . On the Indian front, the Arakanese navy was indeed much busier and fared even better than against the Burmese. In 1617, the first Mughal attempt to invade Arakan ended in a disaster. During three successive years, the Arakanese fleets raided Bengal with impunity. At the same time, the Estado da India was exchanging embassies with the Arakanese, the Burmese and the Thai courts obviously trying to play the courts against each other and strike the best deal for Portuguese trade. In 1619, an Arakanese embassy went to Goa and the next year a peace agreement was signed that cut short to Anauk-phet-lwans overtures to Goa. When a second Mughal attempt to invade Arakan in 1621 29 failed as well, Arakan enjoyed unchallenged naval superiority both on the southeast and the northwest front and King Sirisudhammaraja changed gear 30 . Permanent war as a device for deterrence and coercion became the consensual political philosophy of Arakans court elite. Systematic raids, large-scale military enterprises and deportations were the main occupation of the government. Father Manrique states that between 1622 and 1629, the Portuguese missionaries could not cross the Bay of Bengal to visit the Christian communities on the eastern coast as hostilities never stopped. While King Min Khamaung had been relentlessly making war during the ten years of his reign, Sirisudhammaraja, described as the most warlike king on the Coast (according to VOC
25 Este rei de Arraco mandou as suas duas vezes e ele depois em pessoa veio trs ou quarto, e fez quanta guerre pode ao rei e ao reino, matando-lhe muita gente e levando de todas as vezes, para seu reino, inumervel. Quoted from the Questo acerca do dereito do reino de Pegu as published in Guedes (1994, 220-1). According to the Rakhaing Mahayazawingyi, the Arakanese fleet landed in Martaban and at three other (non-identified) places where garrisons were fixed before the siege of Pegu took place (CL 2, 146). 26 UK 3, 176-7; Leider 2002, 223. 27 BG 1, 383; Dutch VOC archives, letter of Jan Gaeff of 27 April 1616. The Dutch VOC archives put into the historical picture data that lead to a much better understanding of hitherto scattered information on Arakans policies in the 1620s and early 1630s. For such information referred to in this paper, I am heavily indebted to Stephan van Galen (Leiden) and his ongoing research. 28 In a letter of 1 December 1614 to the Dutch East India Company, King Min Khamaung calls himself, among other titles, emperor of the southern lands, in our language known as Hamsawadi, known by the rest of the world as Pegu. 29 Arakanese sources date this invasion to 1622. On the authority of the Baharistan, Van Galen convincingly argues in favour of a date preceding September 1621. 30 The Arakanese record of King Sirisudhammarajas reign is dominated by the political crisis of the late 1630s. Father Manriques unbalanced account is not unhelpful to understand Arakans foreign relations.
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Governor General Pieter de Carpentier) further increased its intensity. The annual raids resulted in largescale deportations some of which were recorded by Dutch VOC traders; in 1623 alone, 30000 Bengalis were deported to Arakan. In early 1626, Dhaka, Bengals Mughal capital, was sacked, the city burned to the ground and the population deported by the Arakanese. At the end of the same year, the Arakanese fleet raided Syriam and Pegu. Arakan had concluded an alliance with King Songtham of Ayutthaya (1610/11-28) and yearly embassies were exchanged not only to promote commerce but also for reasons of policy writes Jeremias van Vliet in his Description of the Kingdom of Siam (Van Vliet 2005, 132). In 1628, a failed coup dtat against Sirisudhammaraja saw the killing of several thousand in Mrauk U, but it distracted the king only briefly from taking further action abroad. In October 1628, a Dutch yacht was being used by the Arakanese during a campaign in Burma that was politically destabilized by a succession crisis. Prince Min Y-dibba had killed his father, King Anauk-phet-lwan. Challenged by his fathers brothers, Min Y-dibba turned to Arakan for military support but he was soon handed over by his own guard and executed a year later. In 1629, Sirisudhammaraja sent a letter to Thalun with a veiled threat to intervene in Burmas succession. As Thalun was unable to defend Lower Burmas maritime frontier, his answer was polite. This opened a five-year phase of diplomatic exchanges between Thalun and Sirisudhammaraja, about whose contents the sources leave us entirely in the dark. The Arakanese were visibly taking the offensive, but it is unclear what their demands were. Four or possibly five Arakanese embassies left for Burma 31 , one even went to Chieng Mai; two Burmese embassies were sent to Arakan in return 32 . Whatever their political or economic aims were, the Arakanese marked their determination by taking further action. In 1630, Pegu was again attacked while negotiations were taking place. The Burmese court had to look on from a distance when the Arakanese took away Anauk-phet-lwans bell from Pegu, a bell whose magic power was meant to dissuade their enemies 33 . In early 1634, the quelling of the Mon rebellion that had started in Pegu and spread to Moulmein provoked another large-scale Mon exodus to Siam and Arakan (Mhannan Yazawindawgyi 3, 222). Van Vliet talks of no less than a hundred thousand Mon who fled to the east and filled the ranks of the king of Ayutthaya (Van Vliet 2005, 125). For the Arakanese, this was a welcome refugee crisis. Their 1634 embassy transmitted a letter from the people in Moulmein pleading the cause of the scared population. Were the Arakanese merely offering their service as go-betweens or does this not rather look like what we would call political interference?
31 The dates of the Arakanese embassies as recorded in the Mahayazawindawgyi are 1629, 1630, 1632 and 1634. Father Manrique states in his Breve relao that he went with the Arakanese ambassadors to Burma but gives no date. M. Ana Marques Guedes think that this happened in 1635-6 (Guedes Breve Relao dos Reinos de Pegu, Arraco, Brama, e dos Imprios Calaminh, Siammon e Gro Mogol. Lisboa, 54 (1997)). The dates of the Burmese embassies are 1630 and 1632. For a detailed study, see Leider 2004, 260-4. 32 UK III, 205-9. 33 On the bell, see Wroughton Account and drawing of two Burmese Bells now placed in a Hindu temple in Upper India Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 6, 2 (1837); Restoration and Translation of the inscription on the large Arracan Bell now at Nadrohighat, Zillah Aligarh, described by Captain Wroughton in the Journal of the Asiatic Society, December 1837 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 7 (1838). According to the VOC Governor General J. Specx, the attack ruined the fortunes of several merchants from the Coromandel coast (Generale Missiven I, 290 ; 7 March 1631). Information communicated by S. van Galen.
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In the 1630s, Sirisudhammarajas diplomatic manners showed an offhandedness that was probably inspired by the fact that wherever they sailed, Arakans fleets did not meet any serious resistance. When King Prasat Thong usurped the throne in Ayutthaya, he sent an embassy to Mrauk-U to renew the alliance with Arakan, but Sirisudhammaraja refused to meet the ambassadors of a usurper. Prasat Thong reacted by keeping some Arakanese traders hostage in Tenasserim, but in 1634 or 1635, he freed them when he sent a second embassy to Mrauk-U 34 . Father Manriques contemporary account shows that at times anti-Portuguese sentiments were rife among Arakans elite (Leider 2002). After the Portuguese had been expelled from Hugli by the Mughal government in 1632, Goa sent an ambassador to Mrauk-U (1633). Negotiations failed though Sirisudhammaraja needed the Portuguese as allies against the Mughals. Two years later, in 1635, an Arakanese embassy visited Batavia asking for four or five ships to attack the Burmese. The VOC refused, but the request betrays once more Sirisudhammarajas relentless efforts to put military pressure on Ava. At that time, Thalun had already decided for good to leave Pegu that lay on the kingdoms unsafe coastal periphery and move his capital to Upper Burma. On the basis of the VOC reports, Stephan van Galen argues that beside the complex demographic, emotional and geopolitical motives of that decision as analysed by V. Lieberman, insecurity at Pegu and Syriam must have been a strong reason to abandon the south 35 . To protect the district, Thalun had to create special companies of artillery, musketeers and cavalry and set up a fleet of 51 war boats because Pegu was seen as an outpost of the empire and the place most vulnerable to invasion (Hamsavati sittan of 1802, in Trager/Koenig 1979, 73). Over twenty years after the Ava lords had taken possession of Syriam, they still had no full control of Lower Burma. It is amazing to read in Van Vliets Description of the Kingdom of Siam 1638 that the kings of Siam and Pegu were not on friendly terms, but that peace would not be lightly [] disturbed because there were not enough soldiers in either kingdom and in the second place, owing to former wars, large tracts of land along the frontiers have grown wild and a march through this country would cause much trouble (Van Vliet 2005, 126). But Arakans Sirisudhammaraja was apparently unstoppable. Having turned his back on the alliance with Ayutthaya, he attacked Tenasserim and Mergui in 1637. Both cities had to be fortified already a few years before for fear of an attack by people from Arracand (Van Vliet 2005, 109). A year later, in 1638, Sirisudhammaraja was assassinated during a coup and with his death, Arakans aggressive policy towards southern coastal Burma came to an end. King Sirisudhammarajas practice of constant warfare combined with intense diplomatic activity raises the question of its motives. It is somewhat clear that the Arakanese did never intent to conquer the Irrawaddy valley. They never considered the region on the eastern side of the Arakan Yoma as part of their royal domain. As we earlier said, Arakanese raids into Upper Burma also never induced the kings to lay serious claims to any territories there. Arakanese kings boasted historical claims on territories in southeast Bengal, but not on Ava. With regard to Lower Burma, Arakanese claims could only be derived from what in Western
34 We know nothing of the outcome of this embassy. It was probably fruitless as Sirisudhammaraja was allegedly killed by a powerful minister in 1638. This man usurped power and was too busy keeping the reins of the government in Arakan to care much about foreign alliances. 35 See Lieberman 1980 and Tun Aung Chain Pegu in Politics and Trade, Ninth to Seventeenth Centuries in Recalling Local Pasts Autonomous History in Southeast Asia, Chieng Mai, Silkworm Books (2002).
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terms was their right of conquest, the dereito per ttulo de conquista discussed in the Questo of 1608. As titles such as emperor of Hamsavati are found in the correspondence with the Dutch, but not in Arakanese documents, it seems to me that Min Rajagri and Min Khamaung referred to such claims specifically in a foreign policy or imperialist context where showing off mattered. Sirisudhammarajas motives were not ideological or political. I assume that the rationale of his bellicose policy was economic and that it was consistent with the policy pursued by the Arakanese rulers in Southeast Bengal. By constantly threatening their neighbours, the Arakanese kings defended hard-core economic interests. Since the late sixteenth century, Arakans court thrived on the revenues of Chittagong, Bengals major port. But Chittagong was not an ethnically Arakanese, but an Indian Muslim-dominated city. The Arakanese governors were milking trade revenues derived from economic networks that the Arakanese had not created by themselves. The foremost political and military task was to enforce trade prerogatives and fend off dangerous competitors. I think that Arakans southern coastal expansion was also bent on the exploitation of trade revenues and the control of ports and waterside communications. When Arakan wanted to replicate the Chittagong model in Syriam, it did not work because they failed to rein in de Brito, their erstwhile Portuguese governor. It is very likely that de Brito, in his first years, had to send some revenues to Mrauk-U to keep his royal master at bay. Trade, if limited, had picked up again. Once Syriam was reconquered by the Burmese, trade was due to recover further, because Ava also had a keen interest in it. Herein lay also Arakans renewed chance to carve a share in maritime trade revenues. We have to bear in mind that in the chaotic years that followed the fall of Pegu, the ruby trade found an outlet through Arakan. Once Lower Burma was pacified, it is probable that the trade in precious stones flowed back to Syriam and Martaban. Lest one would infer from what has been said, that Arakan was just a kingdom run by pirates and slave traders, let it be said that piracy and plundering are short-term but maximum profit-oriented activities that may historically precede regular trade, as early modern English history shows. Under Sirisudhammarajas rule, we find indeed both: state-sponsored plundering and royal trade. It was in his reign that for the first time, members of the Arakanese court got involved in the trade with Coromandel ports. Sirisudhammarajas first embassy to Batavia was a trade mission: the king wanted to promote Arakan as a peaceful place of trade!
Coastal Perspectives
This paper has explored the sketchy and disparate evidence on Mon-Burmese incursions into Arakan and on the four decades of Arakanese coastal expansion to unravel a little known chapter of Burmas past: the political interaction between polities forming Burmas maritime frontier. Such interaction has been generally trivialized because historians studying early modern Burma have focused on state-building and institutional structures and their ideological backing. One cannot fail to see that this orientation was in line with 20th century colonial and post-colonial debates on contemporary Burma as a developing/ underdeveloped /failed nation-state. Paraphrasing Van Schendels coinage of area of no concern when criticising the scholarly peripheralisation of certain parts of Southeast Asia, Dhaawati-Rakhaing and Ramaadesa can be characterized as areas of marginal concern for most Burma historians (Van Schendel 2005, 280-1).
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To escape this marginalisation as well as the straightjacket of Burmese capital-city oriented and ethnocentric historiography, Coastal Burma has been defined as an alternative setting to shift the perspectives. It can operate in historical analysis as an unprejudiced geographic framework that possesses a spatial and temporal identity shaped and structured by cultural and political interaction. My intention is not to reify Coastal Burma as a historically separate region, but to substantiate necessary distinctions between coast and inland. In the context of cross-regional warfare I found coastal Burma to be a particularly useful concept because it allowed me to highlight the particularities of coastal expansion and to sharpen the historical contours of Arakans place against its Southeast Asia, Bay of Bengal and Burmese background. The shift towards a coastal perspective also gives a new lease on discussing the way that the Mon have been positioned in seventeenth and eighteenth century Burmese history. While reading accounts of early modern Burmese history, I have often been upset by the lack of historical continuity and coherence in the representation of the role of the Mon in this history. The Mon of Lower Burma are either victimized as displaced or displaceable people or represented as rebellious subjects whose political projects were doomed to failure. The common denominator of such characterizations seems to be an inherent Mon weakness, but they hardly reflect the full measure of what the Mon contributed to Burmas history. Such impressionism also lends itself to an over-interpretation of select historical facts, culminating for example in statements such as Maung Htin Aungs: the great failing of the Mons was that they were never politically ambitious 36 . I would like to weave these reflections into a further criticism of the peripheralisation of the Mon that, I think, is partly due to the ethnocentric and pseudo-dynastic periodization of Burmese history. There is no such performing tool to eradicate people from history than the use of dynastic, ethnically based and particularly in the case of Burma, capital-centred periodization of history. For sure, in the early seventeenth century, the Mon did not make the history of these times in the sense that Mon kings or local lords would have fashioned the course of political events. But if the Mon did not, or say no more, make the headlines, they were an integral part of political calculations and historical processes. No doubt, they appear above all as the victims of the ongoing conflicts and rivalries. In the 1590s, the Mon population had turned against Nandabayin when he took a cruel revenge against the officers he made responsible for the defeat against the Thai at Nong Sarai (1592) and the death of his son. Unwilling to be forcefully recruited, thousands of young men tried to escape by becoming monks, a device Nandabayin tried to suppress by tattooing the men (Pimenta 2004, 185). When the empire dismembered, invading troops roamed the countryside and the movement of fleeing people from the countryside may have accelerated. The dereliction of agriculture entailed famine. Two cities particularly suffered: Pegu when it was emptied of its population by the Taungu king and Martaban that was sacked by the army of Naresuan when he advanced against Pegu in 1600. A further (and probably much greater) drain on the population was the systematic deportations. Beside the Arakanese kings, the Burmese kings massively deported the Mon population from the south, too. This happened when Anauk-phet-lwan conquered Syriam and retook possession of Lower Burma. But it happened again when Thalun emptied Moulmein after the 1634 revolt. Pimenta noted in 1600
36
History of Burma New York, Columbia University Press, 6 (1967).

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that the Mon fled to Arakan and Siam under Nandabayin. As mentioned above, Van Vliet writes the same regarding the effect of Thaluns reprisals in 1634. All this meant a considerable decrease of the population in the traditional Lower Burma Mon area; but it suggests massive displacements, not wholesale slaughter. So it does not imply that the Mon themselves were diminished as a people. As the Mon population suffered severely in the second half of the eighteenth century under the early Konbaung kings - a period boasting the same well known phenomena: displacement, reprisals, desertion, exodus twentieth-century historians felt confronted with the issue to decide what times had been worse for the Mon. D.G.E. Hall stipulated that the delta had never recovered from its appalling state of devastation at the end of the sixteenth century (1955, 362). In his study of the Burma delta after 1852, Michael Adas followed Hall: thus, over a century and a half before the armies of Alaungphaya the Mon people suffered reverses from which they never fully recovered (1970, 16). But apparently the Mon somehow recovered. Simply we do not know how much. For example, we have no information about the eventual return of people to their ancient lands. Against this background and based on a partial late sixteenth and a more complete eighteenth century census that attest that the Lower Burma population was only a third or a quarter of the Central Burma population, Victor Lieberman has argued the case of a historical demographic inferiority of Lower Burma. In support of his thesis, he refers to an admittedly complex array of ecological, human, cultural and political causes advanced by Adas regarding the mid-19th century situation of the delta. Actually a close reading of Adas text also allows a different conclusion: it is also possible to argue in favour of a considerably high Mon population in earlier times, but this is not the point I want to discuss here. After stating the demographic weakness of the Mon, Lieberman links up with the questionable claim that Pegus sixteenth-century dominance was a historical anomaly and that the normal political condition of Burma was to have its political centre in central Burma (1980, 75). In his Mists of Ramaa, M. AungThwin, the exegete of dry zone paramountcy, similarly belittles the historical relevance of Coastal Burma stating that during Burmas 2100 years of urban history, the political centre was situated only for 218 years on the coast (2005, 27). These are remarkable examples of Burmese ethnocentrism. Because it is only when we decide arbitrarily that there is a Mon Pegu and a Burmese Pegu and if we assume that there is no need for historians to look at connections between the pre-Taungu-dynasty-Pegu and the Taungu-dynastyPegu that we could represent one of the two as an anomaly. Is it not rather strange to look at two of the greatest military and politically competent leaders of Burmese history - Tabinshwethi and Bayinnaung - as part of an anomaly? By force of political needs and military circumstances, Tabinshwethi and Bayinnaung constantly had to mediate between Burmese and Mon self-consideration and ambition. Rather than focusing mechanically on dynastic successions and the ethnicity of the kings, would it not be more inspiring to look upon Tabinshwethi as the man who made Mon Pegu a greater, bigger and wealthier place continuing its already brilliant tradition as a royal capital and as a trading city? When Tabinshwethi became king in 1539, he first looked to the south because it was Pegu, and not Ava, that was the foremost place of trade and wealth, a major centre of religious zeal and of royal splendour that looked back on two centuries of a
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flourishing Mon civilisation. The fall of Pegu that was followed by four decades of political instability did not simply mark the prosaic end of an anomaly, it marked the end of a long period of economic, cultural and political expansion in Coastal Burma. The source of the dynamics of Tabinshwethis and Bayinnaungs empire-building lay in a combination of coastal and inland expansion. Unless one would forget, the chronology of Tabinshwethis expansionary policies demonstrates that coastal expansion preceded inland expansion. John S. Furnivall was pointedly right to call Tabinshwethis political legacy the second Peguan Empire rather than the first Taunggu Empire as it now mostly called (JBRS 4, 1, 47). Insightfully and counterintuitively, he also remarked that it is with commerce rather than with war that this period is connected. To throw light on Mon-Arakanese relations, interaction and collision, it is not enough to fashion the scarce record of our sources with reference to our text-book knowledge of Burmese history. By acknowledging a Coastal Burma perspective, by occasionally looking at Burmese history from down south, we may gain the freedom of a new approach to Burmese history as a whole. Dropping the hindsight and teleological perspective of final winners, we may look at dynamic processes happening simultaneously at different places and either shaking or re-enforcing the political coexistence of different competing centres. By acknowledging the right of Mon, Arakanese and other historical agents to a continuous, structured and complex history, we can start to write Burmese history not as a mono-directional script, but as a common experience formed, shared and endured by different ethnic groups.
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J. Leider - Coastal Expansion

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J. Leider - Coastal Expansion

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Bangkok 10-13 October 2007

Date of print : 30/08/2007

Bangkok 10-13 October 2007

Date of print : 30/08/2007

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Date of print : 30/08/2007

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Date of print : 30/08/2007

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Date of print : 30/08/2007

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Date of print : 30/08/2007

History of Burma New York, Columbia University Press, 6 (1967).

Bangkok 10-13 October 2007

Date of print : 30/08/2007

Bangkok 10-13 October 2007

Date of print : 30/08/2007

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