KING THEEBAW’S STATE BARGE
WE went from Calcutta to Rangoon. In Burmah the shadow of a great
personal sorrow fell upon us. Our reminiscences of Burmah are too sad
and too sacred to be put between the covers of a book. But there is a
great deal that is interesting that I may try to tell about Burmah
before I catch up my little personal narrative in China.
Burmah has almost unprecedented natural wealth. Minerals, woods,
marbles, and gems are in Burmah in seemingly inexhaustible stores.
Useful vegetation springs in spontaneous plenty from the pregnant soil.
Nature does almost everything for the Burmans, and yet, Orientals though
they are, they are exceptionally industrious. The palmyra tree leaf
gives them paper. Butter, sugar, and flour, or their substitutes, grow
on trees. Game, fish, fruit, and vegetables are most abundant. And yet
they work—the men and women of Burmah—work with a will and to a right
good purpose.
The marvellous pagodas, that are the artificial glory of the Burmese
landscape, represent all that is best in Burmese art, all that is most
persistent in Burmese industry. They are indescribably beautiful, with
their huge, graceful, jewelled peaks and their lace-like, golden
carvings. Lepers swarm at their gates. Heavy, pungent flowers are
scattered before their thresholds, and often beneath their shadows lie
the full cemeteries of the Europeans. They dot the Burmese landscape
like huge jewels—do these matchless pagodas, and their sweet, swinging
bells and singing gongs break the Burmese silence with clear, tinkling
music.
Except the “monkey-slipping-tree,” almost every tree in Burmah is
festooned with a creeper,—such wondrous creepers! About the tree trunks
glide snakes, pythons, lizards, chameleons, scorpions, and deadly
centipedes. In the river wallow gruesome alligators.
[Illustration: KING THEEBAW’S STATE BARGE. _Page 80._]
King Theebaw is no longer in Burmah; but Burmah is foul with his memory,
and the more odious memory of his chief queen, Soo-pyah-lat.
Theebaw came of a race in which insanity had found many a victim. The
kindest thing that can be said of his reign is that it was the reign of
a madman. But for Queen Soo-pyah-lat there is no such possible excuse;
her brain was as clear as her heart was bad.
Theebaw was married to three wives; they were sisters, and were named
Soo-pyah-gyee, Soo-pyah-lat, Soo-pyah-galay; but Soo-pyah-lat was the
real queen, the chief queen, and she ruled her two sisters as well as
Theebaw’s concubines, or “under wives.”
Opium, wine, and liquors were forbidden to the king’s subjects, but not
to the king. His potations were so deep that they will be remembered
when he is forgotten.
“The King is still drinking.” No one thing has ever been said oftener of
any one monarch than that was said of the notorious Theebaw, King of the
Burmans, Suzerain of Mandalay, King of the Rising Sun, Lord of the White
Elephant, the Golden Umbrella, and Lord of Earth and Air. If one tithe
of what has been during the last twenty years written about King Theebaw
is true, if a fraction of what they now say in Burmah of him is true,
why then a worse monarch never sat in absolute power upon a barbaric
throne.
It is a strange fact that the Burmese—the pleasantest, most easy-going
of all nations—were ruled for centuries by a cruel bloodthirsty
dynasty. The predecessor of Theebaw, King Mengdon, seems to have been
rather gifted, but he was shifty and treacherous. King Theebaw—unless
Christian literature has wronged him as it never yet wronged heathen
prince—had every bad quality and no one redeeming one. His orgies, his
debauches, the stories of his “posture girls,” are unequalled in the
chronicles of a continent of which many lurid things have been written.
Things were certainly fast and furious while Theebaw ruled Mandalay. But
I doubt if King Theebaw ever did rule at Mandalay. Queen Soo-pyah-lat
was the veritable potentate; she ruled Theebaw. He had an abundance of
wives, but when he showed any special favour to any wife other than
Soo-pyah-lat, she promptly had that other wife trampled to death by the
royal elephants, or killed in some other equally pleasant way. Then she
would, most probably, take King Theebaw in their state barge for a
little post-dated _lune de miel_. Theebaw seems never for an instant to
have resented, disputed, or resisted Soo-pyah-lat’s supremacy. It was
Queen Soo-pyah-lat who hated the British with an intensity beside which
ordinary Asiatic hatred was nothing. It was Queen Soo-pyah-lat who
forced Theebaw to hold out against the English forces, long after
resistance was worse than vain. On the first of January 1886 King
Theebaw, was finally and absolutely overthrown; but before that date he
had caused England much anxiety and his patient subjects great misery.
How often have the eyes of all England been turned toward that wonderful
palace at Mandalay; and almost invariably the wires flashed to the
nations this message: “The King is still drinking.” Yes, the king was
still drinking. Before his gin-filmed eyes swayed the lithe forms of the
flower-decked “posture girls,” and the palace yard ran blood—the blood
of many victims. Wonderful Burmese carvings glimmered and glinted on the
palace walls, and the big gems rose and fell on the bad queen’s breast.
To me there is something very pathetic about the story of King Theebaw.
He was born to a great opportunity. He became the ruler of a most
charming people, the absolute master of as interesting and as beautiful
a country, and as productive, as any on the globe. And his manhood went
down beneath a bad woman’s jewelled foot—he sold his kingship for a
hogshead of grog; and wherever his name was spoken, men said with
disgust, “The King is still drinking.”
When Theebaw ascended the throne in 1878, an eminent Englishman wrote of
him:—“He is little over twenty. He is a tall, well-built, personable
young man. He is very fair in complexion, has a good forehead, clear
steady eyes, and a firm but pleasant mouth. His chin is full and
somewhat sensual-looking, but withal he is a manly frank-faced young
fellow, and is said to have gained self-possession and left the early
nervous awkwardness of his new position with great rapidity.”
Ah, what a different appearance he presented when he was dethroned in
1886! In eight short years he had committed or countenanced atrocities
that entitle his name to be bracketed with the names of Nero and
Caligula.
It is happy for Burmah that Theebaw and Soo-pyah-lat are gone for ever.
The industrious, happy natives eat their morning, noon, and evening rice
under a gentler, if an alien, rule. But what pictures they must have
made in the days and nights of all their glory—the weak bad king and
his strong bad queen!
Think of them in their state barge. It was a picture in itself. Great
golden gods gleamed and glowered on the segregated prow. One of these
indescribable metallic majesties rode upon a grotesque golden horse; and
gods and horse had for eyes jewels of incredible size. Upon the deck was
a house of precious woods. It rose pagoda-like, and was crowned with a
big gem which, fastened to a strong, slender wire, flashed, above the
barge, like a heaven-sent star. Rare journeys they must have had up and
down the lovely Burmese rivers. There are three great rivers in Burmah.
They rise in the high mountains, where the snows never melt, and they
take their wonderful course to the Indian Ocean. Trees crowd on their
banks,—trees that are golden and red and purple with fruit, and yellow
and white with blossom. The scents of mangoe and pine mingle with the
fainter perfumes of the orange and papaya and plantain. Wild asparagus
lifts its slim feathers everywhere. Yams and sweet potatoes grow in wild
plenty. Down to the river’s edge for drink come huge elephants and the
fierce one-horned rhinoceros. Sleek leopards and striped tigers fight
with the wild hog, and hunt the Indian roe and the axis. Wild-cock,
quail, pheasant, and partridge scurry among the scented under-bush; and
great peacocks spread their wonderful fans amid flowers that are
brighter.
Small wonder if Theebaw and Soo-pyah-lat loved to drift up and down
those wonderful rivers.
[Illustration: BURMESE POSTURE GIRLS. _Page 85._]
It would be difficult to exaggerate the beauty of the Burmese river
banks; I should like to slip between them on such another boat. They lay
on soft crêpey cushions, did Theebaw and Soo-pyah-lat. They had dainty
fare of green turtles’ eggs and esculent swallows’ nests; they ate
strange salads made of the succulent stems of many aquatic plants and of
shrubs; they dipped their jewelled fingers into big carved bowls of
pickled tea; they skinned and ate odd Oriental fruits; they moored their
glittering barge, and caught the big dates from off the graceful
tamarind trees. Green and purple parrots whirled in the moonlight; and
the blue jays winged their graceful way, haply unconscious that they
must die to feather with their splendid azure the state robes of Chinese
mandarins.
Perhaps they landed sometimes to wander hand in hand through the forests
of priceless teak. Perhaps Soo-pyah-lat rejoiced in the immense masses
of gorgeous yellow flowers, and in the huge leaves that measured twenty
inches from stem to tip. Perchance they called their attendants to cut a
hole in some huge oil tree, and light in it a fire, and watched the oil
flow, that they might realise again how great in natural wealth Burmah
was, and how spontaneously she yielded up her treasure to her sons. When
the great tree—it was one hundred and eighty feet high, and its
circumference was sixteen feet,—when it was emptied of its oil, it was
split into long torches; and by their weird light the king and queen
went back to their waiting boat.
Wherever Theebaw walked, over him was carried the great white umbrella.
Umbrellas are the stars and garters of Burmah—the coats of arms—the
insignia of rank. They are not carried as a protection against rain, but
as a proclamation of degree. The white umbrella was sacred to Buddha and
the king. Only over the head of a statue of the god and the head of the
king could it be opened. To the princes of the blood-royal belonged the
gold umbrella. And every class had its umbrella prescribed of shape and
hue.
I do not know which is the more wonderful, the pagodas of Burmah or its
creeping canes. The latter are sometimes three hundred feet long. They
make splendid ropes; and out of them the deft Burmans and defter Chinese
make all conceivable and many inconceivable things.
There are immensely valuable mines in Burmah whose locality was only
known to Theebaw, his queen, and their few most trusted ministers. When
Theebaw was conquered, just eight years ago, he did not betray the
placement of those natural treasure stores. We have been hunting them
ever since, but without success. It has been recently mooted that
Theebaw might be induced to disclose to us their whereabouts. If the
spirit of Soo-pyah-lat whispers in his ear, he will ask a big price for
his knowledge.