The Kingdom of Pegu (Hanthawaddy)

A guardsman who eloped

formationDrafted from Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 (1925)

Wareru began his career as a Shan pedlar from Donwun, in the Thaton district of Lower Burma, who took service in the elephant stables of the chief of Sukhotai in Siam and rose to Captain of the Guard. He did not stay a guardsman for long: he eloped with the chief's own daughter, gathered a handful of kindred spirits from the Guard, and set himself up back at his native village.

A wedding feast and a murder

His next step was bolder still. He arranged for his own beautiful sister to bathe where Aleimma, the Burmese governor of Martaban, would be sure to see her, and when Aleimma duly asked for her hand, Wareru staged a wedding feast in apparent gratitude - then murdered his new brother-in-law at it and seized his governorship. By 1281 he was lord of Martaban.

Bibliothèque nationale de France · Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 (1925) · Unknown · Public domain

A duel on elephant-back

The crumbling Pagan kingdom gave Wareru his opening to expand. He made common cause with Tarabya, the rebel governor of Pegu, each man marrying the other's daughter as a pledge of alliance, and together they drove out the last Burmese governors from the country south of Prome and Toungoo by 1287. Tarabya then tried to ambush his own ally, and failed; Wareru, calling on the spirits of earth and air to witness his innocence and pouring a libation from a golden bowl, mounted his elephant and defeated Tarabya in single combat, sparing his life at the monks' request. Tarabya plotted again, was betrayed by his own wife - Wareru's own daughter - and was executed despite her attempt to shield him with her own body. Wareru became sole prince of a Lower Burma kingdom that would last until 1539, and within a decade even received formal recognition from the imperial court of China.

My sweet enemy is dead

expansionDrafted from Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 (1925)

Razadarit came to the throne of Pegu in 1385 at the age of sixteen, and within it he already had an enemy at home: his own uncle Laukpya, lord of Myaungmya, wrote to the king of Ava offering to hold Pegu as his vassal if the northerners would help oust his nephew before the boy could secure his own throne - "march against Razadarit before he is firm upon his throne," the letter urged. "When we have conquered him, do thou keep the heart-wood and leave me the bark." That betrayal opened a war between Upper Burma and the Talaing kingdom of Pegu that ran, on and off, for a generation.

Forty years of ambush and stratagem

The war was fought less by pitched battle than by raid, siege and elaborate trickery. Commanders deserted to the enemy only to reveal their true loyalty at the critical hour; besieged officers forged letters announcing relief armies that did not exist; a Talaing agent named Emuntaya, trapped inside a besieged town, smuggled himself out past a double watch by disguising himself as a corpse laid out on a funeral raft, complete with wailing mourners, and slipped away once the raft had drifted out of sight. Razadarit captured Myaungmya and its rebel lord in 1390 and cleared Burmese forces from the frontier garrison of Myanaung in 1391, defeating an attempt to retake it so thoroughly that his own men returned the Burmese king's own captured golden barge along with a letter praising fair dealing between enemies. He fought more than one rival commander in single combat himself; one Burmese king never dared accept his challenge, and another who did turned his elephant and fled within minutes.

Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 (1925) · Hybernator · CC BY-SA 4.0

Piety, and death in a hunting accident

When news reached Pegu in 1422 that his great rival King Minhkaung of Ava had died, Razadarit's own queens urged him to seize the moment and raid the dead king's palace. He refused. "My sweet enemy is dead," he told them. "I will fight no more but spend my declining years in piety." He did not have long to spend them: the following year, while snaring elephants with his own hands at the age of fifty-four, he was caught in his own rope and injured badly enough to die on the journey home. His own chronicle, devoted to him alone, closes with the judgment that this "Lion King, so wise, so generous, so mighty in word and deed, could overcome all his enemies, but he too at the last must bow before King Death."

Sons, a sword for a stolen ring, and a childless king

None of Razadarit's own successors matched his reign. His son Binnyadammayaza was poisoned by his own brother within three years; that brother, Binnyaran, was succeeded in turn by Binnyawaru, a king so devoted to strict justice that he reportedly had a cat executed for catching and eating a mouse, and an officer's servant hacked in two for stealing a pedlar's ring rather than accept a bribe to overlook it. After a further reign that raised the Shwedagon pagoda's own height, palace massacres left no male descendant of Razadarit alive at all - and it was in that vacancy, by general consent of the court, that the throne passed to his daughter Shinsawbu in 1453.

Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 (1925) · Unknown · Public domain

A bowl chosen by providence

peakDrafted from Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 (1925)

By general consent the throne passed in 1453 to Shinsawbu, daughter of the great king Razadarit, after palace massacres had left no male heir of his line alive - the only instance in Burmese history of a major state ruled by a woman. Daughter, sister, wife and mother of kings, she governed well enough that four centuries later Mon writers, groping for the highest praise they could offer Queen Victoria, could think of nothing better to call her than Shinsawbu reborn.

Two monks and an almsbowl

After seven years on the throne, Shinsawbu decided to retire, and faced a choice between the two monks who had once helped her escape captivity at Ava. Unable to decide between them herself, she left the matter to providence: she hid a layman's robe and small models of the five royal regalia in one monk's almsbowl among the morning offerings, prayed that the lot would fall on the worthier man, and waited. The bowl fell to Dhammazedi. He left the monastic order, married her daughter, and took the government - a choice the court's lords resented at first, murmuring that he was not of royal blood, until Shinsawbu had a common wooden beam carved into a Buddha image and asked them whether they did not now bow before what had, only the day before, been trodden in the dust beneath their own feet.

Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 (1925) · Hans A. Rosbach · CC BY-SA 3.0

The years the source calls happiest

Dhammazedi ruled from 1472 to 1492, continuing the building programme at the Shwedagon that Shinsawbu had begun - she alone had beaten out her own body weight in gold for gilding its dome - and widened the river at Pegu after a boat-racing accident on its narrow waters convinced him the channel needed enlarging. The years from 1423 to 1539 were, by one careful reckoning, probably the happiest the kingdom ever knew - a peace and prosperity built as much on a queen's providence-tested succession as on any king's conquest.

Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 (1925) · Rockrangoon · CC BY-SA 3.0

I only wish to worship

contractionDrafted from Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 (1925)

Dhammazedi died at eighty and was succeeded by his own son, Binnyaran, who reigned from 1492 to 1526 and was remembered afterward for his gentleness - though his very first act as king was to enforce the kingdom's own custom of the Massacre of the Kinsmen, putting every one of his royal relatives to death to remove any rival claim to the throne. In 1501 he marched upstream with a large armed force; when the lord of Prome moved to check him, fearing invasion, Binnyaran answered plainly: "I could conquer both you and Ava but I do not wish. I only wish to worship before the Shwezigon at Pagan." He completed his pilgrimage and returned home without a fight.

A king who preferred the hunt to the throne

His own son, Takayutpi, inherited the crown in 1526 and proved a far weaker ruler. The kingdom's own astrologers held that he could have reigned to the age of eighty-five had he followed their prescriptions

• but, by the judgment later chroniclers passed on him, "he never looked at a book, he gave himself up to sport in the woods with elephants and horses, he searched for shellfish and crabs, he was like one witless." It was this same Takayutpi, the last king of Wareru's own line, who would lose Pegu itself to Tabinshwehti's forged letter within little more than a decade of taking the throne.

A letter left behind

endDrafted from Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 (1925)

Tabinshwehti of Toungoo turned on Lower Burma in 1535, drawn by the wealth its maritime trade had built up over two and a half centuries of Mon kingship. His forces reduced the western provinces of Bassein and Myaungmya without much trouble, drove off both the Talaing war canoes and a Portuguese trading vessel that happened to resist him outside Pegu town, and pressed on toward the capital itself. But Pegu would not fall to direct assault, no matter how many times Tabinshwehti tried.

Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 (1925) · Clay Gilliland · CC BY-SA 2.0

A forged letter and a false quarrel

So he turned to stratagem. King Takayutpi's two ablest commanders had written to Tabinshwehti proposing friendly relations; he ignored their letter in his reply but treated the two envoys themselves with conspicuous honour, then wrote to the commanders by name promising each of them a city to govern once "the matter you arranged with me" was finished. The men who carried this letter had instructions to provoke a quarrel with the local Mon officials by demanding food for nothing, then to flee, leaving the letter behind them where it would be found.

Pegu falls without a fight

The scheme worked exactly as planned. The local officials forwarded the letter to Takayutpi, who took it as proof that his own most capable commanders were traitors and had them put to death. Deprived of its best leadership, the Mon army lost heart and began deserting in numbers; Takayutpi himself fled toward Prome, and Tabinshwehti walked into Pegu in 1539 without striking a blow. Two hundred and fifty-two years after Wareru had won the same country in single combat on an elephant's back, Mon kingship at Pegu ended not in battle but in a letter its own king had been tricked into believing.