Konbaung Dynasty (Alaungpaya Dynasty)

Forty-six villages

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

Alaungpaya was born in 1714 in Shwebo, then a village of three hundred houses known as Moksobomyo, "town of the hunter chief" - the same village a retreating Talaing officer had dismissed weeks earlier as not worth pursuing after its own inhabitants cut down a small detachment sent to collect their oath of allegiance. Alaungpaya himself was of better standing than most of his neighbors, a hereditary myothugyi whose family had governed locally for generations and who later claimed - unprovably, Harvey notes, though not implausibly in a district where genealogies were still kept - descent from a fifteenth-century Ava military commandant. When Ava itself fell to the Talaings in 1752, his own father counseled submission: "We can do nothing. Fate is against us... We may as well give in." Alaungpaya's own answer became the guiding principle of everything that followed: "When fighting for your country it matters little whether you are few or many. What does matter is that your comrades have true hearts and strong arms."

An ambush, then a rout

He fortified Shwebo with a stockade of felled toddy trees and a moat, and made good on his own words almost immediately. A small Talaing detachment sent to collect his village's submission was ambushed in scrub jungle and destroyed. A second, larger force, sent with orders to spare no one, was lured along a hollow road into a musket ambush and all but wiped out. A third attempt, several thousand strong, settled in for a siege rather than risk another ambush - until Alaungpaya led a night sortie that turned into a rout, with Burmese soldiers afterward swearing they had seen the spirit Rider of the White Horse fighting at their side. The fleeing Talaings abandoned their entire camp, handing Alaungpaya's own men muskets, horses and plunder worth, in Harvey's own phrase, their weight in gold.

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

No need to press men

Word of the victories spread faster than Alaungpaya could have organized it himself. Harvey records that there was no need to offer bounties or conscript anyone - men came from across Upper Burma because they were fighting, as they saw it, for the survival of their own people, and because there would be plunder besides. Rival centers of resistance had already formed elsewhere in Upper Burma, led by men of birth equal or superior to Alaungpaya's own, any one of whom could have fractured the common cause by insisting on his own claim to lead it. None did. Within months the territorial cadres of half of Upper Burma had placed themselves under a single hunter-village headman rather than compete with him for a throne none of them yet held.

Under the walls of Ava

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

The Talaing government that had just burned Ava to the ground responded to Alaungpaya's own rising with what Harvey calls bewildering passivity - reinforcing its northern garrisons not at all, replacing one ineffective commander with another who alienated the local population by failing to observe basic customs, and losing ground steadily as Alaungpaya's own campaign gathered momentum. Villages that had sided with the Talaings were dealt with firmly but selectively: Alaungpaya ordered quarter given to captured soldiers, but burned the villages themselves and deported their families and herds to Shwebo, a policy calculated to punish collaboration without making every future surrender a fight to the death. By October 1752 the Talaings had withdrawn most of their outposts from the north.

A capital retaken

By December 1753, barely eighteen months after Ava's own fall, Alaungpaya was camped beneath its walls, and Talaing attempts to dislodge him were beaten back with heavy losses. The reversal completed a transformation Harvey treats as genuinely remarkable: a minor hereditary headman, commanding forty-six villages' worth of irregular levies at his own uprising's start, had become the effective master of Upper Burma within a year and a half of a catastrophe that had left the old royal capital in ashes and its royal family in captivity. What followed carried that momentum further still - a reunification of Lower Burma, the reduction of the Talaing kingdom that had destroyed the old Toungoo dynasty, and, by Alaungpaya's own last years, formal recognition from French and English trading captains who knelt to receive his orders in respectful silence, a homage paid to a man Harvey's own source describes as tall, coarse-featured, and unmistakably regal in bearing despite beginning life as nothing more than a village headman's heir.

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

Orders from a curtained litter

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

Alaungpaya's last campaign overreached the timing that had served him so well against the Talaings. He marched on the Siamese capital Ayutthaya too late in the dry season, with the rains - and the flooding that came with them - close behind, and dysentery already spreading through a camp that included the king himself among the sick. He offered Ayutthaya's own king a chance to submit to religious reform rather than lose his throne outright; when no answer came, Alaungpaya recognized, in Harvey's phrase, that "the play was over," and ordered a retreat within a week of arriving, abandoning forty cannon in the process.

A rearguard that would not fight further back

The retreat itself became one more proof of the loyalty Alaungpaya's own rise had earned. He gave the honour of commanding the rearguard - five hundred Manipuri horse and six thousand musket-armed infantry, the pick of his army - to his own boyhood friend Minhkaungnawrahta. Surrounded and pressed by pursuing Siamese forces, the rearguard's own men wanted to fall back to safer ground; Minhkaungnawrahta refused, telling them, "the safety of our Lord the King lies in our keeping. Let us not fight further back, lest the sound of the guns should break his sleep." They held their position, were defeated but never broken, and withdrew in good order, gathering up Alaungpaya's own stragglers along the way.

Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824, the Beginning of the English Conquest (1925) · Singey Bey · Public domain

A secret kept until home

Alaungpaya himself did not live to learn how the rearguard's stand ended. Already ill, jolted along by litter on the forced march home, he died at dawn on 11 May 1760 at Kinyua, in Thaton district. His own son and attendants kept the death a closely guarded secret, fearing it might break the army's own discipline or spark a succession struggle before the crown prince could reach Shwebo and secure the throne - so daily orders continued to issue in the dead king's name from behind the curtains of his own litter, all the way home. Only at Rangoon was the death finally made public, and his body carried the rest of the way upriver by state barge to be buried, with full royal ritual, in the very village - now a capital in fact as well as claim - where an ordinary headman's stockade of felled toddy trees had, eight years earlier, refused to accept that Burma's own kingship was finished.

Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824, the Beginning of the English Conquest (1925) · Vincent Clarence Scott O'Connor · Public domain

Two brothers, one throne

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

Alaungpaya's eldest son Naungdawgyi succeeded him without opposition in 1760, but the calm did not survive the funeral. His younger brother Hsinbyushin, who had loyally helped send word of their father's death to Naungdawgyi, briefly struck for the throne himself once the body was gone - a feeble attempt that collapsed and was forgiven at their mother's intercession. A harder threat came from Minhkaungnawrahta, one of Alaungpaya's own veteran generals, who revolted after the new king executed two officers he distrusted without warning. Idolised by the army and left in command of most of its musketeers as rearguard, Minhkaungnawrahta occupied Ava itself with twelve thousand men and refused every offer of pardon the king sent him, declaring he would die like a soldier with the city walls for his coffin. The siege that followed starved his garrison out; he broke free with a handful of followers, was run down and shot in the Shan hills above Kyaukse, and even wounded, killed the soldier who first grappled with him before a second shot finished him. When his head was brought before the king, Naungdawgyi mourned rather than gloated: "Should ye have slain so great a man?"

A Company envoy learns the new rules

While besieging his own general, Naungdawgyi received Captain Alves, an envoy from the English East India Company, at Sagaing in September 1760 - the first real test of relations after Alaungpaya had wiped out the Company's garrison at Negrais two years earlier. Pressed for compensation, the king dismissed the massacre outright, comparing the dead indiscriminately to grass burned off a field at the end of the dry season regardless of what useful plants happened to grow among it. He released the surviving English captives, granted free trade, and asked only that the Company relocate from the remote, indefensible Negrais to somewhere on the mainland he could actually control - Rangoon, as it turned out, rather than the more distant Bassein Alaungpaya himself had once suggested. Alves came away with no formal treaty, only a royal letter confirming the terms discussed in audience, and an impression - confirmed by villagers he met on his way upriver, visibly relieved whenever an assault on Ava's besieged rebel garrison failed - that ordinary Burmese were sick of a war that had not stopped since Alaungpaya first raised his stockade.

A king who died young

Naungdawgyi spent his final years on works of merit, building pagodas near Shwebo and sending offerings to shrines around the kingdom; he died at twenty-nine in 1763, leaving seven children, and the throne passed to his brother Hsinbyushin - the same brother whose own earlier bid for it, forgiven at their mother's word, had cost him nothing worse than a rebuke.

The fall of Ayutthaya

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

Hsinbyushin moved the capital from Shwebo to Ava in 1765, a genuine improvement in position - it put the court on the river and in direct reach of the Kyaukse granary - though not the deeper move to the Delta that might have let some outside air into a court that still treated Rangoon as foreign territory. That same year he opened two wars at once that would consume the rest of his reign.

Fourteen months outside the walls

The Burmese claim on Siam rested on a conquest two centuries stale - Bayinnaung had held it to tribute for twenty years in the 1560s and nothing since - but Hsinbyushin sent two armies converging on Ayutthaya anyway, one fighting down from Chiang Mai, the other up from Tavoy. The campaign took three years of siege, flood, and disease before the two commanders even joined their forces under the city's walls, and both principal Burmese generals died of hardship before the end came. Imperial armies from China were by then already invading Upper Burma, and royal despatches urgently recalling every available soldier reached the camp before Ayutthaya fell - if the city had held out through one more dry season, the siege would likely have been abandoned outright. It did not hold. On 28 March 1767 the besiegers' mines breached the wall, the stormers went in, and the slaughter that followed was indiscriminate; the Siamese king's body was found the next day near the west gate. The city was burned, razed, and never rebuilt as a capital - princes, monks, foreign residents and thousands of ordinary people carried north into captivity, so much treasure taken that an ordinary private soldier could return home owning four slaves.

Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824, the Beginning of the English Conquest (1925) · Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

A war on the other frontier

Even as the armies came home from Siam, a second and far more dangerous war was already underway. Qing China invaded in strength over four campaigns between 1765 and 1769, provoked by a tangle of border tribute disputes and mistreated merchants that neither court had the diplomatic machinery to settle peacefully. The fighting ran in the hill country between Bhamo and the Myitnge valley, within three marches of Ava at its closest. Burmese forces, helped by captured French gunners and better war-canoes, won most of the major engagements, but each defeated Chinese army was simply replaced by a larger one. The Qing general Mingjui, the emperor's own son-in-law and a veteran of campaigns in Central Asia, fought his way to within three marches of the capital before his supply lines were cut and his own colleagues failed to support him; retreating with his rearguard fighting to the last, he cut off his own plaited hair as a token for his emperor and hanged himself rather than be taken. Hsinbyushin himself refused every suggestion that he flee the capital, declaring he and his brothers would face the Chinese single-handed if it came to that. The war ended without a treaty either court could openly admit to: Burmese commanders granted honourable terms that let the Chinese emperor withdraw from a costly war, and though his own pride kept him from formally acknowledging it, his silence amounted to consent - the caravan trade down from Yunnan resumed within months.

The seven-day king

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

Hsinbyushin's son Singu ended his father's Siamese war the moment he took the throne in 1776, simply withdrawing the armies still in the field. His own wars, against Manipur's exiled raja operating out of Cachar, cost twenty thousand men to disease before Singu let the matter drop - the country by then so devastated there was nothing left worth fighting over. Ordinary Burmese, worn down by two decades of continuous campaigning under Alaungpaya's sons, were grateful for a king who mostly left them alone to fish, pray, and build pagodas, which was how Singu spent most of his own reign. What they did not see was a court that had stopped respecting him: he was seldom sober, executed a brother, an uncle and several ministers on suspicion, drowned a deposed queen, and made a habit of leaving the palace empty for weeks at a time on pilgrimage, returning at any hour with no warning - exactly the kind of opening a conspiracy needs.

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

A puppet on the throne, and a king who died right

At midnight in 1782, while Singu was away at a riverside pagoda, a palace faction smuggled in an eighteen-year-old cousin, Maung Maung, dressed to pass for the king in the dark, and seized the palace before the Guard understood the trick. When word reached Singu, his own followers scattered and he briefly thought of fleeing to Manipur; his mother refused to let him run. He walked alone to the palace gate at dawn, announced himself as "Singu, lawful lord of the palace," and was let through by guards too startled to stop him - only to be cut down inside by the father of one of the queens he had had killed. He died, Harvey's sources note dryly, at least royally.

Maung Maung, who had spent most of his life in a monastery and never wanted the throne he had just been handed, spent his own week in power begging Alaungpaya's surviving sons to take it from him instead

• an offer they all refused, suspecting a trap, until they realised there was nothing to fear from him. After seven days he was executed by the one brother who was not a puppet: Bodawpaya, the senior of Alaungpaya's sons still living, who took the throne their father had originally decreed should pass between brothers in order of seniority - the same rule Hsinbyushin had broken by naming his own son Singu heir, and the breaking of which had cost the kingdom the better part of two chaotic reigns before it was restored by force.

The massacre of the kinsmen

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

Bodawpaya opened his reign in 1782 the way Konbaung succession disputes usually got settled for good: a clean sweep of every possible rival, their followers, servants and children, remembered in the chronicles as the Massacre of the Kinsmen. Singu's queens and concubines, who had spent his reign laughing in forest glades while he fished and prayed, were burned alive holding their own children. Months later Bodawpaya discovered his own brother plotting against him with the help of Mahathihathura, the veteran general who had commanded the Guard against Maung Maung's coup and won some of the dynasty's greatest victories - a betrayal that convinced the king never again to trust anyone, kinsman or otherwise, for the rest of his life; from that point on he changed his sleeping quarters every night. The entire faction, general included, was exterminated. A minor pretender who scaled the palace wall with two hundred badly armed followers at the end of the same year met the same fate, along with the village that had supposedly backed him - burned to the ground, its people killed down to the infants, its orchards cut down and its fields ploughed under.

A count of the whole kingdom

Once secure, Bodawpaya turned to administration on a scale no Konbaung king had attempted: a revenue inquest in 1784, repeated in 1803, that had village headmen across the country depose the boundaries of their own jurisdictions, what they grew, what they paid, and how many people lived there - a survey giving the crown a clearer picture of its own resources than it had held since 1638, when a Restored Toungoo king had last attempted anything similar. Ordinary people, unsurprisingly, read a nationwide inquest the same way the English had once read the Domesday Book: not as good government but as the prelude to fresh taxes. Bodawpaya decreed at the same inquest that legal claims to land should not lapse merely because a king or dynasty changed - a rule as often ignored as followed, since Burma's institutions kept getting reset by exactly the kind of violent succession that had just put him on the throne.

Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824, the Beginning of the English Conquest (1925) · Singey Bey · Public domain

A conquest that reached the British frontier

The one conquest of Bodawpaya's reign that outlasted everything else he did was Arakan, annexed in 1785 after the small, war-weakened coastal kingdom offered little resistance. It convinced Bodawpaya he was destined to conquer the world - he spoke openly of annexing both India and China - and the following year he launched a four-pronged invasion of Siam that collapsed from poor coordination among its own commanders rather than Siamese resistance. Arakan mattered more than either ambition. It gave Bodawpaya's kingdom, for the first time, a land border with territory the English East India Company actually governed in Bengal - and Arakanese refugees fleeing north across that same border, along with Burmese troops who crossed it chasing them, would spend the next four decades turning an administrative afterthought into the spark for a war neither side, in 1785, had any reason yet to expect.

Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824, the Beginning of the English Conquest (1925) · Philip Nalangan · CC BY 4.0

The king decides on war

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

Bodawpaya died in 1819 after thirty-seven years on the throne, leaving 122 children and 208 grandchildren and, by the chronicles' own judgment, ranking second only to Bayinnaung among Burma's kings. He had settled the succession years in advance, and when his chosen heir died young in 1808 he simply nominated that son's own son in turn - giving the court a full decade to treat the matter as settled, so that Bagyidaw succeeded at thirty-five without the violence that had marked nearly every transition before his. Bagyidaw was personally gentle enough, by all accounts, that no rebellion troubled a reign that would otherwise have destroyed a harder king - but he could not hold his attention on any subject for more than ten minutes, and the men actually running his foreign policy included a minor Portuguese adventurer whose main qualification was having once travelled as far as Calcutta.

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

A general who never lost

The kingdom Bagyidaw inherited had spent decades winning wars against neighbours nobody else respected - Manipuris, Assamese, Chins, Singpho hill tribes - and it produced, in these campaigns, the general Maha Bandula: a commander who had once waited so long for royal notice that he assaulted a minister out of frustration, was recognised by Bodawpaya as having a valiant soul anyway, and went on to build a reputation for silent, unshakeable self-regard that unsettled every professional soldier who actually served under him without ever being matched by results that impressed them. His victories, like Alaungpaya's before him, came against opponents nobody else found formidable. It did not matter. By 1823 the Burmese court, and not just the court but popular opinion across the kingdom, had convinced itself that a war with the English Company in Bengal would be no different: one Burman was worth four Englishmen, the Company's own repeated patience over decades of ignored letters and insulted envoys proved they were afraid to fight, and Maha Bandula's genius for stratagem would finish off an army the Burmese court did not believe could really number two hundred thousand men, in a world too small, in their own reckoning, to hold that many soldiers at all.

A war the people wanted as much as the king

Harvey's own sources are explicit that it was not the king who led Burma into war but Burma that led the king: Bagyidaw had spent years as a moderating check on commanders eager for another round of victories, and gave way only when princes, army and ordinary opinion alike wanted the fight. Burmese troops crossed into British territory in January 1824 and drew first blood before any formal declaration; the Governor-General of India, recognising a war already begun rather than starting one, proclaimed the state of war on 5 March 1824. Weeks later, English transports lay alongside the stockade at Rangoon - the opening exchange of a war the court that declared it had convinced itself, against all the evidence a more curious government might have gathered about the size and reach of the Company it was fighting, would end quickly and in Burma's own favour.

Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824, the Beginning of the English Conquest (1925) · T. Fielding after J. Moore · Public domain