Toungoo Dynasty

A fifteen-year-old restores the kingship

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

Two centuries of Shan migration into the Irrawaddy plains had left Burma without any single overlord by the time Tabinshwehti took the throne of Toungoo in 1531, at fifteen years old. Harvey reads his own advantages as largely inherited rather than earned at first: the same Shan incursions that had displaced so much of the country had also driven Burmese refugees south into Toungoo, swelling his own manpower, and his opponents were themselves Shans - a hill people Harvey judges to have had, in this period, "a congenital incapacity for combined action." What Tabinshwehti brought personally was nerve. At his own accession he insisted on having his ears bored at Pegu's own Shwemawdaw pagoda rather than anywhere else, and did so surrounded by armed retainers under the nose of the reigning Talaing king, whose men did not dare object.

A letter meant to be intercepted

Tabinshwehti's own campaign against Lower Burma, begun in 1535, combined force with genuine cunning. Unable to take Pegu city by direct assault, he sent its two ablest commanders home with a letter

• deliberately written so it would be intercepted - promising each of them a conquered city to rule once "the matter you arranged with me" was finished. Pegu's own king read the letter as proof of treason and had both men executed; deprived of their best leaders, the Talaing defense collapsed, and Tabinshwehti entered Pegu without a fight in

1539. He completed the conquest of Lower Burma two years later at Martaban, a wealthier prize defended by Portuguese mercenary ships under a rival adventurer, Paulo Seixas - a siege that held out seven months before hunger forced its own surrender.

The comrade who would inherit everything

Harvey singles out one figure from these campaigns as a genuine turning point in the quality of Burmese leadership: Bayinnaung, son of Tabinshwehti's own wet nurse and husband to his sister, whose willingness to destroy his own army's rafts after crossing a river against a vastly larger enemy force - reasoning that retreat was no longer an option worth keeping open - Harvey calls "a breath of new life after three centuries of mannikins." That same nerve would carry Bayinnaung to the Toungoo throne himself within a decade, and to a reach across mainland Southeast Asia his own brother-in-law and patron never approached.

Friends, we have got to win now

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

Tabinshwehti's own reign did not survive its own success. A Portuguese favourite at court taught the king's bride foreign cooking and introduced him to wine and spirits; Harvey records the king's own decline into drunkenness in blunt terms, quoting his reply to Bayinnaung's own remonstrance - "I have made friends with drink, Brother, do thou manage the affairs of state" - as he surrendered real government to his brother-in-law rather than reform. Bayinnaung kept his own loyalty intact even as the king's misrule worsened, refusing repeated appeals from Burmese, Shan and Talaing ministers alike to simply take the throne himself, and quietly blocking executions rather than open rebellion. It could not last. Talaing chamberlains lured Tabinshwehti into a jungle on a false pretext - a supposed white elephant - and beheaded him there in 1550, at thirty-five; he was afterward worshipped as a nat, a guardian spirit, at Rangoon's own Shwedagon.

Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824, the Beginning of the English Conquest (1925) · R. C. Temple · Public domain

An empire built on knowing numbers do not matter

Bayinnaung's own reign, from 1551 to 1581, carried the kingdom he inherited to a reach no earlier or later Toungoo ruler matched - suzerainty extending into Siam, Chiang Mai, Manipur and the Shan states, built on the same conviction that had already defined his career under Tabinshwehti: that spirit and resolve mattered more than raw numbers. Facing an enemy force many times the size of his own early in his career, he had destroyed his own men's escape rafts rather than leave open the option of retreat, telling his own alarmed officers simply, "Friends, we have got to win now." That same temperament, applied now to an entire kingdom rather than a single river crossing, gave the Toungoo dynasty its widest extent - a peak his own successors, ruling from a much-reduced Ava after his death, would spend the next century and a half failing to hold onto.

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

The lord who dreamed of restoring it

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

Bayinnaung's empire did not survive him by more than a generation. His son Nanda lost Pegu itself to a Talaing rebellion around 1599, and the kingdom he had spent his own reign assembling broke apart into sixteen years of petty, mutually hostile states - Ava, Prome, Toungoo, Syriam, Chiang Mai and others smaller still, several of them held by Bayinnaung's own sons and grandsons with no loyalty left between them.

Patient reconquest, one Shan state at a time

One of those grandsons, known to history as the lord of Nyaungyan, held only Ava and the country immediately around and above it, and spent the whole of his own working life reducing the Shan states one by one - Mogaung, Mohnyin, Bhamo, Mone, Yawnghwe - rebuilding upward from the smallest possible base rather than trying to reclaim Bayinnaung's old reach at a stroke. He even persuaded China to extradite a fugitive Shan chief who had taken refuge across the border, the last real assertion of the old Chinese claim to overlordship in Upper Burma; after 1628, Harvey notes, Burma sent no further tribute missions north at all. Nyaungyan died in 1605 on the march home from a campaign, his embalmed body carried back to Ava propped upright on its own elephant in full jeweled robes; before the funeral fire had finished consuming it, his son Anaukpetlun was already administering the oath of allegiance to everyone gathered around the pyre.

A conquest completed within Anaukpetlun's own decade

Anaukpetlun inherited Upper Burma and the northern Shan states already reunified, and used that base to overrun a Lower Burma his father had left depopulated and undefended. He defeated his own brothers and cousins who had carved up the old Toungoo territories between them, and when Prome's defenders laid down their arms in 1607, one small page boy refused to abandon his own lord even in defeat - standing over him with a sword in each hand, daring anyone to approach. Anaukpetlun, rather than have the boy killed, took him into royal service instead; he went on to a long career and died a minister of the Hluttaw Council. In 1610 Anaukpetlun took Toungoo itself, carrying home to Ava the sacred tooth relic, two-thirds of its cattle, and the deported populations earlier wars had scattered across three different cities - the last piece of Bayinnaung's old kingdom still standing apart, except for one Portuguese-held port that would take him three more years, and a full siege, to bring under the crown at all.

A cabin boy impaled above his fort

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

Filipe de Brito y Nicote had started life as a ship's cabin boy, and was left behind at the port of Syriam in 1600 by an Arakanese force with fifty fellow Portuguese and nothing but his own nerve. He spent the interval repairing the port's defenses, ambushed and destroyed an Arakanese flotilla sent to bring him to heel, and captured the crown prince of Arakan in the process - treating him with chivalry in person while still exacting a heavy ransom before letting him go. Rather than wait for someone else to recognize what he had built, de Brito went to Goa himself; the Portuguese viceroy gave him his own niece in marriage and quietly sanctioned proceedings he had never formally ordered, and when de Brito disregarded instructions anyway, nothing came of it. He returned to Syriam a commandant in fact if not yet in universal recognition, married his son into the ruling family of Martaban, and built a church - governing well enough, by Harvey's own account, that the people of the country seem to have genuinely liked him, a rare thing for a foreign adventurer's garrison.

A fortune built on tolls, temples and cannon metal

What made de Brito rich also made him hated further inland. He forced all foreign trade in Burma through Syriam alone, patrolling the coast to intercept any ship that tried to land elsewhere, which drove up prices on every imported good the interior depended on. Worse, he turned to systematically looting Buddhist shrines - stripping gems from images, melting temple gold into ingots, and breaking up sacred bronze bells for cannon metal rather than pay to import it. In 1612 he and the ruler of Martaban went further still, sacking the city of Toungoo itself and allying with its lord, Natshinnaung - King Anaukpetlun's own cousin and vassal - against the crown.

Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824, the Beginning of the English Conquest (1925) · Scotted400 · CC0

A siege, a betrayal, and a debt of loyalty repaid in blood

Anaukpetlun marched on Syriam with, by contemporary report, well over a hundred thousand men and hundreds of ships. De Brito, caught short of powder with most of his own men away in India, held out for thirty-four days behind stockade walls before the besiegers mined and pulled down the defenses with grappling hooks. During the siege Anaukpetlun tried to split his two enemies apart, offering de Brito generous terms if he would surrender Natshinnaung alone; de Brito, unable to read the Burmese letter himself, handed it to Natshinnaung directly and sent back word that the Portuguese kept their word once given. Natshinnaung, moved by a loyalty he had not expected from a foreign mercenary, took Christian baptism with de Brito standing as his own sponsor, and when Syriam finally fell, asked to die alongside him rather than be spared. Both wishes were granted. De Brito was impaled on a stake raised above his own former fort, dying slowly over two days in view of the port he had built his fortune on; his wife was sent to Ava among the common slaves after refusing the king's own advances with what witnesses called scorn and courage in equal measure. Anaukpetlun then forced the king of Martaban to execute his own son-in-law - de Brito's own son, married into Martaban's ruling family - so that no trace of the man's line would remain in Burma at all.

The revenue inquest of 1638

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

Anaukpetlun's own reign ended in 1628 when his son had him assassinated; the murderer was seized within days by followers disgusted at his cowardice and tyranny, and the throne passed instead to Thalun, one of Anaukpetlun's uncles, who executed the killer on arrival and rejected his plea to be spared as a monk. Even Thalun's own coronation at Pegu was not free of violence - conspirators tried to rush the royal armoury while he was still in the coronation palace, and though the Guard drove them off, the men who escaped held Moulmein by force for a time before being hunted down in large numbers, touching off a wave of Talaing refugees into Siam that the Siamese king flatly refused to hand back.

A capital moved for good

In 1635 Thalun crowned himself a second time at Ava and moved the royal palace there permanently, abandoning Pegu as a capital once and for all. The Delta had lost its old strategic logic - the dream of using it as a springboard against Ayutthaya was dead, its river to the sea had silted shut around 1600, and its population was still recovering from decades of war. The move back to Upper Burma marked, in plain terms, the final abandonment of Tabinshwehti's own founding ambition of a single Burmese-Talaing kingdom governed from the coast: the dynasty had tried coalescence with the Delta and failed, and now retreated for good into the dry-zone heartland its founders had come from.

A palace coup his own sons survived

Thalun's reign was not free of family violence either. He named as his own heir the brother who had stood by him during the campaign that first brought him to power, but that brother died in 1647; the following year Thalun's son Shintalok, backed by disaffected household men, seduced part of the palace Guard and drove his own father out. Thalun took refuge in a nearby monastery, defended for a month by several hundred monks armed with nothing but sticks, until his other sons raised enough armed men to retake the palace - improvising cannon out of local timber since the rebels held the royal artillery. Shintalok was shot dead trying to break out on his own war elephant, and the defenders who survived him were finished off, by the ordinary custom of the day, under the feet of trained war elephants kept for exactly that purpose.

Counting what a century of war had left

Despite these disruptions at court, Thalun's own reign is remembered chiefly for a peace his predecessors had never had the stability to attempt. He rebuilt the canal system feeding the Kyaukse granary, and went further still, overhauling the revenue administration of the entire kingdom and compiling, in 1638, the first revenue inquest in Burmese history - the same survey a later Konbaung king, Bodawpaya, would consciously imitate a century and a half afterward. How much of the system Thalun invented outright and how much he simply restored from the wreckage of Bayinnaung's own wars is impossible to say for certain, Harvey notes, but even restoring what war had shattered was achievement enough to rank him among Burma's better kings. The scale of that wreckage is visible in what the inquest turned up: even Shwesettaw, one of the kingdom's holiest shrines, had been so completely cut off by decades of war and depopulation that its own sacred footprint relics lay forgotten under scrub jungle until monks sent by Thalun rediscovered them in the same year.

Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824, the Beginning of the English Conquest (1925) · Daniel Julie · CC BY 2.0

Not played out

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

By the early 1750s the Toungoo dynasty, ruling by then from Ava, was a shell of Bayinnaung's own empire. A Talaing rebellion out of Pegu - the same Lower Burma the dynasty had first conquered two centuries earlier - steadily stripped away the countryside around the capital, burning crops, driving farmers from their fields, and cutting Ava off from Kyaukse, the one district that could have kept its granaries full. The reigning king left the war to his uncle Toungooyaza, appointed joint king in his place, while an appeal for help sent all the way to the Chinese viceroy of Yunnan produced only an observer and no actual troops. Harvey's own verdict on the period is blunt: "an object lesson in incompetence," in which capable leaders existed but the government had no means of finding or using them.

A city too weak to lift its weapons

The end came fast once it came. A besieging Talaing army, on the verge of giving up the siege for lack of supplies, learned from deserters that Ava's own garrison was starving badly enough that its defenders could barely lift their weapons. They forced their way into the city in April 1752, sacked it, and burned it to the ground; the royal family and crowds of other captives were deported to Pegu. Most of the surviving princes fled to the Shan hills and made no further attempt at resistance. The one exception, Toungooyaza himself, escaped his own captors in disguise as a fisherman and tried to rally support from Mogaung, but died within the year - "not an able man," Harvey judges, "but at least a faithful servant."

Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824, the Beginning of the English Conquest (1925) · SarahDepper · CC BY 2.0

What the Talaings did not finish

The occupying army made one decision that Harvey singles out as decisive in the opposite direction: rather than press north while the country was still disorganized, the Talaing crown prince withdrew most of his own forces back to Pegu within weeks, leaving only a fraction of his strength to hold Ava, out of a misplaced fear that Siam might exploit the moment instead. A detachment sent to secure the allegiance of one small village, Moksobomyo, was cut to pieces by its own inhabitants - a warning the retreating prince brushed off with an order to make an example of the place, "whatever they call it." The Toungoo dynasty itself was finished. Harvey's own closing judgment on the moment makes the distinction explicit: "the Ava dynasty was played out, but there was nothing to show that the Burmese people were played out" - and the very village whose resistance the Talaings had just dismissed would, within the year, give Burma the leader who proved it.