Free The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma by Thant Myint-U

emperor in person. 7
    The Burmese were no doubt impressed by the seaborne exploits of their Chinese neighbors. But they may have been even more impressed and alarmed by a more subtle change. Land reform, advancements in technology, and sustained political stability had come together in China to produce an enormous increase in the already giant country’s population. And this was no more true than in the southwest, along Burma’sborder, where Ming China now appeared in all its size and confidence, just on the other side of the eastern hills. The Middle Kingdom cast a huge shadow over the Irrawaddy Valley, then and ever since.
    Against this backdrop of global empire building, Tabinshweti and Bayinnaung set off on their more modest dream of uniting Burma under the Toungoo banner. 8 Slowly but surely, they managed to bring all the little principalities and kingdoms of the country to heel, one by one. Pegu itself was among the first to fall, by a devious ruse rather than mere force of arms, and next to go was Martaban, a famed entrepôt of comparable riches, defended by the able and cunning but in the end failed Portuguese mercenary Paolo Seixas. At Martaban, now an overlooked and seedy village but then a place of international repute, the local prince and all his family and retainers were murdered, drowned off the gorgeous sandy beaches, despite promises of good treatment. Many other brutal triumphs followed. But then, just as all Burma lay within their grasp, the Toungoo king, now king of Burma, Tabinshweti, ran into personal trouble. It was to be his undoing.
    The troubles all began with the arrival at court of a young feringhi * — a Westerner whose name is lost to history. Nothing much is known about the feringhi’s past, nothing to distinguish him from the score of other rough-and-ready Iberian fortune hunters who prowled around the Bay of Bengal, looking for action and loot. He was Portuguese, and this may have meant he was born in Portugal, but it may also have meant that he was born in Asia or was of mixed Luso-Asian background.
    By this time the Burmese were very familiar with the men of Lisbon and their kinsmen in the East. It was in 1494, two years after Christopher Columbus’s ships landed in the Caribbean, that Pope Alexander VI issued a bull that divided the world between Iberia’s most Catholic monarchs, with Brazil, Africa, and Asia, Burma included, being granted to King Emmanuel of Portugal and his heirs. It was a license to make money. In 1510, intrepid Portuguese seamen seized Goa from the Bijapur sultan, and a year later Dom Alfonso de Albuquerque overwhelmed the fabulously wealthy trading center of Malacca in Malaya, a pivot of global exchange, and thereby brought under Portuguese control the greatest sea-lane in the world.  
     
    The Portuguese were not coming into a world with no trade; rather they were intervening to break up or circumvent already lucrative intercontinental networks, many in the pockets of Persian and other Asian Islamic businessmen. They saw Islam as their implacable foe but were content to do deals with the Buddhist and Hindu princes of the Indian Ocean world and matched commercial acumen with an unmitigated willingness to kill. Soon maritime trade in pepper from the Malabar coast, spices, cloves, and nutmeg from the Moluccas, and cinnamon from Ceylon all fell into energetic Portuguese hands, displacing the older land routes from Beirut and Alexandria to Venice and taking goods around the Cape of Good Hope. Those lucky enough to be part of this wave of globalization became wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. 9
    And this was what the young, nameless feringhi wanted as well, to be rich beyond his wildest dreams. But his initial plan—to attack the sultan of Aceh from the Portuguese base at Malacca—was a stupid one. He had set off in many ships and with three hundred men. But this would have been a reckless gamble even in the best of circumstances. As it was, Aceh was then under