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

then headed north in a vast armada. His teak warships were crafted into the shapes of animals—horses, crocodiles, and elephants— and the king himself rode in a gilded barge shaped like a Brahminy duck, the symbol of the vanquished Pegu monarchy. The north of Burma was unprepared for the violence to come. Ava quickly gave way. And over the next four years Bayinnaung fought and defeated one by one the highland principalities, stretching from Manipur in the west (in what is now India), across to Chiangmai (in what is now Thailand) and the Lao states of the middle Mekong River.
    This was a never-ending war. Month after month, year after year, Bayinnaung and his men did what they loved best, returning prisoners and loot to their new home at Pegu, the tattooed and turbaned Burmese chiefs on their ponies and elephants fighting shoulder to shoulder with their Iberian harquebusiers and musketeers, in their conquistador-style helmets. They were vicious, though perhaps no more than was the norm in those times. Against the resilient principality of Mogaung, Bayinnaung campaigned several times from 1562 to 1576. When the prince of Mogaung, heir to a long lineage, was finally defeated, he was placed for a week in chains at the gates of Pegu before being sold, together with his chiefs, in the slave markets of eastern Bengal.
    Bayinnaung’s was a winning team. And after a while the tide turned, and resistance ended. Tribute poured in. No one wanted to fight Bayinnaung anymore. The king of Chiangmai, one of the most formidable of the upland states, sent elephants, horses, and silks. He also sent the lacquerware for which his city was famous, and to this day the Burmese word for lacquer, yun , is the same as the word for the people of Chiangmai.
    But this man of such relentless drive and ambition would not be satisfied with just the Irrawaddy Valley and the surrounding hills. He looked east and saw the richest and most cultured city in the region, Ayutthaya, the capital of Siam. Bayinnaung first demanded the tribute of a white elephant, and when this was denied, he prepared his invasion. The outcome was never in real doubt, as the aggressor armytramped across the plains of the Chao Phraya Valley, then laid siege to the capital itself.
    The Siamese surrendered to prevent complete destruction, and the Burmese took not one but four white elephants, together with the king of Siam himself and several princes as hostages. A princess was presented to Bayinnaung as a new concubine. The entire Tenasserim coastline was permanently annexed, and a garrison of three thousand was left to ensure good behavior. Thousands of ordinary people were deported together with court entertainers, dancers, actors, and actresses. The king returned to Pegu in triumph, caparisoned elephants before him. He would soon make his capital a spectacle to rival Pagan, with golden palaces and gilded gates, each named for one of twenty subordinate kingdoms, a multiethnic city with peoples from across the country and beyond. He had established the most far-flung Burmese empire ever.
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    For the Burmese today the chronicles of Bayinnaung’s victories read like tales of Roman conquest to schoolboys in the West. Except that the Burmese army still sees itself, in a way, as fighting the same enemies and in the same places, subjugating the Shan hills or crushing Mon resistance in the south, their soldiers slugging their way through the same thick jungle, preparing to torch a town or press-gang villagers. The past closer, more comparable, a way to justify present action. His statues are there because the ordeal of welding a nation together by force is not just history. It’s as if the Italian Army were today guarding Hadrian’s Wall, defending Syria against the Persians, and quelling German resistance the brutality seemingly inevitable.
    Bayinnaung died in 1581 at age sixty-six, leaving behind nearly one hundred children. He had dominated a region that encompassed nearly all of