The land fell and became forested and soon their route approached that of the Ganges, passing the holy city of Benares, where, as the passengers slept, men rose at dawn to sink themselves into the water of the river and pray. They reached Calcutta after three days, and once again climbed into carriages that pushed through the swarms of people to the docks. There Edgar boarded a new ship, smaller now, for there were fewer people traveling to Rangoon.
Once again the steam engines rumbled. They followed the muddy outflow of the Ganges into the Bay of Bengal.
Gulls circled overhead, and the air was heavy and humid. Edgar peeled his shirt from his body and fanned himself with his hat. To the south, storm clouds hovered, waiting. Calcutta soon disappeared from the horizon. The brown waters of the Ganges faded, spinning off into the sea in spirals of sediment.
He knew from his itinerary that only three days remained before they would reach Rangoon. He began to read again. His bag was packed with papers, with equal contributions from Katherine and the War Office. He read military briefings and newspaper clippings, personal reports and chapters of gazetteers. He pored over maps, and he tried to study some phrases of Burmese. There was an envelope addressed “To the Piano Tuner, to be opened only upon arriving in Mae Lwin, A.C.” He had been tempted to read it since leaving England but had resisted only out of respect for the Doctor; surely Carroll had good reason to ask him to wait. There were two longer pieces, histories of Burma and the Shan. The first he had read in his workshop back in London, and he continued to return to it. It was intimidating, he thought, there were so many unfamiliar names. Now he remembered the second history as the one Katherine had recommended, written by Anthony Carroll himself. He was surprised he hadn’t recalled this earlier, and carried the report to his bed to read. Within the first few lines, he saw how different it was from the others.
(From the War Office: Please be advised that the content of this report is subject to change. It is recommended that all concerned parties closely follow amendments to these reports, available upon request from the War Office.)
If one were to ask a Burman about the geography of his land, perhaps he would first answer with a description of the nga-hlyin, the four giants who live beneath the earth. Sadly, official memoranda afford no space for such complexities. Yet it is impossible to understand the history of the Shan without considering briefly the physiognomy of their home. The area currently referred to as “the Shan States” consists of a large plateau that floats to the east above the dusty central valley of the Irrawaddy River. It is a vast and green Elysian plain, which extends north to the border of Yunnan and east to Siam. Through this plateau cut powerful rivers, twisting south like tails of the Himalayan dragon. The largest of these is the Salween River. The importance of this geography to history (and thus to the current political situation) lies in the affinity of the Shan to other races of the plateau, as well as their isolation from the lowland Burmans. Here, a sometimes confusing terminology merits explanation: I use “Burman” to refer to an ethnic group, while I use “Burmese” to describe the kingdom and government of Burma, as well as the language. Although these words are often used interchangeably, here I have chosen to stress this distinction: not all Burmese kings were Burman; all Burmese kings had non-Burman subjects, including, among many others, the Kachin, the Karen, and the Shan, each of whom once had their own kingdoms within the present borders of “Burma.” Today, although these tribes are racked by internal divisions, they still resent the rule of others. As will become clear from the remainder of this report, the Shan revolt against British rule finds its beginnings in an incipient revolt against a Burman king.
The Shan, who refer to themselves as the Tai or Thai, share a common historical heritage with their eastern neighbors, the Siamese, the Lao, and the Yunnanese. The Shan believe their ancestral home was in southern China. Although some scholars question this, there is ample evidence that by the late twelfth century, at the time of the Mongol invasions, the Tai-Thai people had established a number of kingdoms. These included the fabled Yunnanese kingdom of Xipsongbanna, whose name means “kingdom of twelve thousand rice fields,” the ancient Siamese capital at Sukhothai, and—more importantly for the subject of this briefing—two kingdoms within the present borders of Burma: the kingdom of Tai Mao in the north, and the kingdom of Ava in the vicinity of present-day Mandalay. The power of these kingdoms was substantial indeed; the Shan ruled much of Burma for over three centuries, from the fall of the great Burman capital of Pagan (whose vast wind-worn temples still sit in lonely vigil on the banks of the Irrawaddy River) at the turn of the thirteenth century, until 1555, when the Burman state of Pegu eclipsed the Shan empire at Ava, beginning three centuries of rule that grew into the recent kingdom of Burma.
Following the fall of the Shan kingdom of Ava in 1555 and the destruction of the Tai Mao kingdom by Chinese invaders in 1604, the Shan splintered into small principalities, like shards of a once beautiful porcelain vase. This fragmentation continues to mark the Shan States to this day. Despite this general disunity, however, the Shan were occasionally able to mobilize against their common Burman enemy, notably in a popular Shan revolt in Hanthawaddy in 1564 or, more recently, in a rebellion following the execution of a popular leader in the northern Shan city of Hsenwi. While these events may seem of distant memory, their importance cannot be underestimated, for at times of war, these legends spread out over the plateau like flames through a drought-stricken land, rising on the smoke of campfire tales, whispered on the lips of elders to circles of wide-eyed children.
The result of this fragmentation was the development of unique political structures that are important to consider because they play a great role in our current situation. Shan principalities (of which there were forty-one by the 1870s) were the highest order of political organization in a highly hierarchical system of local rule. Such principalities, termed muang by the Shan, were ruled by a sawbwa (Burmese transliteration, which I will adopt in the remainder of this report). Immediately below the sawbwa were other divisions, from districts to groups of villages to individual hamlets, each ultimately subservient to the rule of the sawbwa. This fragmentation of rule resulted in frequent internecine wars on the Shan Plateau and a failure to unite to throw off the yoke of Burman rule. Here the analogy of the shattered vase grows usefuclass="underline" just as fragments of porcelain cannot hold water, the fragments of governments could do little to control a growing anarchy. As a result, much of the Shan countryside is plagued by bands of dacoits (a Hindustani word meaning bandits), a great challenge to the administration of this region, although distinct from the organized resistance known as the Limbin Confederacy, which is the subject of the remainder of this report.