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A tale of two kingdoms: Ava and Pegu in the fifteenth century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2011

Michael Aung-Thwin
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Abstract

Over a half century after the great ‘classical’ kingdom of Pagan that produced the ‘golden age’ of Myanmar had declined in the first decade of the fourteenth century, the kingdoms of Ava and Pegu appeared. Thereafter, for the next century and a half, both dominated the land. While Ava was an ‘upstream’ agrarian kingdom ruling mostly Upper Myanmar, Pegu was a ‘downstream’ commercial polity with hegemony over Lower Myanmar. However, and contrary to convention that the history of fifteenth-century Myanmar was an ethnic struggle between two irreconcilable Burmese and Mon populations, their relationship should be characterised more as a dualism of different geo-political and economic factors instead. Indeed, the history of that ‘upstream–downstream’ relationship between Ava and Pegu established lasting patterns that became, thereafter, part of the fabric of Myanmar's history until today.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , February 2011 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2011

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References

1 For the most comprehensive and scholarly account of the ‘Toungoo’ Dynasty in English, see Lieberman, Victor B., Burmese administrative cycles: Anarchy and conquest, c. 1580–1760 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 I am aware of the large amount of scholarship that has successfully questioned some of the negative images of the ‘medieval’ world during the past several decades in the field of European history. For a good, representative example, see Tierney's, BrianThe Middle Ages, 2nd edn (New York: Knopf, 1974)Google Scholar. But that kind of scholarship has yet to influence ‘Burma’ studies.

3 Wheatley, Paul, Nagara and commandery origins of the Southeast Asian urban traditions (Chicago: University of Chicago Department of Geography, 1983)Google Scholar. In the present case, neither Ava nor Pegu was ‘the periphery’ anyway; both were centres.

4 Aung-Thwin, Michael, Myth and history in the historiography of early Burma paradigms, primary sources, and prejudices (Athens, Singapore: Ohio University Center for International Studies. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1998)Google Scholar. See also Aung-Thwin, , The mists of Ramanna: The legend that was Lower Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 The theoretical inadequacies of such binary treatments have been demonstrated well in Lieberman, Victor B., Beyond binary histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to c. 1830 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Aung-Thwin, Michael, ‘Spirals in Burmese and early Southeast Asian history’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 21, 4 (1991): 575–602CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also his ‘Lower Burma and Bago in the history of Burma’, in The maritime frontier of Burma: Exploring political, cultural and commercial interaction in the Indian Ocean world, 1200–1800, ed. Gommans, Jos and Leider, Jacques (Leiden: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2002), pp. 25–7Google Scholar, addresses the issue.

7 Aung-Thwin, Michael, Pagan: The origins of modern Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

8 This is clearly contrary to the most recent work of Scott, James C., The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Agrarian Studies Series, 2009)Google ScholarPubMed. It argues for populations headed in the opposite direction; that is, away from the centres. That notion is quite contrary to the best primary evidence we have on the situation, where, if people fled at all, it was during enemy attack, and even then, they fled to other centres, not to the hills. And data he used as ‘evidence’ for flight during normal times in Myanmar were actually references to changing one's occupation from (say) crown service to non-crown service, not geographical flight from the centre to the periphery. Scott's treatment is an example par excellence of what I have earlier called ‘privileging the periphery’.

9 Sun, Laichen, ‘Military technology transfers from Ming China and the emergence of northern mainland Southeast Asia (c. 1390–1527)’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 34, 3 (2003): 495–517Google Scholar.

10 Aung-Thwin, Mists of Ramanna, pp. 58–67.

11 For a recent, scholarly, and comprehensive treatment of this region, one should consult Andaya, Leonard Y., Leaves of the same tree: Trade and ethnicity in the Straits of Melaka (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There are others who have dealt with this maritime region and period in Asia, all of whom cannot be cited here. To mention a few that are most pertinent to this particular point, one should see Hall, Kenneth R., Maritime trade and state development in early Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1985)Google Scholar and Tharpar, Romila, A history of India, vol. I (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1966)Google Scholar.

12 I use the term ‘Second Pegu/Toungoo Dynasty’ deliberately, whose rationale is contained the next note.

13 That decision by the Toungoo leadership to make Pegu its capital inadvertently creates a modern historiographic issue which raises the question of whether this dynasty should be called the ‘Toungoo Dynasty’ and period, the current convention in the Western historiography of Myanmar. It also raises the question of whether ‘its’ successor, the Second Ava Dynasty (as the chronicles had it) should therefore be called the ‘Later’ or ‘Restored Toungoo’ Dynasty, terms used by D.G.E. Hall and Victor Lieberman, respectively. Yet, neither appellation (‘Later’ or ‘Restored Toungoo’) can be found in indigenous historiography for that dynasty. There, it is called the ‘Second Ava Dynasty’.

The reason for these two different perspectives is the criterion each considers valid in naming dynasties and organising Myanmar's history. In the Western historiography of Myanmar, genealogy is the ultimate criterion, whereas for indigenous chroniclers, it is sacred place. The term ‘Later’ and/or ‘Restored’ Toungoo Dynasty was used because it was begun by a member of Bayinnaung's royal family (hence, genealogical). The second, in contrast, was determined by the perceived visit of the Buddha to Ava. Any dynasty that rules from such a Buddha-prophesied city was given the name of that city regardless of who founded it. And because Ava became the seat of such a dynasty for the second time, the Burmese chronicles called it the ‘Second Ava Dynasty’.

Since the differences in the criteria for naming dynasties, in turn, directly affect the organising of Myanmar's history into distinct periods (and hence, the way we understand, analyse and write about that history), the question that remains for us historians is whether our (exogenous) criteria should ignore and pre-empt their (indigenous) criteria in the conceptualisation and organisation of what is essentially their history.

14 For an extended and detailed critique of the ‘watershed’ thesis, see Lieberman, Victor, ‘An age of commerce in Southeast Asia? Problems of regional coherence — A review article’, Journal of Asian Studies, 54, 3 (1995): 796–807CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 I use 1942 as the date for the effective end of British rule when the Japanese and Myanmar nationalist forces drove the colonial forces out of the country.

16 Of course, the number of years given depends on how one counts: beginning with the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824–26 and ending with 1948 at formal independence, or beginning with 1885–86 at complete annexation and ending with 1942 when the Japanese invaded. I am using the latter.

17 See the ‘introduction’ to Lay's, Ma MaBlood bond, ed. Aung-Thwin, Michael, trans. Win, Than Than, University of Hawai'i Center for Southeast Asian Studies Translation Series (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 2004), pp. 4–10Google Scholar. One can also find such satire in many other works. See, for example, Pe, Dr Hla, Burma: Literature, historiography, scholarship, language, life, and Buddhism (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 I consider the coup of 1962, amongst other things, an expression of the desire to reject certain Western modernisms and a return to traditional norms, while at the same time to invoke other modernisms such as ‘revolution’ and ‘socialism’. See Aung-Thwin, Michael, ‘1948 and Burma's myth of independence’, in Independent Burma at forty years: Six assessments, ed. Silverstein, Josef (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 19–34Google Scholar.

19 The image created of the Myanmar government today by the Western media, even the vocabulary and some of the phrases used, are nearly synonymous with those found during the nineteenth century in the Western language media and British government reports regarding the Burmese monarchy. This is no mere accident; it is part of the demonisation process of ‘the Other’, invariably found in colonial (and in this case, neo-colonial) situations.