King Thibaw‘s Palace in Mandalay, shortly after his exile in 1885 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
In the early hours of November 29, 1885, the ancient royal capital of Mandalay awoke to a scene of chaos and carnage. 10,000 heavily armed British troops had stormed up the Irrawaddy River, breached the city walls, and swiftly crushed the meager Burmese defenses. By the day‘s end, a millennium of continuous Burmese monarchy had been extinguished, and 26-year-old King Thibaw – the last of a storied dynasty – found himself a prisoner of the British Empire.
The fall of Mandalay sent shockwaves rippling across Asia. Even the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore penned a mournful ode lamenting how the "golden Myanmar" had been "snatched away in a moment" by "the prison-world of endless night." But few could have predicted then the depth of the tragedy that was about to unfold, or how it would haunt Burma for generations to come.
The Road to War
The humiliating defeat and annexation of Burma was the culmination of nearly a century of gradually escalating British encroachment. Since the early 1800s, the British had fought two wars to chip away at Burma‘s western flank, annexing the provinces of Arakan and Tenasserim in 1826, followed by Lower Burma in 1852.
By 1885, Burma had been reduced to an isolated central plain ringed by British territories. With France carving out its own colonies in Indochina to the east, the independent kingdom presented an inconvenient buffer in Britain‘s strategic vision of a contiguous empire stretching from India to the Chinese frontier.
Economically, too, Burma was an irresistible prize. With 10 million inhabitants, 4,000 miles of navigable rivers, and a bounty of oil, minerals, teak and rice, the untapped kingdom offered lucrative new markets and resources for British commerce.
Politically, the Burmese monarchy was in a vulnerable state. The court at Mandalay was paralyzed by intrigue and instability, having witnessed six rulers in the past 25 years. Most fatefully, one of those kings – Thibaw‘s father – had massacred scores of potential rivals to the throne in a bloody purge, leaving his ill-prepared teenage son as the last man standing.
An Impossible Choice
A rare photo of King Thibaw, taken before his exile (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Born into royalty but educated in a monastery, the bookish and gentle Thibaw was ill-equipped to play the ruthless game of realpolitik with the likes of the British Empire at its height. Barely two weeks into his reign in 1878, the British delivered an ultimatum: submit to becoming a puppet king, or face the consequences of war.
It was an impossible choice, but Thibaw opted to fight – and to go down in history. In early November 1885, an expeditionary force led by the swaggering General Harry Prendergast steamed up the Irrawaddy with a flotilla of 55 ships carrying 10,000 heavily armed troops and thousands of Indian sepoys and laborers.
Arrayed against them were perhaps 15,000 poorly equipped Burmese soldiers, mostly armed with swords and antiquated muzzle-loading rifles. A few dozen European cannon and modern rifles purchased from France and Italy were undermanned and in disrepair.
In a series of swift engagements, the British routed the Burmese defenses, shelling towns into submission, laying railroads and telegraphs in their wake, and occupying the river valley all the way to Mandalay in a mere two weeks. Sporadic rearguard resistance in the north would continue for another two years, but the war itself was over almost as soon as it began.
Entering the royal palace with his pistol drawn, General Prendergast forced King Thibaw to hand over his most precious regalia, including a famed ruby said to be worth an entire kingdom. Thibaw would never see his priceless jewels, or his kingdom, ever again.
30 Years in Exile
Thibaw‘s place of exile in Ratnagiri, India, today a museum (Source: Neel Kamal/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Initially, Thibaw believed the British were escorting him to India temporarily to negotiate the terms of a future role in a British protectorate. The reality proved far harsher. Together with his wife Supayalat and two young daughters, Thibaw endured a harrowing multi-week sea journey to the faraway town of Ratnagiri on India‘s west coast.
There, they spent the next 30 years living in dank bungalows, subsisting on a meager British pension equivalent to a mid-level civil servant‘s salary. Attended by an ever-dwindling retinue of courtiers, the family lived an austere life of study, prayer and handicrafts, punctuated by squabbles over money and status.
As the decades passed, the Burmese royals steadily sank into despair, crushed by the weight of their lost glory. Thibaw himself retreated into a quiet life of poetry and correspondence. He finally succumbed to a heart attack in 1916, his body interred in an unremarkable brick mausoleum on a windswept hilltop overlooking the Arabian Sea.
A Colony Transformed
Map showing the regions of Burma annexed by the British by 1886 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The exile of Burma‘s last king marked the final eclipse of a proud history dating back to the 11th century kingdom of Bagan. Over the next five decades, the British would set about comprehensively dismantling the remnants of the old kingdom and rebuilding Burma in its own image.
Slicing up the kingdom into colonies, protectorates, and tributary states, the conquerors set about reorganizing Burma as a province of British India. The old royal capital at Mandalay was abandoned and a new power center established at the bustling port of Rangoon, which swiftly blossomed into one of the world‘s fastest growing cities and trading hubs.
Thousands of Indian laborers, moneylenders, soldiers, and bureaucrats flooded in, while Burmese peasants were driven into the expanding rice fields and plantations to feed the empire‘s growing commercial appetite. Between 1885 and 1930, Burma‘s rice exports swelled from 162,000 to 3.3 million tons, making it the rice bowl of the British Raj.
| Year | Rice Exports (Tons) |
|---|---|
| 1885 | 161,912 |
| 1910 | 1,808,938 |
| 1920 | 2,068,488 |
| 1930 | 3,258,860 |
Table: Growth of rice exports under British rule (Source: Furnivall 1948)
With this dramatic reorientation came wrenching social change. Traditional Burmese society, anchored around the monarchy, the Buddhist sangha, and the village, was steadily undermined. In its place rose a colonial society segregated into European, indigenous Burmese, and Indian layers.
Resentments simmered between displaced Burmese elites and ascendant Indian migrants, while deepening inequality bred alienation between the rural masses and emerging class of urban educated nationalists. Secessionist dreams stirred among ethnic minority borderlands that had long resisted Burmese domination.
Centralizing power in Rangoon, the British regime swept away the diffuse traditional power structure in favor of a tightly controlled apparatus of modern bureaucracy, taxation, and policing. Authoritarian controls and economic doctrines conceived in London induced what historian Thant Myint-U has described as a "perfect storm of negative consequences" that would toxify Burmese politics for generations.
A Controversial Legacy
King Thibaw‘s understated tomb in Ratnagiri, India (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
In the century since Thibaw‘s death, Myanmar (as Burma is now called) has struggled to reconcile his painful legacy. To many, Thibaw remains a potent symbol of their lost sovereignty and the humiliations of colonialism; a martyr who took a brave last stand against a formidable foe. Nationalists regularly invoke his name as a rallying cry against foreign domination.
But others paint a more nuanced picture of a well-intentioned but feckless king who lacked the wisdom and resolve to navigate his kingdom through the treacherous geopolitical currents of the day. After all, it was Thibaw‘s miscalculations that gave the British a convenient pretext to swallow Burma whole.
Perhaps most bittersweetly, Thibaw‘s tomb and remains still lie unclaimed today in their forlorn patch of India, far from the royal mausoleums of his ancestors in Mandalay. Amazingly, his descendants (dispersed between Myanmar and India) have never managed to agree on whether or how to repatriate the body of their humbled king.
Some feel passionately that bringing Thibaw home would allow the nation to mourn its loss properly and honor a monarch who gave up everything in a valiant effort to save his realm. But others worry that dredging up the past might only inflame the raw wounds of Myanmar‘s troubled relationship with its colonial history and its own monarchy.
The Weight of History
Ultimately, Thibaw‘s mournful exile and his peculiar resting place poignantly symbolize Myanmar‘s tortured efforts to resolve its past and imagine its future. The end of the monarchy marked the start of a tumultuous new chapter in the country‘s history, one from which it is still reeling nearly 140 years later.
From the ashes of Thibaw‘s fall, the British built a new Burma riven by contradictions – materially richer but deeply unequal; modernized but viciously authoritarian; reconfigured around a quasi-national identity but simmering with fractious ethnic tension. Much of the political dysfunction, economic malaise and civil strife that afflicts Myanmar today can be traced back to this wrenching colonial transition.
In that sense, Thibaw‘s lonely tomb is more than just the tragic resting place of an unfortunate king in the wrong country. It is a sobering monument to the enduring scars of imperialism, and a modern nation still trapped between the regrets of yesterday and the unresolved dilemmas of tomorrow.
For Myanmar, truly burying the last king – literally and figuratively – may mean finally confronting its colonial demons, rediscovering its unifying cultural touchstones, and charting a bold new path forward. Only then can Thibaw, and his long-suffering nation, be at peace.
