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BOOK-NOTICES
215
NOVEMBER, 1927]
HISTORY OF BURMA, from the earliest tinies to
March 10, 1824, the beginning of the English Conquest, by G. E. HARVEY, with a preface by SIR RICHARD CARSAO TEMPLE, Bt., with seven illustrations and five coloured maps : Longmans Green and Co., London, 1925.
Although just over a century had elapsed since Lord Amherst was forced by the provocations of the Government of Ava to commence the first Burmese War, the average Englishman knows very little more about the history of Burma than he did at that date. Sir Arthur Phayre attempted to lift the veil of darkness which shrouded the annals of the country by the publication of a History of Burma in 1883; but, As Sir Richard Temple points out in a forewor 1 to Mr. Harvey's work, Sir Arthur had no access to the inscriptions, which are numerous from the eleventh century onwards, and made no use of Chinere records. These valuable sources, coupled with the less trustworthy vernacular chronicles of the sixteenth to the nineteenth cen. turies, the Dutch and Portuguese records and certain unpublished state papers in the India Office, form the ground work of Mr. Harvey's history, which unquestionably supplies a longfelt want and is likely to be a standard volume of reference for many years to come.
His first chapter, which is devoted to the shadowy agos preceding the rise of the kingdom of Pagan in 1044, is necessarily brief and conjectural. The art of writing was probably brought from South India about A.D. 300 to the Pyus,--that strange, unknown race, which once occupied Prome, and gradually lost its identity and became merged in the local tribes of the Pagan kingdom after A.D. 800, but no inscriptions of an earlier date than A.D. 500 have so far been discovered, and the bulk of those in. cluded in Epigraphia Birmanica belong to a much later date. The general conclusion, at which Mr. Harvey arrives, is that the Burmese are a mixed Mongolian race, to which various TibetoBurman tribes—the Pyu, the Kauran or Arakanese, and the Thet or Chins,-have contributed elements, and with these have mingled the Talaings of Lower Burma, who were originally Hindu immigrants from Telingana on the coast of Madras. Immi. gration also took place from northern India through Assam, and influenced the religious ideas and architecture of Upper Burma in the fifth century; and the complete disappearance among the Burmese of their primeval Mongolian traditions is due to the fact that these Indian immigrants, whether from Northern or Southern India, were the only people who could read and write in those early ages and Bo keep tradition alive. Thug it comes that the tradition, folk-lore, and chronicles of the Mongolian Burmese are predominantly Indian in character.
Although Mr. Harvey in his treatment of the Pagan k ngdom, which was practically paramount in Burma from the eleventh to the thirteenth century,
frankly introduces matter which is pure legend or folk-lore, certain definite facts emerge from his com. bination of recorded fact, as embodied, for example, in the Myazedi inscription of A.D. 1112, with the romantie narrative of the chronicles. The dynasty, founded by Anaorahta in 1044, which lasted until the terrible Tartar invasion of 1287, managed to hold Burma together for more than two hundred years, built magnificent temples, and preserved Theravada Buddhism, which, in the author's words, "is one of the purest faiths mankind has ever known." Indeed, the tale of the Pagan rulers, though not free from the stain of cruelty, is on the whole more attractive to the modern reader than the long and dreary chronicle of wholesale murder, raiding, and rapine which commences with Shan dominion in 1287, includes the chequered history of the Toungoo dynasty, and ends, so far as Mr. Harvey's work is concerned, with the challenge offered by Bagyidaw of the Alaungpaya line to the Governor-General of India, Lord Amherst, whom the author incorrectly styles Viceroy of India. The title of Viceroy did not come into existence and use until after the transfer of the Government of India to the English Crown in 1858. Battle, murder, and sudden death fill the centuries succeeding the great Shan immigrations ; here and there one catches a glimpse of a ruler endowed with greater nobility, personality, or administrative aptitude than the general run of Burmese kinga. Such, indeed, were Queen ShinAW bu (1453-72) of gracious memory: Thalun of the Toungoo line, under whose orders the first Revenue Inquest ever made in Burma was carried out in 16384 Bayinnaung, who commenced his martial adventures while still in his teens and continued fighting till his death at the age of 66 ; Aloungpaya, who rose from the position of village headman to be master of Burma; and Bodawpaya. But one looks in vain for any figure comparable with those of Aboka, of Samudragupta, of Harsha, and of Akbar in India. These rulers were quite as despotic as the kings of Burma, but they were more cultured, more civilized, and, so long as they lived, they maintained a tolerably efficient administrative organization. It was in this respect that the Burmese Court was a signal failure, and Mr. Harvey's references to the exceptional inefficiency of the government recall the worst days of the later Mughal rulers, when every official was a law unto himself and the injunctions of the pageant emperor went unheeded.
Quito as valuable as the actual history of the various dynasties are the notes which Mr. Harvey has appended to his narrative. Among these one may call attention particularly to the notes on "The temples and their builders," "Massacre of the kinamon," "Thalun's inquest," which include illuminating paragraphs on slaves and captivos, the ideas underlying prohibition of certain exports, and the organisation of society, and "Administrative
