Indian Antiquary Vol 59

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, S Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarka
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 267

DECEMBER, 1930 ]
NOTES ON CHIAMAY
241
now stands, past Nasrpur, on the west of that town, bifurcating, it seems, lower down, the principal channel, probably flowing past Tatta to the sea, the other taking a S. by E. course, passing Bagh-i-Fath, Jûn and Badîn, to the Rann.
(To be continued.)
NOTES ON CHIAMAY. (The Mysterious Lake of the Far East.)
BY SIR R. C. TEMPLE, Bt. THE derivation of Chiamay, as a name, that at once suggests itself is that it represents Chiengmai, the Zimmè of the Burmese, on the western branch of the Menam, which was subjugated by the Burmese-Shan king of Taungu jrt about the time of Mendez Pinto. There is, however, no lake in Chiengmai, but a temporarily inundated area, such as early European writers speak of in connection with lower Siamese valleys and existing during any given traveller's visit, may account for the term "Lake" being attached to Chiengmai. Even a modern writer, Hallet, A Thousand Miles on an Elephant, speaks of the river plains in the Shan States being sometimes flooded artificially for the sake of the fishery, and also as being liable to inundations when irrigation works are neglected.
In 1921 Mr. Edward Heawood kindly sent me some rough notes of his own (not then with any view to publication) on this “mystery" of the Far East, and these I now reproduce, with his consent, in an ordered form. To his mind, it was quite possible that the story of the lake has somewhere a foundation in fact, but it was nevertheless mythical in stating that the lake was the common origin of the four great rivers that run to the south in Indo-China. Mendez Pinto is the standard, but by no means the only, authority for the statement and for the name Lake Chiamay, and Mr. Heawood thought that as his version agrees so nearly with the current belief in his time, it argues his dependence thereon in the main rather than on his personal knowledge, though he may have seen a lake, perhaps that of Talifu, which he took to be the Chiamay of then current geography. This presupposes a common origin which he and other early writers oopied. Going upon the evidence he had collected, Mr. Heawood was inclined to place the lake" near Chiengmai in the basin of the Meping in Siam, possibly as a temporarily flooded area of the kind described above.
Before Pinto's date, however (wrote Mr. Heawood) in the sixteenth century, Camoens speaks of Lake Chinmay in canto X, stanza 125, of the Lusiads, which, though not published till 1572, were composed before 1560, and gives the Menam as the only effluent, getting nearer the truth than the other early versions of the myth. “Cingapura " is mentioned in the same stanza, and this may be the origin of Pinto's name " Singapamor" (see below), given to the lake, probably due to some confusion. The next stanza mentions the" Gueos " (Gwa Shang, though some say Karens or Kachine), one of the names associated by Pinto with the river' debouching from Lake Chiamay at Martaban. But see my own note on Gueos below.
Turning now to Pinto's account : in ch. 128 of the original Portuguese edition of 1614 (p. 41, § 4 of Cogan's English version of 1653), he describes a supposed journey, by a great river throughout, from North China to Indo-China, passing by Lake Singapamor (que os naturaes da terra nemeño por Cunebetee). It has a circuit of 36 leagues, and harbours a great number of birds. Four great rivers emerge therefrom:
(1) Ventrau, traversos Sornau (Siam) and enters the sea at Chianta buu.