A domestic perspective of news from the past month with implications for business and investment in Myanmar.
Politics: 2nd round of 21st Panglong conference concludes with some evidence of progress.
Economics: World Bank’s $200mn programme to support financial stability; China and Myanmar plan to establish border economic co-operation zone; MIC mandated to exclude irresponsible investors.
Business: Unilever forms HPC J/V with EAC; Puma Energy commissions oil storage facility at Thilawa, plans ventures in jet fuel distribution and fuel retailing; Foreign firms to be permitted to import agricultural, medical & construction materials; Plans for new offshore supply base at Nga Yoke Kaung; Microfinance—two ventures supported by Dragon Capital and OPIC; Myanmar Investments planning ventures in tourism and pharmacies; Korea’s LS Cable to invest at Thilawa; $35mn hydroelectric dam plan from Great Hor Kham; China’s Great New Hope to invest $10mn in poultry hatchery.
… A WINDOW ON THE GOLDEN LAND …
A new final resting place in Myanmar for King Thibaw ?
In recent months, momentum has been building for the repatriation of the remains of Myanmar’s last king, Thibaw, from their current resting place in India, to a new mausoleum in Mandalay. The effort has been spearheaded by Thibaw’s great grandson, U Soe Win, who has been campaigning for permission to build a royal tomb next to that of Thibaw’s father, King Mindon. View more
The Burmese government’s attitude to the King’s descendants has been softening since President U Thein Sein made a visit to King Thibaw’s Indian grave in 2012. In December 2016, one hundred years after Thibaw’s death, U Soe Win led a delegation of family members to the same place to commemorate the event. This followed, in November, a public commemoration by the family, at the royal palace in Mandalay, of the moment the King and Queen had been driven out of the city in a bullock cart. View more
King Thibaw ruled for just seven years before he and his pregnant queen, Supayalat were forced to abdicate by the British at the time of the conquest of Upper Burma in 1885. Denied a home in their native country they and their two daughters, Myatpayagyi and Myatpayalat (a third and fourth daughter followed later), were packed off to India where eventually, a new residence, known as Thibaw’s Palace, was built for them at Ratnagiri, about 350km (220 miles) south of Mumbai.
Initially, King Thibaw received a monthly pension of Rs.100,000, but this was progressively reduced and, by the time of his death, it had fallen to just Rs.25,000. The family had been permitted to take some of their jewellery with them, and this they progressively sold in order to supplement their income. Thibaw lived the life of a recluse and, although he was provided with a car (a Model T), and his daughters and other members of the household travelled about, he rarely left the property before he died, a brokenhearted man, in 1916, aged 57.
Thibaw was buried at Ratnagiri next to his junior queen, Supayagale. Supayalat returned to Rangoon in 1919, but was not allowed revisit the former capital, Mandalay. She begged the British to be permitted to bring the remains of husband with her, but her requests were denied, for fear of the consequences.
When the elder of Thibaw’s daughters reached marriageable age in the early years of the new century, various Burmese suitors were proposed but did not find the King’s favour. The British Viceroy suggested the crown prince of Sikkim who—like the Burmese—was Buddhist, but he made his excuses, saying the princesses’ English was not good enough. Eventually, Myatpayagyi became pregnant with the child of the family’s Indian gatekeeper, and Myatpayalat fell in love with a Burmese, Khin Maung Gyi, who had been a minor official in Mandalay, and of whom Thibaw disapproved. He and the princess had a row, and she moved out of Thibaw’s Palace to the house of Mrs Head, the wife of the British district collector.
Princess Myatpayagyi, travelled back to Burma with her mother in 1919 but later returned to Ratnagiri to be with her daughter Tu-Tu, and Tu-Tu’s father. When she died in 1947, she was cremated and her ashes stored in a box in the Ratnagiri Treasury, but it seems that, owing to bureaucratic dithering, they were never deposited in the tomb built for her next to her father’s.
In 1995, the Hindustan Times caught up with the descendants of Princess Myatpayagyi who remained in India:
The collector’s records say that when Phaya died, she was such a destitute that the locals of the village around collected money under the leadership of the collectorate for her funeral. Phaya left behind the daughter she had borne to Gopal, who had died earlier. This daughter, named Tu Tu, was brought up in poverty and not being educated, forgot all about her royal heritage except having one sorry looking poster painting of her mother in her home for veneration among the many household gods…Without money or education, Tu Tu married a local mechanic and had at least six or seven children, all of whom became more and more Indian in religion and culture as well as appearance. Tu Tu, for whom Burmese is a forgotten language, still lives in Ratnagiri as an old woman and speaks fluent Marathi with a rural Maharashtrian accent. She used to sell paper flowers to make a little money for her family in the days gone by.
According to Thant Myint-U, the author of The River of Lost Footsteps, the fate of the second princess is a bit of mystery, although he suggests she and Khin Maung Gyi lived the rest of their lives apart from the family at a hill station near Darjeeling, tending a dairy farm. They were childless.
In 2013, the Myanmar Times caught up with one of King Thibaw’s two surviving grandchildren. She seemed to have a different opinion to many of her other relatives on the matter of her grandfather’s repatriation: View more
In December of 2016, the BBC’s Alex Bescoby reported on the visit to Thibaw’s grave in India by U Soe Win and other members of the his family, the descendants of Myatpayagyi. View more
On her return to Rangoon, with her two youngest daughters, Supayalat took a house on Churchill Road, named after Lord Randolph Churchill, architect of the third Anglo-Burmese War and the man who, more than any other, had been responsible for the dethroning of her husband. She received a pension but, with good reason, never reconciled herself to British dominion. She died in 1925, at the age of 65. Although the colonial government declared a national holiday on the day of her funeral, her family’s request that she be buried in Mandalay was refused. Instead, her body lies at the Kandawin Garden Mausoluem near the Shwedagon pagoda, alongside the tombs of Aung San Suu Kyi’s mother and UN Secretary General U Thant.
“The King in Exile”, a full account of King and Queen’s exile and last days, by Sudha Shah, was published by Harper Collins in 2012. A brief article by her, from that time, follows: View more