A Royal Collection of Bronze Model Boats and Soldiers from Eighteenth-Century Burma

The Defence Services Museum in Yangon (Rangoon), in Myanmar (Burma), is not well patronized by overseas visitors. Some may have been put off after viewing the dusty cabinets of the poorly resourced National Museum. Others might assume that a military museum will just feature old guns and trucks, of interest only to militaria enthusiasts. However, it’s a pity to miss this museum. Although a civilian parliament was elected in 2010, the military remains predominant in Myanmar politics and government. The Defence Services Museum provides a detailed portrayal of the world view and aspirations of the regime. It has not stinted on resources to do so. And amid the visualization of national history, below the portraits of military chiefs looking proudly over dioramas of factories and dam sites, past the guns, tanks, and aircraft that will indeed appeal to militaria buffs, is a fine collection of model soldiers, cannon, and boats (Figure 1, 4–12). These elegant bronzes belonged originally to King Alaungpaya. They have some tales to tell about the culture and society of his time.

When the British colonized Burma in the nineteenth century, many people in the outside world became familiar with the then-capital, Mandalay, not the least because of Kipling’s popular image of the “road to Mandalay,” the Irrawaddy River that linked the inland city with the sea. The British deposed the last king of the Konbaung dynasty at Mandalay in 1885. This dynasty had been founded more than a century earlier by Alaungpaya, a regional governor who overthrew the previous regime. He had been provided with guns, ammunition, and light cannon by the British East India Company, which expected regional stability and a payoff in trade once he controlled the kingdom (Harvey 1925, 227).

Figure 1.

Alaungpaya’s cannoneer at the ready. The bronze models have been over-enthusiastically coated with gold paint, but their detail remains clear.

In 1753, Alaungpaya built a new capital in his home area, at Moksobo, which he renamed Yatanatheinga, 80 kilometers northwest of Mandalay. This was not a classic brick-walled city, but a huge version of a military stockade, three kilometers square. On the mounds of earth formed by excavating a moat was a wall of palm trunks (Figure 2). But his successors soon moved back to the former capital, Ava, and eventually to the newly constructed Mandalay. By the early nineteenth century, the great stockade had been renamed Shwebo (“golden chief”) by one of Alaungpaya’s descendants (Enriquez 1915). It was by then a minor provincial town, as it remains today.

Figure 2.

Warrior, stockade and cannon: a modern pagoda painting from Shwebo tells the city’s origin story.

Figure 3.

The Shwe-baw-kyun. The central pagoda and the pagodas on each corner were filled with treasure. The small white stone posts contain niches for oil lamps.

The timber of Alaungpaya’s stockade is no longer there, although much of the earth base of the wall remains. The moat is used for fish farming. The town’s twenty or so Buddhist pagodas, works of merit constructed mostly during the early years of the Konbaung dynasty, remain in reasonable repair. A reproduction of what is meant to be Alaungpaya’s palace has been built in the original palace compound, which served as a jail during the British colonial period.

Alaungpaya died in 1760. In 1763, his son and successor King Naungdawgyi built a pagoda (Figure 3) a couple of kilometers northeast of the Shwebo stockade. Naungdawgyi, his mother and his queens filled chambers in the main pagoda, and in smaller structures on each corner, with more than 11,000 reliquary objects. These included gold or silver statues representing Buddha, or incidents and characters from Buddha’s life story, as well as jewelry such as “a pair of gold ear ornaments studded with rubies,” an amber bowl, gold caskets studded with gems, and even a silver ear cleaner (ASI 1904...