The Myowun's Nap: An Incident in 1852 and the Fall of the Burmese Empire

1. The Myowun's Nap

On the afternoon of January 6, 1852, a party of horsemen clattered into the courtyard of the Myowun or Royal Governor of Rangoon, bearing letters from Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General of the Honorable East India Company in Calcutta. The delegation was informed that the Myowun was asleep and could not be disturbed. After waiting for about a quarter of an hour, it departed and returned to a British naval squadron in the harbor.

On receiving the news, British Commodore George Lambert formally declared a blockade of the Burmese coast and evacuated British subjects from Rangoon. That night he seized a Burmese warship in the harbor. Three days later Commodore Lambert ostentatiously towed the captured vessel past Burmese fortifications, and when the British ships were fired on they returned the fire with deadly effect. Though several months of ultimatums and dispatches would follow before the Second Anglo-Burmese war broke out in earnest on April 2, the die had been cast. Britain conquered, occupied, and unilaterally annexed Lower Burma and all the Burmese ports, leaving only an isolated, land-locked remnant of the Burmese Empire in the hinterland.

Thirty-three years later, in 1885, despite the efforts of King Mindon to accommodate Burma to the realities of an imperial world, this rump state also fell to a combination of British commercial interests—now firmly established in the Irrawaddy delta—and Anglo-French imperial rivalry. For sixty years, Burma would suffer the most unenviable servitude of being, in effect, a colony of a colony: it was governed by England but ruled by Indians. The cultural and political scars continue to affect the Burmese polity of today.

What happened on January 6 has been the subject of many interpretations, but few question that it marked the turning point in the onset of the Second Anglo-Burmese War. Once shooting started, the British Raj could not afford to back down. Most Burmese accounts, written after Independence in 1948, assert that the events of January 6, 1852 were part of a premeditated British conspiracy to provoke war.¹ British colonial historians saw them as just another example of efforts to humiliate the British Raj.²

In this paper, I shall examine in some detail the incident at the Myowun's compound, its background and immediate consequences, and the individuals most closely involved. I shall then ask three questions:

(1) Was the Myowun really asleep?

(2) If so, why did his staff not awaken him immediately?

(3) Finally, if the Myowun had received the British delegation, might the course of Anglo-Burmese relations have been different?

2. Background to Conflict

The First Anglo-Burmese War, launched in 1824 by King Bagyidaw, led to a humiliating defeat and the 1826 Treaty of Yandabo. Burma ceded the Provinces of Arakan and Tenasserim to the British East India Company and paid a large war indemnity. But she only partially learned the lesson (successfully mastered by the new dynasty in Siam) that survival in nineteenth century Asia required a frank recognition of European technological superiority, and an adroit ability to play one European power against another.

In 1852 the Burmese throne in Ava was occupied by King Pagan. He had seized power from his father King Tharrawaddy in 1846, just as Tharrawaddy had seized it from his brother Bagyidaw nine years earlier. While King Pagan showed himself rather more hospitable to foreigners than his father, he devoted little attention to governance,³ leaving his provincial governors free to pursue their own interests. In Rangoon, the King was represented by a Myowun, or Governor, named Maung Ok, whom foreigners regarded as particularly rapacious and corrupt.

Rangoon remained the principal port for the Burmese Empire, politically and culturally isolated from the royal capital of Ava in the dry zone to the north. It now consisted of two towns: the old port town along the river, dilapidated and occupied mainly by foreigners, and a new walled town built by King Tharrawaddy near the Shwedagon Pagoda.⁴ At the end of 1850, the port area...