King Alaungmintaya’s Golden Letter to King George II (7 May 1756)
The story of an exceptional manuscript and the failure of a diplomatic overture
Jacques P. Leider
In the seventeenth century, Burma was an ethnically diverse but unified kingdom whose territory covered a large part of what is now the Union of Myanmar.1 But since the early eighteenth century Burmese royal power was threatened by foreign invaders in the north and a general dislocation of administrative control. In the late 1730s, the invasions of the Manipuri cavalry demonstrated the kingdom’s weakness to defend its core territories. In the south, a secession of Mon governors led to the resurrection of an independent Mon kingdom in 1740. In contemporary western sources, the north and the south were referred to by the names of their respective capitals, Ava and Pegu.2 War raged for several years between the Burmese and the Mon kingdoms.
In April 1752 the Mon army took Ava and the king of Burma was deported to Pegu. But at the moment of the greatest Mon triumph, a local man, a Burmese chief of Moksobo, a village forty kilometers north of Ava, successfully resisted the new rulers. Not only did he stand his own against the Mon detachments called up to dispel his followers, but with an extraordinary gift for organization, he also mobilized local troops, struggled to win the loyalty of other Burmese chiefs and in just two years, re-conquered Ava and made himself the new master of Upper Burma. Victorious on the battlefield, he came to be recognized as a king predestined to be born to re-establish the Burmese kingship and reunite the kingdom. In his orders, he referred to himself as Alaung-mintaya-gyi-phaya, ‚great august forthcoming righteous king‛ a title that was colloquially shortened to ‚Alaungphaya‛.3 But obtaining the allegiance of the population of the Burmese heartland was the lesser challenge. To conquer the south and outwit the Mon, Alaungmintaya thought that he needed more guns and cannon. Some of his hopes to procure them in a short time lay on the development of close trade relations with the English East India Company. Letters were exchanged with the local chief of the Company who was keen on obtaining the king’s approval for a settlement. Missions went back and forth while the war against the southern kingdom raged unabated. In May 1756 the king agreed to the English requests in a letter sent to King George II. It was an exceptional dispatch written on a rectangular plaque of gold dotted with precious rubies. The elaborately packed letter was brought to Madras and from there forwarded to London, where in early 1758 it was handed to George II by the Secretary of State William Pitt. Another letter was sent to the Court of Directors of the East India Company. We do not know what Pitt told the English king about the letter’s contents, or what opinion formed in the king’s mind when he received this exceptional missive. George II kept the letter, but no official reply was ever made following Alaungmintaya’s overtures for friendly contacts with the British monarch. To Read More>> To Download HERE>>>
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