The Xenophile Historian

1500 to 1800

	The Portuguese Quest for Spices and Souls
	Magellan's Expedition
	The Spanish Philippines
	The Second Burmese Empire
	Cambodian Escapade
	The Dutch East India Company
	Arakan: The Mrohaung Era
	The Phaulkon Affair
	The Fall of Lan Xang
	The End of Champa
	Two Divisions of Vietnam
	Eighteenth Century Burma & Siam
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Two years later Albuquerque personally led a fleet of nineteen ships to Malacca. The Malaccan force outnumbered the Portuguese by a factor of 15 to 1, but the superior technology of Portuguese ships and cannon prevailed, and Malacca fell after a six-week siege. To prevent any trouble with the powerful mainland states to the north (remember Siam's claim to all of Malaya), Albuquerque immediately sent embassies to Ayutthaya and Pegu, and diplomatic relations with both kingdoms got off to a good start. Afterwards Portugal sent expeditions to the Moluccas (1512), China (1513), and Japan (1543), securing trade with all of those places.

For much of the time that the Portuguese ruled Malacca, the city was on the defensive against its Malay neighbors. First of all there was the ex-sultan of the city, who established himself on a small island near Singapore and attempted unsuccessfully to regain his lost throne. A more serious threat was Acheh, which defeated all Portuguese attempts to set up a colony on Sumatra. After that Acheh made four major attacks on Malacca itself, nearly capturing the city the last time (1574-75). There was also trouble with the other Moslem states: Johore (south Malaya), Brunei (Borneo), Bantam (west Java), Mataram (central Java), Demak (east Java), and Makassar (southern Sulawesi), to name a few. All of these states had pirates in the local waters, making travel through the Java Sea unsafe for Europeans. To add to the danger, the sultan of Demak sent missionaries to Borneo, Sulawesi, and the Moluccas, converting the natives to Islam with increasing speed. The Portuguese first attempted to counter this threat by seeking allies among non-Moslems. They thought they found one when the Hindu raja of Sunda Kalapa let them build a fort in his city-state, on the northwest corner of Java, but when the Portuguese returned in 1527 they found that Sunda Kalapa had been conquered by Bantam and renamed Jakarta.

Eventually the Portuguese paid toll to the sultan of Brunei so that they could sail around north Borneo and through the Sulu Sea to reach the Spice Islands without being molested. Catholic missionaries like St. Francis Xavier tried to stop the spread of Islam by converting the non-Moslem Indonesians to Christianity, but time was not on their side; usually they came to an island only to find that the natives had converted to Islam shortly before their arrival. The missionaries were only successful on islands like Amboina, where Islam had not yet established itself; if Islam got to a community first, Catholic missions had no hope of success.

The real reason why the Portuguese colony survived was because its Moslem rivals could never get along with each other. By supporting the moderate sultanates in their quarrels with the religious extremists (Acheh and Demak), Malacca was able to keep all of Indonesia from attacking it at once. But Portugal's early victories had given it more empire than it could handle. Portugal itself, with a population of 1.5 million, never seemed to have enough manpower to manage everything it had claimed in Africa, Asia and Brazil; often other Europeans like Italians, English and Dutch had to be hired to fill all the crew positions on Portuguese ships. The money made on Far Eastern ventures was spent immediately, either on payments of the king's debts or on policing the Indian Ocean. "Look at the Portuguese," wrote Sir Thomas Roe, the English ambassador to the Mogul Empire in India, in 1613. "In spite of their fine settlements they are beggared by the maintenance of military forces; and even their garrisons are only mediocre." When other European nations went out to sea, Portugal could not compete, and soon its empire sank into obscurity.

Portugal suffered a blow from which it never recovered in 1578, when its king was killed in an invasion of Morocco; Spain's King Philip II promptly claimed the Portuguese crown for himself. Spain ruled Portugal until 1640, but it did nothing to promote the Portuguese half of its enormous empire. In fact, Spain's temporary rule was harmful to the Portuguese colonies, since Spain's enemies, England and the Netherlands, now became Portugal's enemies as well. English and Dutch privateers like Sir Francis Drake found the Portuguese colonies to be vulnerable targets.

Magellan's Expedition

Magellan did not stop anywhere for long until he reached the central island of Cebu. There he baptized the local chief, Humabon, and two thousand of his followers. The price of Humabon's conversion was aid in fighting an enemy chief, Lapu-Lapu of Mactan island, one mile away. Magellan was so confident of victory that he only took sixty men to Mactan. Humabon brought 600 warriors to help, but Magellan told him to stay on the sidelines. His crew could do the job by themselves.

Lapu-Lapu heard they were coming and assembled 1,500 warriors of his own to meet them. The resulting battle was one-sided; the Spaniards never even got to Mactan's shore, and only eight of the sixty men survived. Magellan was not among the survivors. Today the Filipinos venerate Magellan for discovering their islands, and Lapu-Lapu because he was the first Filipino to resist colonialism.

The battle of Mactan.

When it came to spices the Philippines only had cinnamon, so at first Spain was more interested in Indonesia. But for a few years it was uncertain who was allowed to have both. In 1494 the Pope tried to prevent quarrels between Spain and Portugal by issuing a treaty that divided the whole non-European world between them. The dividing line was drawn at longitude 46^o 37' West, giving most of the New World to Spain and Africa and Brazil to Portugal. Once European ships entered the Pacific, it became necessary to draw a similar property line there. It seemed logical to simply continue the first line to the other side of the world, where it becomes longitude 133^o 23' East. The problem was that nobody knew for sure where the 133rd meridian actually ran. The news from Magellan's expedition caused Spanish geographers to draw maps with the crucial meridian passing through Malaya, putting both the Philippines and the Spice Islands on the Spanish side of the line. Actually they are on the Portuguese side, since the meridian really runs near the western tip of New Guinea, but before the invention of accurate chronometers the only way one could determine longitude was by guessing ("dead reckoning"). Magellan had erred by overestimating the size of Asia and underestimating the size of the recently discovered Pacific.

On this evidence Spain sent two naval expeditions to conquer the Moluccas: one followed Magellan's route, and one sailed directly from Panama. Both failed for logistical reasons; the Spanish route from Europe to Indonesia was 5,500 miles longer than the Portuguese one around Africa, giving Portugal the advantage. Finally at the Treaty of Sarragosa (1529), Spain accepted a Portuguese offer of 350,000 ducats (about $51,800,000 in 2011 dollars) to forget the claim. However, the Spaniards eventually got a foothold in the Spice Islands, when the natives of Ternate became so angry at Portuguese clumsiness and cruelty that they expelled their masters in 1574. The Spaniards immediately moved in and set up their own outpost on the island, which lasted until the Dutch took it in 1663.

The Spanish Philippines

Spain was in the Philippines to stay, but other European nations tried to gain a foothold there. Portugal disputed and threatened the Spanish colony until 1580, when King Philip II also became king of Portugal. In 1579 Sir Francis Drake came and attacked Spanish shipping. In the early 17th century the Dutch raided the islands, capturing not only Spanish ships but also Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese traders visiting the archipelago. The Dutch didn't lose interest in the Philippines until the more lucrative Spice Islands came under their control.

After Legazpi came the missionaries, who went all over the archipelago until they had converted 85% of the population, making the Philippines the only Christian nation in Asia. They made little headway in the south, however, since Islam was already established there. The "Moros" (a name derived from the Spanish word for Moors or North Africans) declared a jihad, or holy war, raiding Christian coastal communities and stubbornly defending their territory against every outside authority. The Moros have been a persistent problem since that time, struggling for independence against every government ruling the Philippines, including the present-day one.

Spain controlled the economy of the Philippines very strictly. The only commerce allowed between the Philippines and other Spanish colonies was a single galleon, which made a round trip voyage between Acapulco and Manila every year. Colonial officials did not develop the local economy; instead they made a living by loading the Manila galleon with silks, porcelain, and other imports from China, paid for with Mexican silver. Since demand for space on the Manila galleon always exceeded supply, merchants were only allowed to send cargo on the westbound trip if they went with it as passengers, thereby running the risk of not getting a ticket for the return trip later. The system was terribly inefficient, and loss of a galleon brought a year of destitution, but the Manila galleon trade continued its lonely rhythm for the next two and a half centuries.⁽²⁾

Some thirty to forty Chinese junks came to Manila around March of each year. The cargoes they brought included hardware, nails, pots & pans, gunpowder, saltpeter, furniture, jewels, and all kinds of foods. The merchandise that did not go into the Manila galleon for its eastbound voyage was eagerly bought by the residents of Manila. Some of the Chinese sailors and passengers remained behind when their ships went home, and they formed a Chinese community that grew rapidly; by 1600 there were about eight thousand Chinese in Manila, living alongside a few hundred Spaniards. Most of them became barbers, tailors, shoemakers, masons, painters, weavers, blacksmiths and other skilled workers, forming the middle class of Philippine society. To avoid paying the taxes levied on aliens and non-Christians, they took Filipina wives and/or were baptized. They sometimes joined the Church in disturbingly large groups; on one occasion, four hundred of them were baptized in one day. In 1603 a Chinese riot caused the Spaniards and Filipinos to panic; before it was over, 23,000 Chinese were massacred. The remaining Chinese fled the city, causing an economic slump that lasted until Spain reluctantly invited them back. Similar incidents happened later in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Spaniards could not do without Chinese services, but the size and character of the Chinese community kept them in a state of constant apprehension.

The Second Burmese Empire

Five princes claimed Tabinshweti's throne at Pegu, but one of them, the late king's brother-in-law Bayinnaung, quickly eliminated the others. His thirty-year reign (1551-81) was the most energetic period in Burmese history. Once the south was secure, he marched north and east, conquering Ava, the Shan states, and Chiangmai (1554-7).

Between campaigns Bayinnaung found time to be an ardent patron of Buddhism. Perhaps he did it in atonement for all the lives lost in his wars. Wherever he went he built pagodas, made and distributed copies of the scriptures, and fed monks. He outlawed animal sacrifice, a common practice by Moslems and the animist Shans. Often he sent offerings to the Sri Lankan temple where the Tooth of the Buddha was kept, one time sending brooms made from his own and the chief queen's hair. In 1560 he got an awful shock when the Portuguese raided Sri Lanka, to punish a local ruler for persecuting St. Francis Xavier's Catholic converts. Among the treasures brought back to Goa was a tooth, presumably Buddha's. Bayinnaung sent envoys with an offer of 300,000 ducats for it. But the Inquisition declared the tooth to be a dangerous idol and had it destroyed. Not long after that two more holy teeth appeared in Sri Lanka, the backers of each insisting it was really the original. One of them is enshrined in the Temple of the Tooth today; the other was sent to Bayinnaung as a gift, along with a Sinhalese bride.

Burma might have enjoyed a long period of peace had this phenomenal king stopped his conquests with Chiangmai. But Chiangmai opened the way to both Laos and Siam, and Bayinnaung had ambitions even greater than his talents. He captured Ayutthaya easily in 1564, but not for long, because the Siamese king, Maha Chakrap'at, promptly revolted at the first opportunity. Bayinnaung returned in 1569, captured Ayutthaya a second time, and placed a pro-Burmese prince on the Siamese throne. This time Siam stayed loyal for the rest of his reign, but troubles sprang up elsewhere. Cambodia attacked, seeing an opportunity to even old scores with the Thais; six Cambodian raids (1570-87) were defeated, forcing Bayinnaung to rebuild Ayutthaya's defenses, even though he knew that might be asking for trouble in the long run. In the northeast, Laos became a constant source of trouble because it never accepted the loss of Chiangmai. Bayinnaung invaded Laos twice, taking both Laotian capitals (Luang Prabang and Vientiane), but never capturing the king; every time the Burmese withdrew Setthathirat returned to make more trouble. At the time of his death in 1581, Bayinnaung was preparing to conquer Arakan, which up to that date had escaped his attention. The campaign was canceled, and Arakanese independence lasted for two more centuries.

Burma in 1580, at the height of Bayinnaung's power.

Burma fell apart completely while Naresuen was restoring Siam. Two brothers of Nanda Bayin revolted, called in help from Arakan, and together they burned Pegu to the ground (1599). Nanda Bayin was taken to Toungoo and executed, and Pegu never completely recovered afterwards. Naresuen was also involved in the attack, but he arrived too late to share in the looting of Pegu; in fact, his "allies" inflicted a nasty defeat that forced him to flee back to Siam.

Nanda Bayin's nephew, Anaukpetlun, recovered Lower Burma (1605-13) and Chiangmai (1615) from his enemies, bringing a measure of stability back to Burma. The Toungoo dynasty moved its capital to Ava, where it lasted until 1752, but its kings were weak, and holding the country together was all they could do.

Cambodian Escapade

At the same time other Iberian adventurers were trying their luck in Cambodia. A few missionaries had gone there as early as the 1550s, but Buddhist opposition had always forced them to leave again. This changed in the 1580s, when an ongoing struggle between Siam and Cambodia turned against the Cambodians. As the Siamese king, Naresuen, advanced on Lovek (Cambodia's capital for much of the 16th century), the feeble Cambodian king, Satha, became desperate. Using Diogo Veloso, a Portuguese soldier of fortune, as his envoy, Satha pleaded for aid, first from the Portuguese at Malacca, then from the Spaniards at Manila. A Spanish force was sent from Manila in 1594 but it arrived too late; the Spaniards found that Cambodia had fallen to the Siamese, Veloso was a prisoner in Siam, and King Satha was a refugee in Laos. The Spanish leader, Blaz Ruiz, was captured and placed on a prison ship headed for Siam. Unwilling to give up so easily, Ruiz managed to hijack the ship and take it back to Manila. Meanwhile the equally resourceful Veloso gained favor with Naresuen and got himself placed in command of a ship carrying the Siamese ambassador to Manila.

The adventure became even more bizarre once Veloso and Ruiz were united in Manila. Forgetting that he was now officially a diplomat of Siam, Veloso claimed that he represented Cambodia's ex-king and signed a highly irregular treaty. This document allowed Spanish troops, merchants, and missionaries to travel freely in Cambodia, and promised that the king and queen would become Christians in return for military aid. Then Veloso and Ruiz led a raid on Siamese-occupied Phnom Penh. Deciding at first to return to Manila after this affair, they later changed their minds, jumped ship in a Vietnamese port, and marched overland from Vietnam to Laos, where they discovered that Satha and his eldest son had died. The adventurers returned to Cambodia in 1597 with Satha's second son in tow; fearing another Spanish invasion, the terrified Cambodians allowed them to crown the prince as King Barom Reachea II.

The puppet monarchy was short-lived, though. In 1599 a fight between the Spaniards and some Cham and Malay mercenaries grew into a massacre that killed almost every Spaniard in Phnom Penh. The pro-Spanish king became yet another of Southeast Asia's many victims of regicide. Four years later a fresh royal weakling made overtures to Manila, but Naresuen replaced him with a pro-Siamese monarch immediately. The Spanish game in Cambodia was over, and with it ended Spain's only attempt to expand her empire onto the Asian mainland.

The Dutch East India Company

The first expedition, however, was almost a total disaster. Cornelis Houtman had been a spy in Portugal, and was picked to lead the expedition because he knew more about the spice trade than any other Dutchman. As you might expect, spies make poor leaders. Houtman set sail in 1595 with two ships, the Amsterdam and the Mauritius, and more than a hundred men, but by the time they reached the Indian Ocean, seventy-one had died of scurvy, dysentery and malaria, and the rest were constantly fighting among themselves, since they had no other way to relieve months of boredom. When they got to the port of Bantam in Java, they found that the Portuguese had been coming there for some time, so even here the spices were overpriced. In addition, Houtman made a bad impression on the local rulers, who probably did not want to deal with this new group of Europeans anyway. Before long, he was bombarding the town and sending his men ashore to do some pillaging; they only took a break long enough to decide whether they should stab their prisoners, shoot them with arrows, or blow them out of cannon (Alas, we don't know which sentence they carried out!).

Houtman had a chance to start with a clean slate at his next stop, the island of Madura, where the natives had not heard what happened at Bantam. Instead, a misunderstanding led to another fight. Here the local prince came to him with a flotilla of boats, to stage a parade in honor of the visitors⁽³⁾, and the Dutch got the idea that they were being attacked. Houtman agreed with his crew and opened fire, killing everyone in the welcoming party, including the prince. After the battle, Houtman managed to get a small cargo of spices, but far less than his ships could hold, since naturally few natives wanted to do business with him. At this point the ships were so unseaworthy that the sailors burned the Amsterdam and went home with only the Mauritius. The trip back was uneventful, because most of the crew was dead. They made a rest stop at Bali, and two men liked the local girls so much that they chose to spend the rest of their lives here; for them, if nobody else, the story had a happy ending.

The one positive accomplishment of Houtman's voyage was that it proved the Portuguese couldn't keep competitors out of the Indies. More expeditions followed, but none were a success until 1599, when four ships came back laden with cloves and nutmeg. They did it by sailing directly from the Cape of Good Hope to the Sunda Strait; not only did this route avoid the Portuguese forts on the rim of the Indian Ocean, but it also kept the ships south of the tropics, where a strong west wind blew them rapidly to their destination. The spices they brought back yielded a spectacular profit--a 400% return to the investors who financed the expedition.

In 1602 the Dutch companies that had participated in previous Indonesian ventures united to form the Vereenigde Ost-Indische Compagnie (Chartered East India Company), generally known as the V.O.C. The V.O.C. was a complete success; within a decade the Portuguese were out of the spice trade. In 1619 the V.O.C. man on the spot, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, seized the port of Jakarta, renamed it Batavia, and made it the Company's headquarters. Working back westward, the Dutch took Taiwan (1624) and evicted the Portuguese from Malacca (1641) and Sri Lanka (1638-1658); in Japan they became the only foreigners allowed to trade there (1641). They also besieged Manila, but here the Spanish garrison was strong enough to keep the Dutch from taking the city. When the fighting ended Spain remained in control of the Philippines and the Portuguese held onto Macao, Goa, and eastern Timor, but now all commerce in the Far East was under V.O.C. control. The Dutch were pleased to fit the remaining Iberian outposts into their trading system; the Dutch had good reasons to hate Spain, but they could forgive any enemy who became a customer of theirs.

The V.O.C. brought the Netherlands an annual profit averaging $240 million in 1994 dollars. But only a fourth of its trade went between Asia and Europe. Not committing all their resources to one money-making scheme, the shrewd Dutch merchants used most of their ships in an intra-Asian trade network. Most of this trade involved shipping rice from rice-producing areas to rice-deficient areas. Other commodities were crops introduced to Java from elsewhere, like potatoes, yams, peanuts, corn, sugar and coffee. The coffee yielded fantastic profits until prices tumbled in 1727.

While the Dutch were forcing their way into Southeast Asia, England was starting its own East India Company. It only had a tenth of the V.O.C.'s assets, but the Dutch had to wait until the Portuguese were driven out of the game before they could deal with the English challenge. Once they could, however, hostilities broke out immediately. In 1623 one of Jan Coen's subordinates massacred eight English workers at their factory on Amboina. Later on the Dutch uprooted the English outposts on Sulawesi (1667) and western Java (1682). Eventually the English and Dutch East India Companies came to an unwritten agreement; England would stay out of Indonesia in return for a free hand in India.

The V.O.C. also faced challenges from native rulers, since it was Dutch policy to leave them in charge as long as they were willing to do business. In 1661 they lost Taiwan to a Chinese pirate named Zheng Chenggong, known to Westerners as Coxinga. The biggest threat came from Sultan Agung of Mataram (1613-45), who dreamed of conquering all of Indonesia and restoring the old Majapahit empire. Agung spent the first fifteen years of his reign defeating rivals in the small coastal states. Now the master of Madura and most of Java, Agung attacked the Dutch by using a variant of the Trojan Horse trick; he sent a fleet of merchant ships to Batavia with cargo holds full of armed men, and the ruse very nearly succeeded. The next year (1629) he sent a huge army to take Batavia by land, but the Dutch destroyed his supply ships, leaving the Javanese too weak from hunger to attack the city when they arrived. By 1705 all of Java was either directly ruled by the V.O.C. or under friendly sultans; the Moluccas were also under direct company control, but on most islands the Dutch limited their influence to small enclaves. The V.O.C. always disliked wars of conquest, and in most places they kept patrols to the minimum needed for security, since capital ships tend to tie up capital.

It was a combination of bad business practices, corruption among company employees, and a profitless war that brought down the Company in the late 18th century. The first mistake was in 1740, when the Dutch let fright take command of reason. The rapidly growing Chinese community in Batavia gave rise to fears that the Chinese and Javanese would join together in an anti-Dutch revolt; if Batavia was lost, the V.O.C. would be finished. The fact that many of the Chinese immigrants were unemployed seemed particularly ominous. Why not send them to the Dutch colonies in Sri Lanka and South Africa, where skilled labor was in short supply? That seemed like a satisfactory solution; the Chinese would have jobs, the Dutch would feel safer, and everybody would be happy. Unfortunately nobody asked the Chinese what they thought about it before they were rounded up for deportation. Rumors said that the Dutch actually intended to throw their captives overboard once the ships were out to sea. Fearing a Chinese riot, the Dutch and Indonesians ran amok first, killing the Chinese they found and putting the rest to flight. The result was the same as when the Spaniards tried to get rid of their Chinese community in Manila. Without the Chinese, business stagnated, and eventually the feared immigrants had to be invited back to Batavia.

The Company's fate was sealed in 1780 when the Netherlands declared its support for the American Revolution. From the Dutch viewpoint it was a disaster; England sank more Dutch ships than could be replaced, and in the treaty ending the war (Paris, 1783), the Dutch were forced to give up all monopoly trading claims. Indonesian ports were open to foreign shipping, and the V.O.C. found it could no longer compete with the other traders. The Company declared bankruptcy in 1791; seven years later its holdings were taken over by the Dutch government. It was the end of an era in Dutch-Indonesian relations, but the company's influence lingered on; for a long time afterwards Indonesians referred to any European authority over them as the kompeni.

In Malaya the English leased Penang Island from a friendly sultan (1786) and seized the port of Malacca (1795, recognized by the Dutch in 1824). These were the first steps toward's Britain's conquest of the Malay peninsula.

Arakan: The Mrohaung Era

The next important king was Minbin (1531-53), who fortified Mrohaung with massive earthworks and a deep moat, just in time to ward off an attack by the Burmese king Tabinshweti. During his reign a number of Portuguese sailors, called Feringhi by the Arakanese, became pirates and started terrorizing the Bay of Bengal. Minbin persuaded them to join his navy as mercenaries, and together they became an important regional power. The Feringhi raiders plundered far and wide, especially in the Ganges delta, and brought back thousands of slaves to their market in the port of Dianga every year. In 1625 they even captured Dacca, the Bengali capital; by this time the raids of the Feringhi armada had been so thorough that there was not a house left inhabited between Dacca and Chittagong.

Under Min Razagri (1593-1612) there was a temporary falling out between the Feringhi and their employers. Both had taken part in the burning of Pegu in 1599, and the Feringhi captured the port of Syriam, in the Irrawaddy delta. Min Razagri apparently expected the Portuguese to hand over Syriam to him, but instead they kept it for themselves, defeating the Arakanese flotilla sent to dislodge them. Min Razagri now decided that his mercenaries had grown too powerful; in 1607 he made an all-out attack on Dianga, killing six hundred of its inhabitants without mercy. Those who escaped declared war on Arakan, making raids up to the very walls of Mrohaung, but the capital's defenses saved it again; even a Portuguese fleet of 14 ships, sent by the Viceroy of Goa, could not prevail. After 1620 Arakan and Portugal renewed their previous alliance, when India's Mogul Empire became a threat to both.

During this time Dutch merchants started visiting Arakan, buying up all the slaves and rice the Arakanese were willing to sell. On several occasions a V.O.C. warehouse was set up in Mrohaung, but politics kept it from running smoothly. The king of Arakan wanted a military alliance with the Dutch, to keep his enemies away and to provide an alternative to the unpredictable Feringhi. The Dutch refused, since warfare would be bad for business, and often they would close shop when the king became too overbearing. They never gave up on Arakan, though, and always reopened the warehouse a few years later.

Relations with the Mogul Empire went from bad to worse as the 17th century progressed. The first Mogul attack retook Dacca, but the invading fleet was smashed before it could get out of the Ganges delta (1629). In 1660 a Mogul prince, Shah Shuja, fled to Mrohaung when he failed to keep his brother, Aurangzeb, from usurping the Mogul throne. Shah Shuja asked for ships to convey his family and retinue to Mecca, but none were supplied. Then the Arakanese king, Sandathudamma, asked for one of Shah Shuja's daughters in marriage and was indignantly refused. Fearing he would be handed over to the Moguls, Shah Shuja tried to escape; on the second attempt he was killed in a riot and his treasures were confiscated.

When Aurangzeb heard the news, he demanded the surrender of Shah Shuja's children; Sandathudamma refused and war broke out. At first the war went well for Arakan, with the Feringhi making two devastating raids on the Bengal coast. But at a crucial moment they quarreled with the Arakanese, and when the Moguls offered employment most of the Feringhi switched sides. The result was an overwhelming Mogul victory at the battle of Dianga (1666), where the Arakanese fleet was destroyed and Chittagong (held by Arakan since 1459) was taken back.

The piratical habits of the Arakanese survived long after their fleet and Portuguese teachers were gone. Between 1682 and 1785, 25 kings rose and fell in Mrohaung. Political chaos now became the national hobby, and Arakan was no longer a threat to anybody.

The Phaulkon Affair

Three years later two English frigates arrived on the Tenasserim coast at Mergui, demanding 65,000 pounds in damages from Siam for giving shelter to pirates that attacked English shipping. At Phaulkon's urging, the Siamese opened fire on the ships and massacred every Englishman they could find. Now it looked like an Anglo-Siamese war would begin. The next time French priests arrived, they came with 600 French soldiers who occupied the ports of Bangkok and Mergui. That aroused Siamese fears. The king's terminal illness persuaded the anti-Western faction of his court to act before it was too late. In a palace coup they seized and beheaded Phaulkon; the small French garrisons could not hold out for long against native opposition and were evacuated. The new Siamese policy called for minimal contact with the West. It would be 150 years before Siam's doors were opened to the outside world again.

The Fall of Lan Xang

One Laotian king, Chao Anou (Vientiane, 1805-28) attempted to shake off the Siamese yoke. The first thing he did after his coronation was to send gift-bearing ambassadors to Vietnam, Siam's new rival to the east. Next, he persuaded the Siamese to make his son governor of Champassak, giving him indirect control over two-thirds of Laos. But then he made a fatal error; thinking that the British, who had just defeated Burma, were about to invade Siam next, he led three armies against Bangkok in 1826. No British army was at Siam's door; the Siamese quickly defeated Anou, chased him to Vietnam, and pillaged Vientiane. After this Vientiane became a directly-ruled Siamese province.

The End of Champa

There are half a million Chams alive now; 300,000 live in Cambodia and most of the rest are in Vietnam and Thailand. They suffered terribly under the Pol Pot terror of the 1970s, because their distinctive clothing and practice of Islam made them obvious targets to the godless communists; half of the Cham population probably died at that time. In part because of this, today's Chams trace their family lineage through the mother, not the father.

Two Divisions of Vietnam

The transformation of Vietnam from a small compact state into a realm 1,000 miles long caused severe growing pains. Two cultures developed: a heavily populated, conservative north, and a bolder, more aggressive south. During the next three centuries Vietnam was divided twice, and the two halves were at war much of the time.

The first and shorter division came about because none of the kings after Le Thanh Tong had his ability. Between 1497 and 1527 ten weak kings rose and fell from the throne, most of them usurpers. Finally the ambitious governor of Hanoi, Mac Dang Dung, ordered the reigning monarch to commit suicide, and claimed the throne for himself. However, the deposed Le family found two generals who remained loyal to them, Nguyen Kim and his son-in-law Trinh Kiem. Between 1533 and 1545 they regained control of the lands south of the Red River delta, but then Nguyen Kim was assassinated, and his sons were too young to finish what he started. This setback prolonged the civil war until 1592, when the Le, Nguyen, and Trinh families conquered Hanoi and most of the north. The Mac rulers fled to Cao Bang, on the Chinese frontier, and there they remained, always threatening to come back, until the Chinese stopped supporting them in 1677.

Theoretically the Le monarch was in charge of the whole country again, but he was really a figurehead; the Nguyens administered the south from Hue, and the Trinhs handled the day-to-day affairs of the north from Hanoi. Now there were four dynasties (Le, Mac, Nguyen and Trinh), each claiming to be the true rulers over all of Vietnam. The Nguyens and Trinhs forgot the friendship of their ancestors, and now they got along like scorpions in a bottle. Both families prepared for war, which broke out in 1620 when the Nguyens refused to submit any longer to Hanoi. For over half a century the Trinh rulers tried in vain to conquer the south. The failure of the last campaign in 1673 was followed by a truce that lasted nearly a century. During this time both the Nguyens and Trinhs paid lip service to the Le dynasty but maintained two separate governments in the two halves of the country.

In 1772 a new civil war began. This time it was started by three brothers named Nhac, Lu, and Hue'; history calls them the Tay Son brothers, after the name of their village. Originally bandits in the Robin Hood style, the Tay Sons declared war on all three ruling houses when they gathered enough peasant support to form an army of their own. In 1777 they massacred the Nguyen family, except for one member, Nguyen Anh, who escaped. While the Tay Sons were campaigning in the north, Nguyen Anh attempted to establish himself as king of Saigon, but he was driven out by the Tay Sons in 1783. In the north the Tay Sons also succeeded, overthrowing the Le and Trinh dynasties in 1786.

For a short time Vietnam was reunited under the Tay Son brothers, but Nguyen Anh was able to make a comeback. In the meantime he had gained the friendship of a powerful French bishop, Pierre Pigneau de Behaine, who saw great opportunities for missionaries in Vietnam if he could place a pro-Christian king on the throne. Pigneau went to Paris in 1787, taking along Nguyen Anh's seven-year-old son as proof of his good faith. Unfortunately the French government was broke--it was only two years before the French Revolution would begin--so no aid came from the court of Louis XVI. All Pigneau could do was collect funds from interested merchants, which he used to hire mercenaries on the way back to Vietnam. With their help Nguyen Anh captured Saigon and the Mekong delta in 1788. Most of the mercenaries got bored and quit afterwards, but Nguyen Anh now had the power base he needed. In a series of campaigns that lasted 14 years, Nguyen Anh defeated the Tay Sons and gained control of the entire country. When Hanoi and Hue fell to his armies in 1802, he moved his capital to Hue. To signify that he now ruled all of Vietnam, he changed his name to Gia Long, a name referring to the provinces containing Saigon (Gia Dinh) and Hanoi (Thanh Long). For his French benefactor, who died in 1799, Gia Long erected a fine tomb, and during the rest of his reign (1802-19) he kept French advisors at his court. There was full toleration of missionaries during his lifetime, but his successors were less friendly to Christians. That would eventually give the French an excuse to come back in force. The French were too busy with affairs at home to get involved in Vietnam until the mid-19th century, but they would return someday, now that the door had been opened for them.

Eighteenth Century Burma & Siam

There was also trouble in Siam's vassal state to the southeast, Cambodia. In 1710 Vietnam's Nguyen monarch invaded and placed a pro-Vietnamese prince on the Cambodian throne. Siam tried to remove him but couldn't, so an agreement was reached where Cambodia paid tribute to both Siam and Vietnam. For the next century and a half Cambodia alternated between pro-Siamese and pro-Vietnamese rulers with distressing frequency.

Burma could be ignored in the 17th and early 18th centuries, but things changed suddenly when an aggressive new dynasty came to power. In the 1740s all of Burma's ethnic minorities revolted. At the same time the raja of Manipur, the nearest Indian state, regularly sent raiders into the country. The rebellions culminated in 1752 when the Mons, aided by the French, captured Ava, bringing the Toungoo dynasty to an end.

The Mon rule of Burma, however, was brief, for the Mons had defeated the Burmese king, not his people. In the same year a popular local leader, Alaungpaya, rose up and gained control of Upper Burma and the Shan states. By 1758 he had also conquered Manipur and the Mons, defeating their French allies. Siam grew alarmed and tried to start new rebellions, and Alaungpaya responded by invading Siam in 1759. First he took the ports of Moulmein, Tavoy, and Tenasserim; they have been part of Burma ever since. Ayutthaya was surrounded in the following year, but before the city could be taken, a Burmese cannon exploded, mortally wounding Alaungpaya. He died while his army retreated home.

Where Alaungpaya failed his son Hsinbyushin (1763-76) was dreadfully successful. After putting down a rebellion in Chiangmai, he invaded Siam with three armies: one followed the traditional invasion route, the Three Pagodas Pass; one came from Chiangmai, and one came from the Malay peninsula. The siege of Ayutthaya lasted fourteen months (February 1766-April 1767), and when the capital fell, the Burmese destroyed it completely. Ten thousand captives were led away to Burma, everything flammable was put to the torch, and the Burmese did not let their piety stop them from hacking gold plate off images of the Buddha. The ruined city was never rebuilt.

The Burmese army promptly withdrew after it was finished with Ayutthaya, thinking that Siam had been destroyed with its capital. However, Siam had one good leader left, a half-Chinese general named Taksin. He first gained renown when he fought the most successful holding action against the Burmese, delaying one of their armies for five months. He was put in charge of Ayutthaya's defenses, but could not launch an effective counterattack, which brought some unfair criticism from the Siamese king. Unable to make the king listen to reason, Taksin cut his way out of the doomed city with 500 followers and escaped. When he reached the Gulf of Thailand, Taksin began to raise a new army. No longer forced to fight from a fixed position, he went from victory to victory, gaining more recruits every time he won a battle. Siam was quickly liberated, and Taksin had himself crowned at a new capital, Thonburi, near the mouth of the Menam River.

The warrior king's troubles were, however, far from ended. First of all, four rivals (a prince, a monk, and two governors) claimed the throne for themselves; it took a three-year civil war (1767-70) to eliminate them. Second, Burma did not give up easily, and a follow-up invasion had to be driven back. Finally, Taksin was motivated to restore the glories of Ayutthayan Siam overnight, so he conquered Chiangmai (1776, this time for good) and Laos (1778); he also sent yet another expedition into Cambodia. Fifteen years of uninterrupted warfare took its toil; the king went insane, and declared himself a Bodhisattva (saint or living Buddha).

In 1781 the Siamese nobility decided that Taksin had to be replaced; he had become a threat to Buddhism and his country. They placed him in a monastery, and offered the crown to Chakri, Taksin's best general, who hurriedly called off the Cambodian campaign so he could accept it. But before the coronation could take place, something had to be done about Taksin. The hero of 1767 was (reluctantly) executed, which both cured the royal madness and removed the biggest challenge to Chakri's rule. Because Burma was still a threat, the capital was moved across the Menam River to Bangkok, on the east bank. Chakri went down in history as King Rama I, and the dynasty he started still rules Thailand today.

2. To give another example of the inefficiency involved, the winds and currents of the Pacific Ocean tended to push eastbound ships northward, so that a galleon sailing to Mexico usually made landfall near Monterey or San Francisco. This meant more weeks of hardship as the ship sailed down the barren California coast to Acapulco, but not until 1769 did Spain bother to settle California and give the Manila galleon rest stops on the final leg of its voyage.

3. Boat parades are a Southeast Asian tradition. The court of Siam was known for the grandest boat parades of all, and even today in modern Bangkok, the royal barges are occasionally brought out to stage this spectacle.

4. It is worth pointing out here that Borommakot is also credited with saving Therevada Buddhism in its homeland, Sri Lanka. By his time Sri Lankan Buddhism had declined so badly, in numbers and quality of teaching, that the remaining monks turned to Siam for help. Borommakot sent missions to Sri Lanka that ordained monks and purified existing teachings and practices. The school they established, called Syamvamsa, still exists today. Nowadays the Thai people claim that their country has replaced Sri Lanka as the true headquarters of Buddhism.

© Copyright 2000 Charles Kimball