Tigers Out, People In—The Second Founding of Chiang Mai

                                                                by Jim Goodman

Kawila's army on the march, Wat Srisupahn

       Originally founded in 1296, for over two and a half centuries Chiang Mai was the capital of the independent Kingdom of Lanna.  At its peak, Lanna ruled over most of northern Thailand and its authority extended into northeast Burma and Xishuangbanna in Yunnan, China.   But by the mid-16^th century the state had fallen into decline and Chiang Mai fell to Burmese armies from Pegu in 1558.  Lanna became a semi-autonomous vassal state of Burma for over a century, then was incorporated into the Burmese Kingdom as a province and ruled directly by Burmese governors. 

       At the pinnacle of its power, in 1767 Burma conquered and destroyed Ayutthaya, the capital of its hereditary rival Siam.  Down but not out, the Siamese recovered under King Taksin and began a long struggle to expel the Burmese from the land.  Some places, like Lampang, 100 km south of Chiang Mai, had already reclaimed their independence from Burma and in an alliance with Taksin’s forces, in 1774 drove the Burmese garrison out of Chiang Mai. 

ruins of the wall and bastion on the nw corner

       Peace didn’t last long, though, for the Burmese launched a nearly successful counter-attack two years later.  Not feeling strong enough yet to withstand another attack, the defenders abandoned the city and removed what was left of its local population to Lampang.  With most of its fortifications, palaces and temples heavily damaged by years of conflict, Chiang Mai became a ghost city, its ruins the haunt of tigers and wild elephants from the forest just to its west.

       In 1782 the Chakri Dynasty took power in Siam and moved the capital to Bangkok.  King Rama I, who had been one of the commanders who expelled the Burmese from Chiang Mai, appointed his ally Prince Kawila of Lampang as King of the re-established state of Lanna.  It would not be fully independent, as in the past, but as a vassal state of Siam, yet would still recoup its former glory.  And so would Chiang Mai, its capital once again.

       The problem was that there were not enough people around to be able to do this.  Decades of war had devastated northern Thailand and all the cities north of Lampang were empty.  Persuading people to leave their forest retreats and return to rebuild didn’t seem to work.  So for the next several years Kawila’s armies embarked on what were called missions of ‘collecting vegetables for baskets and collecting people for the cities.’ 

guardian lions onrth of the city

       Mostly these expeditions went north, to Kengtung in northeast Burma and over into Xishuangbanna.  Their objective was to capture people to repopulate Chiang Mai and other cities.  This was not something unprecedented.  For centuries states in the region had been doing the same thing to each other.  The winners abducted people from the losers’ territories and brought them back to live within their own countries.  They waged war for resources and people were prime resources, especially crafts workers.

       Finally, in 1791, fifteen years after the tigers took over Chiang Mai, Kawila began his reconstruction program.  He had the original moats renovated, rebuilt the brick walls and city gates, restored the most important temples, constructed new palaces and eradicated the wild animal presence.  Reviving old Lanna customs, he reinstalled the sacred city pillar and later built shrines for protective animal spirits at two locations north of the city.  One was a pair of white elephant statues and the other a pair of white lions.  Then he began moving people into the city starting with the former residents who had been shifted to Lampang.  They were Tai Yuan people, from the majority ethnic population in the north.  And for some time only Tai Yuan people were permitted to live within the walled old city.

rounding up theTai Khoen

the chedi at Wat Ku Tao

       The Tai Khoen from Kengtung and the Tai Lu from Xishuangbanna were settled in Haiya, the area south of the old city that used to be inhabited by the Tai Yuan commoners, when only the royal family, high-ranking nobles and monks lived within the walled area.  Both the Tai Khoen and the Tai Lu are culturally close to the Tai Yuan.  Their dialects are very similar.  They use the same alphabet, follow the same monastic orders and their former ruling families were related.  They apparently didn’t have any trouble fitting in to the Tai Yuan polity.

Chakravartin Buddha at Wat Ku Tao

Shan girls at Wat Ku Tao

       In 1796, five hundred years after its original birth, with enough people on hand now to cheer his procession, Kawila had himself crowned as king in resurrected Chiang Mai.  With a further nod to tradition, he and his entourage entered the old city by the northern gate, the same route taken by Mengrai, Lanna’s first King, and all of his successors.  Security was still a priority, though, for the Burmese were still a threat.  Kawila had an earthen wall built around the southern and eastern suburbs and this helped stop a final Burmese attack in 1802.  Shortly after this, Kawila expelled the Burmese from their last stronghold in Chiang Saen and from then on northern Thailand lived in peace.

music at the Wat Ku Tao festival

Wat Papao

       With this victory, followed by more ‘collecting people’ among the Tai Yong and Shan, Kawila assured the revival of the Lanna state and the prestige of Chiang Mai.  But just as it was not quite the Lanna state of old, it was not the same kind of Chiang Mai this incarnation.  In the past, Chiang Mai had some resident foreign traders and diplomats, but now it had entire neighborhoods settled by outsiders.  From now on it could no longer be identified as a Tai Yuan city.

       This trend continued for the next century as other Lanna cities revived and the north became more integrated with the rest of Thailand.  The last of the people-collecting missions ended with the captured Tai Yong of northeast Burma, removed to resettle Lamphun, 30 km south.  Afterwards it was a normal immigration process, though communities settled in certain exclusive areas.  The Tai Yai, or Shan, moved into the area north of the old city and in the early 20^th century Chinese settled along the Ping River, where today they dominate the big riverside markets.

lacquer ware at Wat Nantharam

       Though they have long been an integral part of Northern Thai society, many of these ‘outsiders’ have kept up their own distinct customs.  The Chinese have their Mahayana Buddhist temples and stage elaborate New Year celebrations in the riverside Warorot Market.  The Shans took over maintenance of Wat Chiang Yeun, the only temple undamaged by the Burmese wars, and erected two of their own.

       Wat Ku Tao, about two km north of the old city, is distinguished by its unusual old chedi, shaped like a stack of begging bowls.  It was built in the late 16^th century during the Burmese occupation and holds the ashes of the first Burmese prince appointed to the throne of Lanna.  The two-story viharn, or main worship hall, is new and in the Thai style.  The large, seated Buddha in the upper floor hall wears a crown, regal garments and ornaments, a style known as the Chakravartin—Universal Ruler.  It symbolizes a period when the Buddhist Dharma will prevail all over the world.

Wat Nantharam

       At the beginning of the Buddhist retreat season the local Shan hold a festival in the compound.  Dressed in their best traditional clothing, they throng the compound from mid-morning.  Festivals are market venues as well, so some set up stalls to sell temple offerings, jewelry, clothing, fruits, drinks and snacks.  Others light incense sticks and place flowers at the shrines and inside the viharn, paste gold leaf wafers onto Buddha images and, more and more often every year, use their cell phones and selfie-sticks to record their devotional exercises.

       The activities are both religious and secular.  Inside the ground level hall devotees listen to monks’ sermons and beneath one of the compound’s leafy big trees sit while monks recite passages from scriptures.  In another area an impromptu music session takes place, with flutes, gongs and a long ‘elephant-leg’ drum. 

      The other main Shan temple is Wat Papao, across the moat on the other side of the northeast corner of the old city.  With its triple-roofed entrance gate, bell-like chedi and multi-tiered viharn, it follows the Shan style in northeast Burma.  It’s also more of a Shan cultural center, for the signs are in the Shan language and script and stalls in the compound sell Shan specialties like cheroots. 

Wat Srisuphan--the Silver Temple

       The biggest Shan festival, Por Sang Long, takes place here late March or early April.  It is a rite of passage for boys 7-14, who dress like princes in gorgeous clothes and jewelry to symbolize the life of the Buddha before he left his royal palace to seek Enlightenment.  After three days of music, dancing, games and a colorful procession, the boys exchange their fancy garments for monastic robes and enroll in the monastery as novices for a few months.

       As for the earlier settlers from Burma, the Tai Khoen forcibly resettled in Haiya, their neighborhood became an important part of the city’s crafts tradition, particularly lacquer ware and silver.  Workshops in the lanes around Wat Nantharam produced bowls, vases, platters, trays and containers of all shapes and sizes, lacquered in red, gold and black.  The lustrous surface finish is so durable that antique lacquer ware, like that on display in the Wat Natharam museum, looks like it was just made yesterday.

craftsman at work,Wat Srisuphan

       Wat Nantharam is also famous as a traditional medicine center.  It is one of several temples serving the Haiya neighborhoods.  But the most important, the cultural hub of Haiya, is Wat Srisuphan, just off Wualai Road, the street that runs diagonally through the district.  Shops selling silver jewelry and other silver items dominate Wualai and craftsmen work at little stalls in the adjoining lanes.

       Wat Srisuphan was built in 1501, when Lanna was still a strong, independent kingdom.  At the time, it was one of the eight holiest temples surrounding the center of Chiang Mai.  Hardly anything remains of the original structures, though, for it has been renovated many times since.  During the Second World War, when Thailand was temporarily allied with Japan, the Japanese Army used the temple compound as a military base, with soldiers quartered just outside the walls.  Consequently, it suffered from a rare Allied bombing raid.  One of the bombs blew up the main worship hall--the viharn.

monk in the workshop, Wat Srisuphan

     After the war the local people gradually restored the buildings, added more, upgraded the decorations, installed new statues and in recent decades turned the compound into a showcase for the Haiya silver crafts community.  From 2005 workers began covering the exterior walls of the ubosot (ordination hall) with sculpted metal plates depicting a great variety of figures and scenes.  The work was completed only a couple years ago and Wat Srisuphan now is famously known as the Silver Temple.

       The plates are only silver in color though, for they are made from aluminum.  Yet the work, carried out in the compound’s own workshop, is truly impressive, both for its skill and for some of its unusual themes.   On each side of the entrance stairs are mythological scenes of devatas (Buddhist angels) flying over churning oceans.  On the back wall is a scene of the Buddha, in gold, preaching to an assembly of devotees.  On the side walls are vignettes of daily life, like riding ox carts, building houses, carrying water and so on.

       Such scenes are also commonly portrayed in the interior wall murals of many temple buildings in the city.  Unique to the Silver Temple are the panels depicting the Haiya community’s history, with Kawila’s army on the march and his mounted soldiers rounding up people in Kengtung.  Also unique are decorative plaques that have nothing to do with religion, like the emblems of the ASEAN nations, pictures of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, capital cities of the modern world, famous buildings like Stonehenge, the Hagia Sophia Mosque, the catacombs of Alexandria, the Porcelain Pagoda of Nanjing, etc. and cartoon characters like Spiderman.

Alexandria catacombs, Hagia Sophia Mosque

       The identifying captions beneath these plaques are all in English, another indication of the temple’s new reach out to the tourist crowds.  Next to the ubosot is a small museum honoring the community’s top silver and lacquer ware specialists, with biographies and samples of their work.  The workshop next to the viharn is still active every day and the temple offers tourists classes in silver craftwork.  It also has a ‘Monk Chat’ program for visitors to talk with English-speaking monks about Buddhism or learn about meditation.

       The moats, bastions, restored old temples and city gates, what passes for the main tourist attractions in Chiang Mai, are the visible legacy of Kawila’s reconstruction.  More important was the demographic change he introduced, the precedent he set for adding to the local population people from far beyond Chiang Mai,  As a result, the culture of Chiang Mai today is richer than it ever was, even in Lanna’s Golden Age.

village life, a panel on the Silver Temple

                                                                    * * *   

      

      

      

       

SHAN STATE GETAWAY

                                                        by Jim Goodman

    Visitors to Mandalay arrange their itineraries around visits to Myanmar’s former royal cities.  They tour the temples and historic ruins of Inwa, Amarapura, Sagaing and Mandalay itself, the last of the nation’s royal capitals before the British terminated the institution.  Yet not far away, around six hours by car to the northeast, lies another former royal capital, Shan not Burmese, known as Hsipaw by its Shan inhabitants and Thibaw by the Burmese.  It was once an autonomous state of its own, ruled by its own saopha, one of many such little princely realms that were eventually consolidated into the single political unit now known as Shan State.

Hsipaw lies on the banks of the Dokhtawaddy River

    Hsipaw has been drawing an increasing number of visitors in the past few years.  They come to enjoy a very different kind of royal city adventure than the one experienced around Mandalay.  The town is not very big, nor plagued by any traffic noise, and easy enough to explore on foot.  It lies along a picturesque river, bounded by hills on all sides, and close to a typically old-fashioned rural environment.  Though ancient monuments and important temples are among its features, most travelers spend little time checking them out and are more interested in tours by boat to Shan villages to visit traditional stilted houses and observe Shan farmers in the fields.  Second choice is usually a trek to a Palaung village, passing by a particularly striking waterfall.  Rather than a succession of temples and urban neighborhoods, Hsipaw’s guests opt instead for the pleasures of rural outings.
    The town itself feels like a true farmers’ city.  Other than an old cinema, there are no entertainment venues and the streets are nearly empty by nine p.m.  Farmers fill the morning market along the Dokhtawaddy River long before dawn, while activity in the town’s central market starts tapering off by eight a.m.  Bullock carts ramble through the streets as often as cars.  No one appears to be in any kind of hurry.  And all the women seem to carry their goods on their heads.

a common sight on the streets of Hsipaw

    Yet for all its relaxed atmosphere and relative isolation from the main currents of commerce and communication in the country, Hsipaw has in the past played important roles in Myanmar’s long history.  As the Shan state nearest to the new Burmese state of Bagan, it was the first ally the Bagan king sought when facing war with the Pyu and Kayan.  Paw Pan, the younger brother of Hsipaw’s ruling saopha, led the first-ever Shan delegation to a Burmese state.  Impressed with the treaty terms offered by Bagan, Paw Pan’s favorable report persuaded the saopha to dispatch troops, elephants and cavalry to Bagan, turning the tide against the Pyu and Kayan. 
    Some years later a succession struggle broke out in Hsipaw and Paw Pan usurped the throne without securing the customary approval of the Mong Mao saopha.  The latter’s son subsequently led an army against Hsipaw and Paw Pan capitulated at once.  The victor then had Paw Pan, his family, followers, horses and elephants all massacred together at a site called Tong Suat.  A temple and shrine then went up over the spot, now about two kilometers northwest of the town, and Paw Pan was declared Hsipaw’s official guardian spirit.  Whether Paw Pan was informed of his ultimate post-mortem role before he was killed is not known.
    Centuries later, with the rise to power of Bayinnaung, Burma once again had a strong and ambitious king.  After uniting the vassal states along the Ayeyarwadi River, Bayinnaung then launched a campaign against Siam.  The state of Hsipaw supplied the elephants and the cavalry for the invasion force.  In 1569 Ayutthya fell and among the treasures seized in the conquest were a number of ancient Khmer bronzes, which Thai armies had looted from Angkor when they sacked that city in 1431.  When he returned to his own capital Bayinnaung passed through Hsipaw.  In a farewell ceremony at Bagyo Paya, the king donated three of the bronzes to his Shan ally, which the saopha had installed in a separate shrine still standing in the pagoda’s courtyard.

Bagyo Paya temple

    Bagyo Paya, just 8 km southwest of Hsipaw, is the most important Shan pagoda in the northern Shan States.  Its annual festival, staged the week running up through the full moon of the Burmese month of Tabaung (Feb-Mar) attracts masses of Shan and Palaung pilgrims, with Buddhist Jataka stories staged every night.  Local people claim the site has been sacred for 2000 years and that the original chedi, complete with its own umbrella, is encased within the large and ornate one visible today.  Over the centuries devotees have added more elaborate elements to the building, culminating in the 1995 restoration, which re-gilded the spires and added intricate glass decorations to the supporting columns.  The top of the sagawa tree beside the pagoda bends over towards the spire, paying obeisance, say the Shan, to the relics housed within,
    Despite its antiquity, though, its beautiful modern embellishments tend to impinge upon its historical atmosphere.  But for authentic ruins and relics of Hsipaw’s past glory, one needs to go outside the northern end of the town, turning west past the shrine to Paw Pan, to the quiet and evocative site known locally as Little Bagan.  This is an area around the 150 year-old stilted wooden monastery of Mahananda Kantha, comprising several groups of even older chedis, some whitewashed, some plain brick, that date back to the time Hsipaw was located here, 4 km northwest of the town center today.

stupas in "Little Bagan"

    In the 1860’s King Mindon, Burma’s penultimate monarch, adopted the Hsipaw saopah’s son and raised him in the Mandalay palace.  In 1876, when it was time for him to return to Hsipaw and take on duties as the new saopha, this foster son asked King Mindon for permission to rebuild Hsipaw next to the Dokhtawaddy River, with a grid copying that of Mandalay, with its regular blocks and right-angle turns and intersections.  The king granted it and Hsipaw’s residents relocated the entire city from Little Bagan to the land along the river, laying it out just like Mandalay.  The saopha even had a temple built on a hillock approaching the city that included a standing Buddha image with its arm extended, pointing towards the town center, replicating the image on Mandalay Hill that points to the old royal palace.  He also renovated and expanded the grounds of the town’s main Buddhist temple, the Mahamatyamuni Paya, modeled on the Mahamuni Paya of Mandalay.

pillar at Mahamatyamuni Temple

    The saopha did not, however, copy the Mandalay Palace, but instead lived in a grand, Shan-style mansion outside the town.  When he died his ashes were interred in an elegant mausoleum on a hill just southwest of the town.  It still stands, though weeds and shrubs seem about to take it over.  Bombs destroyed his old palace in World War II and its replacement, just north of the town, looks more like a modest English country house, all but bereft of indigenous architectural motifs.  British influence was paramount by then, for just over a decade after Hsipaw’s relocation the British came to occupy Upper Burma. 
    Until they left after 1948, the British brought the accoutrements of colonialism to Hsipaw, elements which have now become absorbed into the town’s contemporary character.  Thus, Hsipaw, like so many other Burmese towns and cities, also has a clock tower, symbolizing the British attempt to make their subjects aware of the passage of time, when prior to their arrival it did not matter so much.  Besides the magnificent Mahamatyamuni Temple the town has several other Buddhist pagodas, both within the town, on its outskirts, and on the hills around it.  But now it also has a big mosque, Hindu temples, Christian churches and a Chinese Mahayana temple, all of which still serve the religions of the communities brought in by imperialism. 

colonial era buildings

Hsipaw's clock tower

    Besides adding a bit of variety to Hsipaw’s architecture, this outsider legacy of colonialism means visitors can enjoy different kinds of food during their stay—Shan, Chinese, Indian and Burmese.   Shan cuisine resembles that found in northern Thailand, with its sundry noodle dishes, grilled items and fish or meat steamed in leaves.  A Burmese meal revolves around a selected curry, served with rice, soup, and several side dishes of vegetables that are steamed, grilled, boiled, raw, or pickled.  Even washed down with a big bottle of good Myanmar beer the set meal costs less than three dollars.
    As a typical small city in a very underdeveloped country, Hsipaw also boasts the unusual attraction of old-fashioned small factories that provide a few more interesting distractions for those coming from the advanced countries of the West (and for that matter most of Southeast Asia).  Visitors can watch the production of noodles, popcorn, sandals and cheroots.  With boat trips and day-treks available, hilltop temples with great views of the city and its surroundings constantly beckoning, fine-looking buildings, good food and a friendly local population, it’s no wonder that nearly every visitor to Hsipaw adds another day or two to the original amount of time intended to explore this fascinating Shan destination.

the ruins of "Little Bagan" on Hsipaw's original site

                                                                       * * *