Mrauk-U: City of the Monkey Egg

Screened from the Ayeyarwady Valley by a long wall of jungle covered mountains, Rakhaing (aka ‘Arakan’) State in the northwest of Burma is today one of the most remote, under-developed parts of the country. Yet 350 years ago, its coastal strip formed the heartland of a prosperous and powerful kingdom presided over by the most cosmopolitan court in the history of southeast Asia.

Its capital was Mrauk-U (literally “Monkey Egg”), a port founded in 1430 by King Naramithla after he’d returned from exile in Bengal. Naramithla had fled his homeland following an invasion by the Burmese, and spent three decades across the border in the Bengali city of Gaur, soaking up its refined Turko-Afghan culture.

Thirty years later, his own court at Arakan would be no less sophisticated and hybrid that that of his former Bengali hosts. Buddhist traditions co-mingled fruitfully with those of Indo-Islamic India. Dance, music, poetry and philosophical debate flourished, both in Arakanese and Bengali. And a wealth of splendid pagodas, temples and palaces were erected on the banks of the River Kaladan.

Bolstered by thriving maritime trade, the new capital swelled to 160,000 inhabitants by the mid-15th century, attracting not just settlers from the hinterland, but Burmese, Bengalis, Afghans, Persians, Thais, Abyssinians and Japanese Christians, as well as Dutch and Portuguese fortune seekers. The king even boasted a personal bodyguard of Samurai warriors.

The accommodating spirit of the Arakanese court, however, would prove its downfall. In 1657, the Mughal prince Sha Shuha, son of the recently deceased Emperor Shah Jahan and former governor of Bengal, took refuge in Mrauk-U after a failed bid for his father’s throne. The royal fugitive and his entourage were generously received, but soon tired of their hosts’ generosity and made an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Arakanese king, ultimately paying for their hubris with their heads.

The executions, however, infuriated Shah Shuha’s brother, the new Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, who dispatched a punitive army to annexe the eastern portions of Bengal occupied by the Arakans, which effectively cut them off from their main source of prosperity at that time: slaves.

The loss was the beginning of the end Mrauk-U. With the Dutch discouraged by the Mughals from trading with Arakan, the port went into decline, the countryside lapsed into poverty, and in 1784, the Kingdom of Ava finally succumbed to another Burmese invasion. Hundreds of thousands of Arakanese men, women and children were massacred or taken prisoner, and the very symbol of their sovereignty, the Maha Muni image, was carried off across the hills to the Ayeyarwady plains.

Mrauk-U never recovered from the sacking. Marooned 65 km upriver from the coast, the vestiges of Naramithla’s once resplendent capital now stand forlorn maid the jungle, shrouded in cooking fires from the farming village that now nestles in the shadows of its ruined pagodas.