CULTURE

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After their wedding, Supayalat defied her mother and stayed in Thibaw’s quarters, and thereafter she did everything in her power to prevent him from taking on new wives and concubines, de rigueur for a Burmese monarch. When a certain Myoza of Yanaung urged Thibaw to take the 17-year-old Mi Hkin-gyi as his minor wife, Supayalat had both the Pandarus and the would-be Cressida executed, and she treated similarly any maid of honor that happened to catch Thibaw’s eye. She also believed that her son’s nurse had poisoned him; the nurse’s fate was thereby sealed. "If she liked you," said a Mandalay abbot, "she loved you; if she hated you, she killed you." Murder was not her only weapon. On one occasion she told the famously moderate and competent minister Kin Wun Mingyi that he was acting like a woman, and she even sent him a set of woman’s clothes. Apparently this is the gravest of insults to Burmese manhood. In The Lacquer Lady, F Tennyson Jesse dramatizes the queen’s cruelty by showing Supayalat’s maids of honor pummeling "Ma Khingyi" (presumably the same as Mi Hkin-gyi) under the pretext of playfully dousing her with water. The queen’s Schadenfreude jumps off the page. She was vicious but she was also frivolous. She liked to have a good time. She was very protective of her "red velvet swing with golden tassels," says Jesse. She had a weakness for jewelry, and one of her last acts as queen included the intended purchase of 70,000 rupees worth of fashionable clothing and, in her vague words, "interesting and unusual things." Blackburn gives us this account of her attire: "Suphayarlat wore a ‘huge diamond necklace some three or four rows deep, while a sort of coronet, set with rubies, emeralds, and diamonds was fixed in the folds of her hair just above her forehead.’ She was observed to be wearing English shoes, unusual for someone who supposedly detested anything Western." And especially anything English. According to Jesse, Supayalat hated the English "unless they amused her." This is hardly surprising given what they did to her. The British stole much of her property and all of her authority; exiled her to the coast of western India, the culture and soggy climate of which she shunned; and gave her what she considered to be an insufficient pension. "Our lot is already too hard," she protested to the Governor of Bombay. "The tale of our domestic woes is too long to narrate here … We are torn from our natural home and are interned in a land which is utterly foreign to us." One local official reported that in India Supayalat seemed to be "moping to death." Meanwhile Thibaw, who had never really wanted to be king anyway, was relatively content. Of course in some measure Supayalat was only getting her comeuppance. Historians blame her for the swift capitulation of Upper Burma to the British, not to mention the countless atrocities against her own people. And she blamed herself too. Little could she have known that some Burmese would later use her as "proof" that the governing of Burma could not be entrusted to a woman. If Supayalat proved anything, it was that the stereotype of the pliant, subordinate Asian female is specious. Whatever else one may think of her—that she was wicked or simply stupid—she held, for a moment, a country in the palm of her hand.