Mandalay

Mandalay, whose construction began in 1857 as the capital of Upper Burma north of the British colonial border, became home to King Mindon’s splendid court two years later. With its lively urban economic-industrial trading and development activities, the city came to symbolise the revolt by the last Burmese Buddhist rulers against colonialism. The investigation of the little-researched city of Mandalay proved, like the onslaught of the apocalyptic horsemen bringing war and pestilence in their wake, to be ill-fated by the double star of the coronavirus pandemic and the military coup. The observations in this essay therefore focus predominantly on the city’s early period, ultimately posing the question of whether royal Mandalay might serve as a guideline for understanding present-day politics in Myanmar. Mandalay: Bulwark against Colonialism follows on the heels of an account of Yangon (2017) and an approach to Naypyitaw (2018, 2019) – a trilogy spotlighting the three capitals on the territory of Myanmar as urban figures in which historical epochs of upheaval and the political-economic regimes of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries played out.