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| conclusions may be
questionable, and indeed are questioned and reinterpreted above, this does not
lessen the debt owed to Luce by any student of these periods. The story of the
western discovery of Pagan is of some interest and a necessary prelude to the
chapters that follow-that in a sense are the sum, or synthesis, of these
earlier discoveries. :Marco Polo, in the late 13th century, as member of the
Mongol emperor Kublai Khan's entourage, was most likely the first European to
learn of the city. In 1298 he was to dictate, whilst in prison in Genoa:
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| You must know that at the
end of fifteen days journey lies a city called Mien (Burma) of great size and
splendour, which is the capital of the kingdom. The inhabitants are idolators
and speak a language of their own. They are subject to the Great Khan. And in
this city is a very remarkable object of which I will now tell you. Marco Polo
goes on to describe great gilded towers and the finials of monuments, "...and
round the whole circuit were little gilded bells that tinkled every rime the
wind blew through them"; just like the hti of Burma today.' Marco Polo may not
have physically visited Pagan; however, in December 1283 when the Mongols
engaged the Burmese forces at Nga-saun-gyan in the north and defeated them, it
was this battle that Polo witnessed and described in some detail in
TheTravels.As a direct consequence of the Great Khan's victory he wrote: "And
from this day forward the Khan began to have elephants in plenty. In 1795
Michael Symes led a diplomatic mission, from the Governor General of India to
the Court of Ava, and travelled up the Irrawaddy, from the coast to the
capital, passing Pagan and noting it in his account.` Symes was most likely not
the first European to spot Pagan from the river, for at least two centuries
before this Western mercenaries had been in the pay of the -various kings and
dynasties operating in the region.
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No.1: the gyi c.1855 by Colesworthy Grant from Yule's Narrative
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However, such men of action were rarely men of letters
and left no record of their impressions of the former capital. By the middle
part of the 18th century, early envoys from the East India Company had begun to
visit Ava, though they barely gave the former capital a mention in their
various reports and narratives. Pagan was not a significant staging post on the
river route, and even today steamers stop upstream at U and not at the village
itself. Thus in 1795 Michael Symes recorded his impression:
Leaving the temple at Logahnunda nanda), we approached
the once magnificent city of Pagaham. We could see little more from the river
than a few straggling houses, which have the appearance of having once been a
connected street: in fact, scarcely anything remains of ancient Pagaham, except
its numerous moulding temples, and the vestiges of an old brick fort, the
ramparts of which are still to be traced.
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| On his return journey Symes actually
visited some of the temples and mentioned the regilding and restoration
operations in progress, for it was at this time that king Bodawpaya sent the
Crown Prince, who took the title `Prince of Pagan', to supervise the
restoration of the city." It is significant that the Burmese themselves
discovered the significance, symbolic, historical or artistic, of Pagan, and
commenced restoration work there, exactly a century before the British were to
introduce `archaeology' to the region. It was close to Pagan that one of the
final engagements of the First Burmese War of 1826 was fought; Colonel Havelock
in his history of the campaign noted of the monuments:
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| The sensation of barren wonderment is the
only one which Pagaham excites. There is little to admire, nothing to venerate,
nothing to exalt the notion of the taste land invention of the people that the
traveller might have already formed in Rangoon or Prome.
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