Nanmadaw Me Nu နန္းမေတာ္ မယ္ႏု, Sagaing Min စစ္ကိုင္းမင္း / ဘၾကီးေတာ္ Bagyitaw, and the First Anglo Burmese War
I began this blog as about Nanmadaw Me Nu နန္းမေတာ္ မယ္ႏု alone, a queen who was not of royal birth but became chief queen of the Bagyitaw / Sagaing king စစ္ကိုင္းမင္း. She and her brother Lord of Salin Maung O စလင္းစားေမာင္အို were the true powers in the court of Ava during the later years of the reign of the Sagaing king. However, as the First Anglo Burmese War and the life of the Sagaing Min cannot be left out and just a short mention about them would make it incomplete, I have included more about them and also about the crown prince Tharawaddy သာယာ၀တီမင္းသား who later revolted and dethroned his elder brother the king Sagaing and ascended the throne himself_ in order that readers will not have to refer elsewhere to understand the complex situation in Myanmar at the time.
I wish to thank Maung Kyaw Shin ေမာင္ေက်ာ္ရွင္း (the late U Kyaw Shin), who’s book Withayta NaeMyae ၀ိေသသနယ္ေျမ inspired me to begin this blog and from which I obtained much data to begin with, and also to various sources on the internet, especially the Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica which I enriched my blog. However, I find differences between Maung Kyawt Shin (who had researched extensively from Myanmar sources and the others on the internet_ the year an episode occured and whether Prince Tharawaddy was or not a crown prince, for example_ I put my faith on Maung Kyawt Shin as he quoted from the original Myanmar sources whereas, in my view, the internet versions are written by non-Burmese, from second hand sources_ translated or verbal data of modern Burmese historians.
*Nanmadaw Me Nu* နန္းမေတာ္ မယ္ႏု; 18 June 1783 (၁၁၄၆ 1784/85) – 12 May 1840 (၁၂၀၂ 1840/41) was one of the few strong Queens in Myanmar history and she was the main character in Myanmar government of the time and the First Anglo Burmese War. She was born a commoner but rose to fame or notoriety. *Nanmataw Me Nu*was mother of *Queen (Hsinbyumashin *ဆင္ျဖဴမရွင္ မိဖုရား*) of King Mindon
* မင္းတုန္းမင္း who herself was mother of Burma’s last queen* Supayalat
**စုဖုရားလတ္*. The *female lineage* of Nanmataw Me Nu, Hsinphyumashin and Supayalat in the *male dominnated Burmese monarchy* is a very intersting one regarding the *end of Independence**and* the *monarchy*.
She was the *chief queen of King Bagyidaw*ဘၾကီးေတာ္မင္း* / Sagaing Min *စစ္ကိုင္းမင္း ofKonbaung dynasty
of Burma
from 1819 to 1837. Married to Prince of Sagaing (as king Bagyidaw / Sagaing Min was then) in 1801, Me Nu became Chief queen (when Bagyidaw ascended the throne on 5 June 1819), with the title *"Namadaw Mibaya Khaunggyi"* (Chief Queen of the Royal Palace) and also known as *"Taung Nann San Miphayargyi"* ေတာင္နန္းစံမိဖုရားၾကီး (Queen of the South palace_south palace is the palace of chief queens).
Born (သကၠရာဖ္ ၁၁၄၆ 1784/85) at *Phalankhone village *ဖလံခံုရြာ 5 miles northwest of present day town of Khin Oo ခင္ဦး, she was named *Shin Min Nu* ရွင္မင္းႏု and she was great grand daughter of the hero Bala Thaman ဗလသမန္း who was posted to the Phalankhone village fort ဖလံခံုရြာ တပ္စခန္း during the reign of king Maharajadipadi မဟာရာဇာဓိပတိမင္း of Nyaungyan dynasty ေညာင္ရမ္းေခာတ္ to guard against the danger of Manipuris မဏိပူရ ကသည္း
The third daughter of Bala Thaman was Thakhin Mun သခင္မြန္. Her son was Htaung Thinn Hmu Thiha Kyawswar ေထာင္သင္းမွူး သီဟေက်ာ္စြာ. (name U Hlote ဦးလႈပ္). Shin Min Nu was born of Thiha Kyawswar U Hlote and his wife Daw Nge ေဒၚငယ္
*King Bodawpaya
*ဘိုးေတာ္ ဘုရား* / Badon Min* ပဒံုမင္း also known as *Bodaw U Waing* ဘိုးေတာ္ ဦး၀ိုင္း made his eldest son *Thado Minsaw
* crown prince on သကၠရာဇ္ ၁၁၄၅ ခု၊ ဒုတိယ၀ါဆို လဆန္း ၁၂ ရက္ေန႔ 1783 Jun / Jul with the title of "Thiri Maha""Dhammar Bizaya Thiha Thura"သီရိမဟာဓမၼာဘိဇယသီဟသူရ " "and gave him the"Depeyin "cavalry ဒီပဲရင္းျမင္းစု.
The "Phalankhone" village squire "ywar sarr Thway Thauk MyinSi "ရြာစားေသြးေသာက္ျမင္းစီး" "(cavalry trooper) "Thiha Kyawswar U Hlote" of the "Depeyin"cavalry was transferred from Phalankhone village to serve at the Amarapura Naypyitaw အမရပူရ ေနျပည္ေတာ္ capital. He went there with his wife, son, daughter, uncle, aunt etc. Before the two months is up after reaching the Amarapura Naypyitaw, on the day of သကၠရာဇ္ ၁၁၄၆ ခု၊ ၀ါဆို လျပည့္ေက်ာ္ ၅ ရက္၊ အဂၤါေန႔ နံနက္ပိုင္း 1784 Jun / Jul, "Shin Min Nu" was born of "U Hlote"’s wife "Daw Nge".
When "Shin Min Nu" was about 7 – 8 years age, she learned the basic teachings of သင္ပုန္းၾကီး၊ မဂၤလသုတ္၊ အတြင္းေအာင္ျခင္း၊ အျပင္ေအာင္ျခင္း၊ ရတနာေရႊခ်ိဳင့္၊ နမကၠာရ၊ ေလာကနီတိ၊ ပရိတ္ၾကီး၊ ဆုမၼစာ၊ ဇာတ္ေတာ္ၾကီး ဆယ္ဘြဲ႔ စေသာ အေျခခံ စာမ်ား from her younger brother "Maung O"ေမာင္အို as girls were not allowed to attend the monastery schools which were the only schools at the time.
When she was 12 years age and her father became Htaung Thinn Hmu she was selected to become a maid at the South Palace. Sagaing prince Maung Shwe Zin (Maung Maung Sein), born 23 July 1784, fell in love with the South Palace maid Mae Nu. However, marriage between them was impossible. Badon Min / King Badon bethroted his grandson Sagaing prince to Hsinphyushinmae princess ဆင္ျဖဴရွင္မယ္ မင္းသမီး
*King Bagyidaw* (Burmese
: ဘၾကီးေတာ္; also known as *Sagaing Min *စစ္ကိုင္းမင္း ; 23 July 1784 – 15 October 1846) was the seventh king
of Konbaung dynasty
of Burma
from 1819 until his abdication in 1837. He was born 23 July 1784 and his parents were king Bodawpaya
and Min Kye, Princess of Taungdwin. Prince of Sagaing
, as he was commonly known in his day, was *selected ascrown prince
* by his *grandfather King Bodawpaya
*in *1808*, and *became king in 1819* after Bodawpaya’s death. Bagyidaw moved the capital from Amarapura
back to Ava
in 1823.
In *1812*, his first wife *Princess Hsinbyume died of childbirth in Mingun
*. He took on *five *more wivesas crown prince (of the *eventual number of 23 queens*). His *third* and later *chief queen *was*Nanmadaw Me Nu
*
* *
On 9 February 1803, the *18-year-old prince married 14-year-old Princess Hsinbyume*, a granddaughter of Bodawpaya
On သကၠရာဇ္ ၁၁၇၀ ျပည့္ႏွစ္၊ တန္ခူးလဆန္း ၁၄ ရက္ေန႔ April 1808, the crown prince *Thado Minsaw
*died at age 45. His son and grandson of King Bodawpaya, the Sagaing prince became the crown prince Nine days later. The prince was also allowed to inherit his father’s fiefs of *Dabayin* / Depeyin and *Shwedaung*.
His elevation to crown prince also brought his royal servants, including *Maung Yit *(later Gen.Maha Bandula
) of Dabayin and *Maung Sa* (laterLord of Myawaddy
) of Sagaing to prominence. Myawaddy became his longtime adviser and personal secretary ("atwinwn") until his abdication in 1837. He promoted Maung Yit to governor of Ahlon-Monywa.
At သကၠရာဇ္ ၁၁၇၄ ခု၊ သိတင္းကြ်တ္လျပည့္ေက်ာ္ ၇ ရက္ေန႔ 1812 October, Hsinphyushinmae princess died seven days after the birth of her first son who would later be known as Setkyar Min Thar စၾကာမင္းသား / Nyaungyan prince ေညာင္ရမ္းမင္းသား Before long, Shin Min Nu became the crown princess and for this she faced severe criticism and opposition by the royalty.
Nanmataw Me Nu while being a crown princess had a daughter who died soon after birth and a son, Prince of Palaing, who died young at age of six (some say_ ten).
On 5 June 1819, Sagaing ascended the throne after the death of the king Badon. Shin Min Nu became the "Taung Nann San Agga Mahaythi Miphayagaunggyi" ေတာင္နန္းစံ အဂၢမေဟသီ မိဖုရားေခါင္ၾကီး (Chief Queen of the south palace) and came to be known as Nanmataw Me Nu နန္းမေတာ္ မယ္ႏု
King Badon had 61 daughters, 106 grand daughters. His son, the first crown prince *Thado Minsaw
* had 26 daughters. There were many daughters of other kings, princes, princesses, Sawbwas / Saophas, Lords, Governors more suitable to become "Taung Nann San Agga Mahaythi". Therefore Shin Min Nu was disliked and critized by the court.
However, King Sagaing and Nanmataw Me Nu were inseparable. Nanmataw Me Nu sat beside the king on the throne during ceremonies and the palanquin of the queen went beside that of the king on their outings. Thus they were referred to as the Two Royals / Shin Hna-parr ရွင္ႏွစ္ပါး rather than the King and Queen ရွင္ဘုရင္ႏွင့္ မိဖုရား as was the court etiquette previously.
*Prince of Sagaing* was fond of shows, theater, elephant catching and boat racing and so was his younger brother Prince Tharrawaddy. When his elder brother Bagyidaw
ascended the throne in 1819, Tharrawaddy was appointed* crown prince.*
On သကၠရာဇ္ ၁၁၈၃ ခု၊ တန္ေဆာင္မုန္းလျပည့္ေက်ာ္ ၁၃ ရက္ေန႔ 1821 November, Nanmataw Me Nu gave birth to a daughter. She was later well known as Hsinphyumashin Me Thae ဆင္ျဖဴမရွင္ မိသဲ, *Queen (Hsinbyumashin *ဆင္ျဖဴမရွင္ မိဖုရား*) of King Mindon
* မင္းတုန္းမင္း and *mother of Burma’s last queen Supayalat
**စုဖုရားလတ္*. The princess was given Sagaing, Depeyin, Momeik, Pakhangyi, Sint Kuu, Ingapu, Myehte, Padaung and Kyankhin towns in addition to many jewelry.
- bodawpaya’s grandson, king bagyidaw
*moved
the court
back*
