The Land of the Great Image

"This is the earliest book on my list. Collis was an administrator in colonial Burma for a good 20 years, and his many books on the country (Trials in Burma, Lords of the Sunset, inter alia) are among the best of the late colonial period. This one is a curious departure – an account of a Portuguese missionary’s hair-raising travels between 1628 and 1636, from Goa to the west coast of Burma, in the Bay of Bengal. (Not so curious a departure perhaps, since, as Collis reminds us, ‘Portuguese Asia is the seed from which grew the British Dominion in Asia.’) The journey of Sebastião Manrique, the Augustinian friar on whose diaries the book is based, is fraught with horrors of the kind especially reserved for missionaries braving the Far East. Pirates and slave-raiders. Tigers and floods. Pagan rites. The mass suicide of Hindu pilgrims in shark-infested waters. Ants. Manrique eventually ends up in Arakan, then a powerful kingdom on Burma’s west coast, where he finds himself at the seething centre of an Oriental court. Even for a worldly Portuguese friar schooled in the intricate workings of the Inquisition, the court of King Thiri-thu-dhamma is bewildering, if not terrifying – riven as it is with occult rituals, murderous intrigues and obsession with white elephants. Apart from being terrific entertainment, and wonderfully droll in places, Land of the Great Image makes an important contribution to the literature of dynastic lunacy. The same blend of megalomania and mysticism witnessed by Manrique in the 17th century – the same delusions of divinity inherent in Burmese despots – are in florid evidence to this very day."