Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiasoldiers who surrendered their arms after the royal court capitulation.^36
Nevertheless, one contemporary source in Mandalay reported that “by
some mistake” the British allowed five thousand Burmans to walk away
with their weapons.^37 Unlike the more modern small arms used by the
royal army, however, the Burmese “dacoits” were using flintlocks. Two
firearms captured in August 1887 and shown to James Alfred Colbeck
in Mandalay, for example, were both flintlocks. As he described them,
... one [was] a flint-lock carbine, which we found loaded and crammed
with one big bullet and four slugs; the other was on old horse pistol,
also flint-lock. Just imagine the Burmans with these rubbishy weapons
trying to resist our soldiers with rifled guns and Martini-Henry rifles.
Of course, some of the dacoits have better weapons, but hundreds of
them have only guns as I have described above, which I should be very
sorry to have to fire off, even without bullets. I should think friends
would suffer more than enemies.^38- Ivan Pavlovich Minayeff, Travels in & Diaries of India and Burma, translated by S.
Bhattacharya (Calcutta: Eastern Trading Company, 1970): 130. - Colbeck, “Mandalay in 1885–1888”, 51.
- Ibid., 72.
Figure 6.3: The razing of a rural settlement (Source: The Graphic, 1 March
1890)