How Reliable is U Kala's Burmese Chronicle? Some New Comparisons

Dados Bibliográficos

ID8065551
AutoresVictor Lieberman (autor correspondente)
Ano1986
Volume17
Fascículo2
Páginas236-255
Data de publicação1986-09-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of Southeast Asian Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0022-4634 • E-ISSN: 1474-0680
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s002246340000103x
OpenAlexW2120918110
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas6
Referências citadas20

Rarely has a national historiographic tradition depended so heavily on a single author as the Burmese tradition has on U Kala. A native of Ava in Upper Burma, U Kala completed the so-called “Great Chronicle”, the Maha-ya-zawin-gyi , in the early eighteenth century. Beginning, logically enough, with the start of the current world cycle and the Buddhist version of ancient Indian history, this chronicle proceeded with ever increasing detail to narrate the political story of the Irrawaddy basin from quasi-legendary dynasties to events witnessed by the author himself in 1711. Before U Kala, the only Burmese histories of which we have record were biographies and comparatively brief local chronicles. Some twenty years after U Kala finished his work, many of the original sources on which he relied were destroyed by a fire at Ava. This loss combined with U Kala's admirable prose style to establish his encyclopaedic work as a model in the eyes of all subsequent historians. The pre-1712 portions of later national Burmese chronicles — including the Ya-zawin-thit (New Chronicle), the Maha-ya-zawin-gyaw (Great Celebrated Chronicle), and the famous Hman-nan maha-ya-zawin-daw-gyi (Glass Palace Chronicle) — are more or less verbatim reproductions of U Kala's history, with some interpolations of quasi-legendary material and with limited digressions on points of scholarly dispute. In essence, therefore, we have but one chronicle prior to 1712. Not surprisingly, U Kala's Maha-ya-zawin-gyi has provided the basis for virtually every survey of pre-colonial Burmese political history

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Buddhism · Burmese · Literature · Political science · Politics · Style (visual arts · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Cambodian History and Society · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies