Mission to Burma 1855
British missions to the Chinese Court had already run into many grievous difficulties. When a mission was despatched to Burma, writes Mildred Archer, they found their problems no less irksome.
In the late eighteenth, and much of the nineteenth century, the British were faced with an intractable problem. It was how to deal with Far Eastern courts. Lord Macartney’s and Lord Amherst’s embassies to China had brought home to them the difficulty of making contact with the Chinese. Major Phayre’s embassy to Burma in 1855 showed that it was equally difficult to make contact with other Eastern peoples.
The Burmese, like the Chinese, were living in isolation, with no idea of the changes that were taking place around them in India and South-East Asia. The Burmese King, the Lord of the Golden Palace, saw himself as the centre of the universe—a world that consisted in fact of Bengal, Assam, China, Tibet, Siam and the sea. The Burmese were a proud and confident people and during the second half of the eighteenth century they had been successfully extending their boundaries.
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