Having annexed Lower Burma, the area round Rangoon and the Irrawaddy Delta, in the 1850s, the British were content for Mindon to rule Upper Burma as an independent sovereign. Mindon was clever enough to understand who possessed real power in his part of the world. The old man was a pious Buddhist who had an extensive family; some people claimed that he had a hundred wives, though this is evidently incorrect, because only fifty-three wives have been attested to, thirty-nine of whom bore children. Altogether, Mindon had 110 children, of whom forty-eight were boys and sixty-two were girls.1 Mindon, as a local king, had experienced the power of the British at first hand, because his brother, Pagan Min, the previous king, had been an unpredictable and wild ruler who had been defeated by the British in battle. When it took over the southern part of the Burmese kingdom, Britain forced Pagan Min to abdicate. Pagan had been the worst kind of ruler for the British and had begun his reign by massacring a hundred members of his own family to secure his rule.
