Thibaw Palace and Point

Thibaw the last king of Burma (now Myanmar) under house arrest kept in this palace. Thibaw ruled the Burma for 6 years. Burma was partitioned from India in 1935. British took over the Burma kingdom and arrested king Thibaw. To keep him far away from his kingdom i.e. Burma he was kept under house arrest at Ratnagiri. Though the king was under British rule, he was given legal rights and was treated with the state honors. King died at the age of 58 in Ratnagiri. His grand-granddaughter Tity was the last living heir of the king. She got married to a local resident Shankarrao Pawar.

THIBAW PALACE

The palace is a beautifully constructed three storied structure with sloping roofs. Semi-circular wooden windows with beautiful curving are the main attraction of this structure. On the first floor one dancing hall with a fully marble tiles floor is in the palace. One Buddha idol is installed at the back side of the palace. This idol was brought to India by king Thibaw. Presently the palace is maintained by archaeological depth. The plans are afoot to convert the palace in to museum and providing    tourist accommodation there. Thibaw palace is best situated on a hillock and panoramic view from this point is    most enchanting. This is a point worth – visiting for Ratnagiri tourist.

The year 2010 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the construction of the famous edifice known as the Thibaw Palace at Ratnagiri, 225 kilometres from Mumbai.

Let’s have look at wikimapia

http://wikimapia.org/1498529/Thibaw-Palace

This is verily a portion of India that is Burma.  For as per agreement between the governments of India and Burma (now Myanmar) this mansion will be maintained in good condition in memory of  King Thibaw of Burma (1859-1916)) who was exiled here  by the British, just like they exiled to the Burmese capital of Rangoon, Emperor Bahadur Shah (1775-1862)  after their victory in the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857.

After the British took away his kingdom, Thibaw had been deported to India in early 1886, first to Madras and then at the muggy seaside town of Ratnagiri on the Konkan coast.   Thibaw was given a substantial house, and later he was allowed to build his own small palace, now known as Thibaw’s palace, in 1910.

This palace with teak finishing and Italian coloured glass placed against the setting sun is set on twenty three acres   of land on a promontory overlooking the green Arabian Sea.   The palace itself cost 136 thousand rupees and is a unique example of pagoda style of architecture and took two years to complete. The main building is 60 metres (197 feet) long and 43 metres (141 feet) broad, with an area of 25 thousand square feet is two storey structure, constructed in red stone.

By all accounts Thibaw and his family lived a life of intense boredom.  He seemed never to have accepted his fate and, hoping for some sort of improvement in his status, wrote several memorials to the Viceroy of India.

At the very beginning this amounted to a request to return to Mandalay and rule as a British puppet.  This would of course have been more than acceptable back in 1880, but was now out of the question.  In later  times Thibaw’s  requests became more modest, asking, for example, to attend  the 1905  Delhi durbar  with King George Vth  together  with the other  Indian  princes.

Money was a constant problem.  Thibaw and his queen Supayalat had brought with them precious stones as well as other valuables, which over the 1890s were almost all sold to local merchants.  Their pensions were small.   Again and again Thibaw petitioned the British for more funds.  They in turn worried   that he was being irresponsible, and a number of tiresome attempts were made to better supervise Thibaw’s spending, as if the former king were a young child with an allowance.

And then there was a scandal during the hot weather of 1906.  Out of three princesses - the daughters of Thibaw- the first princess became pregnant with the child of the Indian durian, the gatekeeper.  Thibaw and Supayalat soon reconciled themselves to the situation, and their first granddaughter became their new focus of attention.  She was nicknamed Baisu.

Then in 1916 something happened that the royal couple could not accept.   The second princess, always known   for being strong –willed, fell in love with a man named Khin Maung Gyi.  He was Burmese and King Thibaw was not willing to let an ordinary citizen of Burma marry his daughter. Then the daughter escaped from the Thibaw palace with her lover and when Thibaw found that she would not return, he had a heart attack and soon died. He was buried in a mausoleum within the compounds of Thibaw palace. Supayalat returned   to Burma with her two younger daughters.

The first princess stayed behind with her little daughter Baisu and slowly fell into poverty.   Baisu herself married and had a sizable family, with several children and grandchildren, moved to Bombay, and merged into the great urban poor of Bombay’s slums.  She was still alive at the beginning of the twenty first century, then in her late nineties,   and journalists who went to visit spoke of her generosity and kind manners. A little picture of Thibaw and Supayalat tacked onto the wall of her shack and a hint of upper class Burmese features being the only thing to distinguish her from her neighbours.

The fate of the second princes is something of a mystery. Her sibling (with whom she had no contact after her elopement) says that she and her Burmese husband Khin Maung Gyi had no children. Apparently, the couple wound up at the hill station of Kalimpong, near Darjeeling, and bought a dairy farm, where thy lived out the rest of their lives in the cool pine scented air of the Himalayan foothills. The only surviving descendant of    King Thibaw was Taw Hpaya, his eldest grandson, who was alive in 1997 at the age of 84 in the town of Maymyo in Burma

After decades of being one of the government offices at Ratnagiri, the palace was made into a Bombay University sub-centre and was leased to it by the government, for Rs.60, 000 per year for a two-year period which ended in 1999.

The Archaeological Survey of India has however reclaimed the palace in 1999. It has also been partly converted into a museum. The museum is rather pitiful as it has only 4 rooms. The 3 rooms on the first floor have some old, badly damaged copper vessels, old photographs and the last room is an attempt to recreate the grandeur of the palace... These 4 rooms and 2 used for offices are currently the only usable rooms in the edifice. At present, the condition of palace is precarious and some portion of the roof and walls may collapse at any moment.

Meanwhile, the Government of Burma (Myanmar) has conveyed to the Government of India, their concern, that since they have preserved and maintained carefully the mausoleum of the last emperor of India, Bahadurshah in Rangoon; why is the Government of India not taking same interest in the monument of Thibaw, the last king of Burma?

Thibaw Point – Jijamata Udyan

One of the major attractions of Ratnagiri city situated on a small hillock. There is also a best sunset point from here. One can have a panoramic view of Someshwar creek, Bhatye bridge to pawas and Arabian sea. This palace was used for keeping the King Thibaw,

Source 

Info : Internet

Photos :  Sulekh