Golden letter

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The Golden Letter is a handwritten document made of sheet gold in the Burmese language , which the Burmese King Alaungphaya had drawn up on May 7, 1756 and sent to the British King George II in London . The letter is now kept in the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library (GWLB) in Hanover . In October 2015, the Golden letter was included in the UNESCO - World Documentary Heritage in Germany added. The letter is believed to be the common heritage of Germany, Myanmar and the United Kingdom.

The golden letter: on the left the mythical bird Hamsa , on the left and right the two rows of rubies. The damage from 1768 is also clearly visible at the bottom right.

history

Sender of the Golden Letter:
King Alaungphaya of Burma
Recipient of the Golden Letter:
King George II of Great Britain

King Alaungphaya of Burma was one of the most influential rulers of his time in Southeast Asia. At a time when founded in 1600, East India Company ( East India Company EIC) had already been established beyond India and goal for their economic and political influence continuously, King Alaungphaya the "tenth day Burmese of the waxing moon of the [ ] Month Kason of Sakkaraj - year 1118 “, that was May 7, 1756 Gregorian calendar , wrote four letters from his office . A letter - the golden and therefore most important - was addressed to the British King George II. A second went to the directors of the East India Company, the third to the British President of Madras, and the fourth to the chief on Negrais Island in the Irrawaddy River Delta .

In order to avoid misunderstandings or misinterpretations of the contents of the letters, the Burmese king had all letters which, depending on the recipient, differed in terms of content, style and diction , already translated into Rangoon and sent these translations together with the originals. The entrance had been recorded at the headquarters of the East India Company in London.

In the Golden Letter, Alaungphaya Georg II offered to expand the long-standing trade relations between the two countries. Among other things, this was to be done by allowing the East India Company to build a fortified trading post in the port city of Pathein on the south-west coast of Burma . At the time of this writing, the EIC had only one minor base on the tiny island of Negrais. This was far away from the trade routes of the time, had no infrastructure and was located in a climatically unhealthy zone.

The fact that one king turned directly to the other and made him such an offer in the form of a precious, artfully made and decorated letter made of gold, testifies to the appreciation and importance of the offer on the one hand, but also of the generosity of the gesture on the other; because both sides would have benefited from it: the writer could have strengthened his external reputation and his internal power, the recipient would have received a branch of economic strategic importance against the competition of the French East India Company ( Compagnie française des Indes Orientales ).

The addressee of the letter was born in Hanover and out of the Guelph house dating George II., Who in personal union both King of Great Britain and Elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg was. The letter was first sent to Madras, from where, however, due to various delays in onward transport, it did not arrive in London until March 1758, almost two years after it had been written and sent.

One explanation for this nearly two-year delay may have been the Seven Years' War , which broke out in 1756, the year the letter was written, and which was directly involved in Great Britain. King Alaungphaya had sent the Golden Letter to George II along with another letter to the directors of the East India Company. Both addressees probably understood neither the content nor the meaning of the letters and therefore saw no need to respond to these letters in a diplomatically appropriate manner. Rather, the Burmese ruler's initiative was viewed as a curiosity and not as a politically serious initiative by a head of state who was regarded as a minor. Not only did the sender not receive a reply to their offer, but not even a notification that their letter had even been received. It is known that King Alaungphaya found this disregard for himself a grave insult.

Georg II immediately sent the letter, which was considered curious, to the library in his home town of Hanover, where it arrived three weeks later - albeit with a wrong description. The wrong description came from Gerlach Adolph von Münchhausen , the King's Privy Counselor at the time. Münchhausen described the Golden Letter in a ministerial assignment to the Hanoverian librarian Christian Ludwig Scheidt as a note of friendship written in "Indian" (for Sanskrit ) of an Indian prince from the Coromandel coast , whose religion forbids him to consume anything living and to worship fire. The letter was then archived . As a result, the Golden Letter was ultimately ignored for the next 248 years - with the exception of one event in 1768. On June 11, 1768, the Danish prince and later King Christian VII visited Hanover on his cavalier tour, where he was shown the letter. However, through carelessness he damaged it. This damage is still visible today. After that, the letter was finally forgotten. In 1867, Eduard Bodemann took over this incorrect description without checking it for the library catalog of the "Royal Library of Hanover" (now part of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library) under the shelfmark "IV 571 a".

Although the Golden Letter was always known to researchers and copies were in different archives, it was unknown until its "rediscovery" in 2006 where the original was or whether it still existed at all. Only after this discovery was the letter translated and its true meaning recognized only through it. In February 2013, the Golden Letter was therefore included in the list of nationally valuable cultural assets on the basis of the law on the protection of German cultural assets against emigration .

description

material

The mythical bird Hamsa , signet of King Alaungphayas.

The rectangular letter measures 54.7 × 8.5 cm and is 0.2 mm thick. The total weight, including the 24 rubies , is 100 g. A spectroscopy carried out by the Lower Saxony State Office for Monument Preservation showed a gold content of 95.25 to 98.69%. The 24 slightly egg-shaped rubies come from a mine in the Burmese city of Mogok . Each of them is held in place by a hexagonal, 6 × 6 mm gold mount.

Ornaments

The thin sheet of gold is bordered on the left and right of the text by a row of twelve vertically arranged rubies. On the left edge is attached to the left-center next to the Ruby series of artfully driven mythical bird Hamsa as a royal emblem in an octagonal, richly decorated box. The signet was pressed onto the letter.

text

The letter on sheet gold is engraved with fine Burmese characters running from left to right and comprises ten lines of equal length.

Containers

The only surviving transport container: the hollowed out and decorated tusk of an elephant.

The (transport) packaging of the valuable document was both artistically elaborate and valuable, as well as being robust for the long journey. The golden letter was originally rolled up and wrapped in red paper and then placed in the cylindrical ivory container. This lidded vessel was made from a specially hollowed out and decorated tusk of a Burmese elephant ( Elephas maximus indicus ). Little can be seen of the decorations today. The lidded box was in a kind of brocade pocket . This container was in turn in a box made of polished wood covered with red resin and decorated with gold. A sheet of paper with a text in English was attached to the box. Finally, all of these containers were put in another sturdy red bag for protection and sent on the journey to London. Apart from the ivory cylinder, nothing of the other packaging has survived today.

"Forgetting" and rediscovery

Due to the entry in the Bodemann catalog, the existence of the letter under the signature "Ms IV 571a" has always been known within the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz library and research, not least because of some copies in various archives, but because of the wrong description the original itself was ignored for almost 250 years. It was not until July 2006 that Friedrich Hülsmann, head of the Book and Librarianship Department at GWLB, turned to Jacques Leider , a Luxembourg- born historian and Southeast Asia expert at the Paris École française d'Extrême-Orient , with the request to identify the To be helpful in writing. Until contact was made, the library had assumed a text in Sanskrit due to the incorrect catalog description. Unfortunately, during the first investigation, it was found that it was a Burmese document, the meaning of which had been completely misunderstood by then.

Research object

In 2007 Jacques Leider was commissioned by the GWLB to research the history of the Golden Letter. In addition to researching the genesis of the letter and its "fate" in London and afterwards, Leider also translated the text anew and compared the original of the letter with the versions that were stored as copies in archives, e. B. in Myanmar (the former Burma) exist. He published his findings in a comprehensive report in 2009 (see under “Literature”). In 2013 which encouraged Foreign Office as part of its cultural preservation program, the 3-D - digitization of the Golden letter.

meaning

The choice of noble materials and their artful craftsmanship are indications of the importance that the writer attached to both the content of the Golden Letter and the political position of the recipient - as well as his own. The letter is likely to be the only surviving copy of its kind in the world today. The fact that England, in the person of George II, was so disinterested in working with Burma was due to the geopolitical situation at that time: Since 1756, England was in an alliance with other European states in the Seven Years' War and again fought on different continents several other European countries, including North America . The Electorate of Hanover was also involved in this conflict on the British side. Due to years of conflict, the East India Company withdrew entirely from Burma and showed no interest in expanding its involvement there. In connection with several reckless politico-military actions on the part of the British, this finally led to King Alaungphaya having the settlement on the island of Negrais in the Irrawaddy Delta destroyed, which in turn destroyed relations between the two countries for decades.

The letter also made it possible to reassess the work of the Burmese king, who until then had been largely reduced to his life as a warrior, but was not viewed as a geopolitician and a skilled diplomat of international stature.

Against this background, Alaungphaya's Golden Letter is extraordinary not only as a unique piece from an art historical perspective, but also from the point of view of geopolitical relations at the time between Great Britain in general and the East India Company in particular, on the one hand, and the regaining strength of the Kingdom of Burma on the other Meaning.

UNESCO World Document Heritage

In 2014, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library had together with the Ministry of Culture of Myanmar and the British Library in UNESCO documents for nomination of the Golden letter as a world heritage documents submitted. This application was granted in October 2015. Since then, the Golden Letter has been part of the world document heritage in Germany .

Due to the long-term renovation of the library building, the UNESCO certificate was only presented to the library director Anne May at a ceremony on March 29, 2017 by Verena Metze-Mangold, President of the German UNESCO Commission . Also present were: Yin Yin Myint, Ambassador of Myanmar, Annabel Gallop, Chairwoman of the Southeast Asia Collection of the British Library, Heinrich Prince of Hanover as representative of the Welfenhaus and Gabriele Heinen-Kljajić , then Minister for Science and Culture in Lower Saxony.

literature

Web links

Commons : Golden Letter  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Jacques P. Unfortunately: King Alaungmintaya's Golden Letter to King George II ... , p. 7.
  2. ↑ Five new German entries in the “Memory of the World” register on unesco.de
  3. ^ The Golden Letter of the Burmese King Alaungphaya to King George II of Great Britain. UNESCO Memory of the World, accessed August 31, 2017 .
  4. ^ Georg Ruppelt, Jacques Leider: The Golden Letter from King Alaungphaya ... , p. 7.
  5. ↑ a b Georg Ruppelt, Jacques Leider: The Golden Letter from King Alaungphaya ... , p. 11.
  6. ^ Jacques P. Unfortunately: King Alaungmintaya's Golden Letter to King George II ... , p. 76.
  7. ^ Jacques P. Unfortunately: King Alaungmintaya's Golden Letter to King George II ... , pp. 58-61.
  8. ^ Jacques P. Unfortunately: King Alaungmintaya's Golden Letter to King George II ... , p. 99.
  9. ^ Jacques P. Unfortunately: King Alaungmintaya's Golden Letter to King George II ... , p. 98.
  10. ^ Jacques P. Unfortunately: King Alaungmintaya's Golden Letter to King George II ... , p. 84.
  11. ^ Georg Ruppelt, Jacques Leider: The Golden Letter from King Alaungphaya ... , p. 9.
  12. ^ Jacques P. Unfortunately: King Alaungmintaya's Golden Letter to King George II ... , p. 92.
  13. ^ Jacques P. Unfortunately: King Alaungmintaya's Golden Letter to King George II ... , p. 59.
  14. ^ Jacques P. Unfortunately: King Alaungmintaya's Golden Letter to King George II ... , p. 60.
  15. ^ Jacques P. Unfortunately: King Alaungmintaya's Golden Letter to King George II ... , p. 105.
  16. ^ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library: Historical files in the library V15, f 29, based on: NN: Nomination form: International Memory of the World Register. The Golden Letter of the Burmese1 King Alaungphaya to King George II of Great Britain. P. 3, FN 2.
  17. ^ Ministerial allocation of March 28, 1758 from Münchhausen to Scheidt
  18. ^ Jacques P. Unfortunately: King Alaungmintaya's Golden Letter to King George II ... , p. 106.
  19. ^ Entry in the Bodemann catalog under no. 571a, p. 98f.
  20. ^ NN: Nomination form: International Memory of the World Register. The Golden Letter of the Burmese1 King Alaungphaya to King George II of Great Britain. P. 4.
  21. ^ Jacques P. Unfortunately: King Alaungmintaya's Golden Letter to King George II ... , p. 104.
  22. ↑ a b c d Jacques P. Unfortunately: King Alaungmintaya's Golden Letter to King George II ... , p. 103.
  23. ↑ Burmese original and German translation
  24. ^ Jacques P. Unfortunately: King Alaungmintaya's Golden Letter to King George II ... , p. 102.
  25. ^ Jacques P. Unfortunately: King Alaungmintaya's Golden Letter to King George II ... , p. 4.
  26. ↑ The Golden Letter as a 3-D digital scan
  27. ↑ nomination document on unesco.org (pdf in English)
  28. ↑ The Golden Letter from King Alaungphaya of Myanmar to George II is part of the UNESCO World Document Heritage  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Toter Link / 3c.web.de   on Auswaertiges-amt.de
  29. ↑ Mario Moers: Securitized World Heritage / Ceremony for the inclusion of the “Golden Letter” in the Unesco World Document Heritage in the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library. In: Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung of March 30, 2017, p. 21