His “sole object on earth” was declared to be the introduction of “the religion of Jesus Christ”. The recruitment of missionaries who came for short periods with the intention of soon returning home was avoided: The work of a “true missionary” in Myanmar was envisaged as nothing less than a life’s task. Their excuse was the need to first learn the language. The newcomers were highly reluctant to go into remote places, especially Tanintharyi and Rakhine. But a troublesome matter was a tendency to concentrate missionary staff in large centres instead of dispersing them widely through the country. The Christian missions in rural Myanmar enjoyed greater freedom than those in the cities.
The insalubrious climate, the diet, the austere mode of life – all of these causes contributed to thinning the ranks of the devoted propagators of the Christian religion and to bringing an untimely end to a good number of them. But a huge waste of human life (mainly from dysentery and pulmonary trouble) gave Myanmar the reputation of being physically tough and so tended to deter men from coming here. In a short time Christian missionaries were fully assimilated with the Myanmar people. Indeed, the Myanmar population, gifted with “good dispositions”, was right away considered to be prone to look upon the Christian religion favourably and be ready for conversion by Christian fathers. The efforts of the Christian missionaries to transform a “pagan country” (according to them) into a proper Christian commonwealth were intense in Myanmar, immediately described as “a promising land”. This is a well-known moral and humanitarian argument. Moreover, as slavery was a widespread practice here, Christians proposed nothing else but the “redemption from slavery to education” – in other words, from darkness to light. In this regard, education, the main vehicle to bring civilisation, quickly became the main activity of missionaries in Myanmar. Indeed, Christianity was often used to justify colonisation in the name of so-called civilisation. Missionaries, often born into clerical families, were not long in following them, providing one more illustration of the classic established association between merchants, missionaries and colonisers. In this context, the first Westerners who appeared in the 16th century in Myanmar were merchants, chiefly Portuguese adventurers, who travelled through Western Asia, Persia and India.
These records are a first-rate introduction for anybody interested in this aspect of the fascinating but complex history of Myanmar.Īcute Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-French rivalries emerged as Europe gradually became aware of Myanmar.