She is best known for engineering a massacre of 80 to 100 royal family members, to prevent potential rivals from usurping Thibaw's power,[2] although she had always denied any knowledge of the plot, which may have been hatched by her mother together with some of the ministers, including the chancellor Kinwon Min Gyi U Kaung.

As a greatest achievement of Supayalat, she changed the royal tradition of polygamy to monogamy on a Burmese king for the first and the last time in history and never allowed Thibaw to take another woman as a consort.

[5] In Burmese history, Supayalat is remembered for her ego, cruelty, and excessive pride, serving as the figure held responsible for the kingdom's fall into the hands of the imperialists.

Western historians have documented that Queen Supayalat often rewarded her favorite servants, court musicians, dancers, and entertainers with significant amounts of gold and jewelry.

On 25 November 1885 they were taken away in a covered carriage, leaving Mandalay Palace by the southern gate of the walled city along the streets lined by British soldiers and their wailing subjects, to the River Irrawaddy where a steamboat called Thuriya (Sun) awaited.

The troops had nicknamed her "Soup Plate", and in the commotion and haste that attended their abduction, some of the crown jewels disappeared including a large ruby called Nga Mauk that Colonel Sladen had insisted on being handed over for safekeeping.

[4][13] Thibaw saw an opportunity in 1911 when King George V visited India, and wrote for the return of the Burmese crown jewels, but only received a reply that Col. Sladen had died in 1890.

[14] On 10 December 1885 the royal family, minus the queen mother and Supayagyi who were sent to Dawei, was taken to Madras where their third daughter was born, and in April the next year they were moved to Ratnagiri on the west coast where they could no longer look across the Bay of Bengal to the land they had been forced to leave.

Supayalat gave birth to her fourth and youngest daughter in 1887; they were not given a proper residence commensurate with their status until 1911 when Thibaw Palace was built by the government.

When King Thibaw died in 1916 at the age of 58 after 30 years in exile, Supayalat fought in vain for the right to take her husband's body back to be buried with proper funeral rites in Burma.

While confined to her residence, Supayalat upheld the longstanding traditions of the Burmese court, with the Queen positioned above her guests and servants gliding around the room on their stomachs.

She had lived on a pension and in her last days her closest adviser was Thakin Kodaw Hmaing, the great writer and nationalist leader, who revered her for her defiant stand against colonialism and who had witnessed at the age of nine the fall of the monarchy and the abduction of the royal couple in Mandalay.

Hmaing was a boarder at Myadaung Monastery built by the queen who never had the chance to conduct an opening ceremony (yeizetcha, literally "pour drops of water", in order to call on the goddess of earth to witness the good deed) as it had only been recently completed.

Her body lay in state, shielded under eight white royal umbrellas, attended by 90 Buddhist monks and the British governor Sir Harcourt Butler with a guard of honour of the Mounted Police complete with a 30 gun salute.