The Golden Letter of King Alaungpaya
[1] In October 2015, the Golden Letter was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register,[2] as a common heritage of Myanmar, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
On the "tenth day of the waxing Moon in the [Burmese] month Kason of the Sakkaraj-year 1118" (7 May 1756 in the Gregorian calendar),[6] Alaungpaya directed that four letters be drawn up by his chancery.
The second was addressed to the director of the East India Company, the third to the British President of Madras, and the fourth to the headmaster of the island Negrais in the Irrawaddy River delta.
Among other things, this could be done by having the East India Company set up a fortified trading post at the harbor city Pathein on the southwestern coast of Burma.
The recipient could further his economic strategy against the competition from the French East India Company (Compagnie française des Indes orientales).
[14] George II sent the letter, considered to be a curiosity, to the library in his home city of Hanover, where it arrived three weeks later, albeit with an incorrect description.
In 1867, Eduard Bodemann copied the erroneous description of the letter for his catalog of the "Royal Library at Hanover" under the shelf mark "IV 571 a".
[21] Spectroscopic analysis by the Lower Saxony State Office for the Protection of Historical Monuments (Niedersächsichen Landesamt für Denkmalpflege) found its fineness to be between 95.25 and 98.69%.
On the left edge is an embossed figure of the mythical bird Hamsa, the king's signet, in an octagonal, richly decorated field.
[24] Due to the entry in the Bodemann Catalogue under the shelf mark "Ms IV 571a", the existence of the Letter was always known within the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library (GWLB) and to researchers, not least because of transcripts in various archives.
In July 2005, Friedrich Hülsmann, the director of the Book- and Library-Systems department at the GWLB, invited Jacques Leider, a Luxembourg-born historian and Southeast Asia expert at the École française d'Extrême-Orient in Paris, to help with identifying the document.
In addition to researching the history of the Letter and its "fate" in London, Leider translated the text and compared the original with other versions that exist as transcriptions in archives, e.g. in Myanmar.
That Great Britain, in the person of George II, was so uninterested in cooperating with Burma, could be put down to the geopolitical situation of the time.
Eventually, this together with many ill-advised political and military actions by Britain caused Alaungpaya to destroy the outpost on Negrais in the Irrawaddy Delta, which broke relations between the two states for decades.
The document also allowed a reassessment of the legacy of Alaungpaya, whose role was often oversimplified to that of a warrior, neglecting his actions in geopolitics and as a skilled international diplomat.
Against this background, the Golden Letter of Alaungpaya is not only a unique artefact of art history, but also a window into the contemporary geopolitical relationship between Great Britain (and the East India Company in particular) and a resurgent Kingdom of Burma.
