Saya San

Saya San (Burmese ဆရာစံ; October 24, 1876 - November 28, 1931) - Burmese politician, Buddhist monk and healer, leader of a series of major anti-colonial uprisings in British Burma 1930-1933.

At birth, received the name Yar Zhuo. Born into a peasant family, in childhood he was sent to study at a Buddhist monastery in his native village, a few years later he moved as a monk to the monastery of Khpo Khmu, where he remained until the age of twenty, after which he moved to the village of Nga Kaung, where he married and earned a living for some time. weaving rugs and baskets and carpentry. After some time, he became famous as a folk healer and astrologer and wrote two treatises on traditional Burmese medicine.

There is no information about when and how Saya San joined the revolutionary anti-British movement in Burma (which at that time was a British colony). However, already in the early 1920s, he represented his native village in Molamayne , and in 1924 he was appointed the nationalist General Council of Burmese Associations as the head of the commission to study the living conditions of the peasantry of the country. Around the same time, he began to promote the expulsion of the British colonialists from Burma and the unification of the entire Burmese people under the rule of a new monarch, in the role of whom he saw himself; this propaganda found a wide response in the peasantry, dissatisfied with tax oppression, which intensified especially after the outbreak of the Great Depression and the fall in prices for rice. October 18, 1930 in Insein, near Rangoon, Saya San declared himself king of Burma ^[2] . He called his followers the “Army of Halons” (in Burmese mythology, a halon is a mythical bird, an analog of the Indian garuda, which kills an evil dragon).

The uprising began on December 22-23, 1930 in Theravada , and soon spread to the entire Irrawaddy delta. Unrest reached its peak by the middle of 1931, covering large areas of Upper and Lower Burma and the Shan principalities. The main demands of the rebels were the reduction of taxes levied on peasants, the free use of forests and the independence of Burma from the British Empire . Almost immediately after the uprising began, British colonial troops armed with firearms were thrown at its suppression, while the rebels' weapons were almost exclusively swords and spears. It is known that Saya San urged his soldiers to make special tattoos on their bodies, which supposedly were to make the rebels invulnerable to bullets. By July 1931, the main forces of the rebels were actually defeated, Saya San fled to the Shan mountains, where he was arrested on October 2 in Hokho and taken to Theravradi, where, by the decision of a specially created tribunal, he was executed several months later, despite the efforts of his defender Ba Mo by hanging. Separate scattered rebels, however, continued to resist the British throughout 1932 and early 1933.

The uprising of Sai San is considered the last uprising in Burma, which sought to restore the monarchy in this country, although initially its reasons were primarily economic. It also became one of the largest popular anti-British uprisings in the history of Burma, during which more than 10 thousand people died.