Overview

A hybrid of history and biography, Maurice Collis’s The Land of the Great Image concerns a little-known Portuguese friar abroad in early seventeenth-century Asia. The book chronicles the great diplomatic coup of Friar Manrique’s career, opening the kingdom of Arakan, now Burma (land of the “great image” of the Buddha) to the Church and to Portuguese trade, Dispatched from Goa, capital of the now almost forgotten Portuguese empire in Asia, Manrique made his way across and around the Bay of Bengal, surviving shipwreck, tigers, and pirates, to reach the court of King Thiri-thu-dhamma. And all along Manrique’s way the author waits at every turn with another curiosity, another historical tidbit for the reader to relish. Collis notes how trials of the Inquisition were run (which too had set up shop in Goa); the luxury enjoyed by Europeans in the East; what was served for dinner at court; how elephant warfare was waged; and what went into a potion magically brewed to bring glory to King Thiri-thu-dhamina (the hearts of 2,000 white doves, 4,000 white cows, and 6,000 of his subjects).

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9780811209724

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The land itself is a fantasy and a dream of strangeness. The physical pictures the author gives us are more than beautiful; they are wonderfully neat and often ironic .... The Land of the Great Image is a vivid, illuminating study written with the care and penetration that an artist as well as a historian must exercise to make the exotic past live and breathe for us. -- Eudora Welty - New York Times Book Review

""The land itself is a fantasy and a dream of strangeness. The physical pictures the author gives us are more than beautiful; they are wonderfully neat and often ironic …. The Land of the Great Image is a vivid, illuminating study written with the care and penetration that an artist as well as a historian must exercise to make the exotic past live and breathe for us."" -- Eudora Welty - New York Times Book Review

A strange book, this - and complete escape reading (unless the captious will take issue with the fact that the setting is now a battle zone and part of Burma, then - in the 17th century, the Kingdom of Arakan, Portuguese Asia, a country of perversities and extremes, of Inquisitors and Jesuits, of murder and poison and adultery, of luxury and debauchery). Based on what purports to be contemporary source material and on a voluminous diary, this is the story of the journeys taken by an Augustinian friar, Sebastiao Manrique. Father Manrique stood out in sharp contrast to the lurid background, - a plain man, resolute and unimaginative, lover of sanity and reason. Collis has selected episodes from his Travels, his trip to the Court at a time when the King was unfriendly to the Portuguese; his attempts to gain converts; his founding of a church; and finally the murder of the King who fell under the influence of black magic. The English edition (and we presume this one) is plentifully illustrated with engravings from various sources which help offset an occasional didacticism on the part of Collis. Of specialized interest to students of the East and to readers seeking an exotic experience. (Kirkus Reviews)

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