Burmese royal titles
Burmese royal titles are the royal styles that were in use by the Burmese monarchy until the disintegration of the Konbaung dynasty in 1885. These titles were exclusively used by those of royal lineage (မင်းမျိုးမင်းနွယ် or ထီးရိုးနန်းရိုး), or more formally, Maha Zi Maha Thwei (မဟာဆီမဟာသွေး).
Titles
King
Kings in Burma assumed a distinctive reign name and title, usually a combination of Pali and Sanskrit, upon ascending to the throne. In the Taungoo and Konbaung dynasties, the title Shwe Nan Shwe Pyatthat Thahkin (ရွှေနန်းရွှေပြာသာဒ်သခင်), literally "Master Lord of the Golden Palace and Golden Spired Roofs", was also used by the sovereign king.[1]
He was addressed Hpondawgyi Hpaya (ဘုန်းတော်ကြီးဘုရား, [pʰóuɴdɔ̀dʑí pʰəjá]) or Ashin Hpaya (အရှင်ဘုရား, [əʃɪ̀ɴ pʰəjá]) and Hkamedaw (ခမည်းတော်, [kʰəmɛ́dɔ̀]) by his children, the princes and princesses. Other forms of address included Shwe Nan Shin Hpaya (ရွှေနန်းရှင်ဘုရား) and Ekarit Min Myat (ဧကရာဇ် မင်းမြတ်).
King's consorts
The king's consorts were assigned titles according to one of four ranks:
- Nanya Mibaya (နန်းရ မိဖုရား): Queens of the first rank
- Nanmadaw Mibaya Hkaunggyi (နန်းမတော် မိဖုရားခေါင်ကြီး): The Chief Queen (usually a half-sister by the same father), she alone had the right to a white umbrella and to sit with the King on the divan-throne. She was also called the Taung Nandaw Mibaya (တောင်နန်းတော် မိဖုရား, lit. Queen of the Southern Palace), Taung Nyazan (တောင်ညာစံ,) Ashin Nanmadaw Hpaya (အရှင်နန်းမတော်ဘုရား) and Nanmadaw (နန်းမတော်).
- Myauk Nandaw Mibaya (မြောက်နန်းတော် မိဖုရား): Queen of the Northern Palace (the third most senior wife of the King)
- Ale Nandaw Mibaya (အလယ်နန်းတော် မိဖုရား): Queen of the Centre Palace (the fourth most senior wife of the King)
- Anauk Nandaw Mibaya (အနောက်နန်းတော် မိဖုရား): Queen of the Western Palace (the fifth most senior wife of the King)
- Ahsaungya Mibaya (အဆောင်ရမိဖုရား): Queens of the second rank
- Taung Hsaungdaw Mibaya (တောင်ဆောင်တော် မိဖုရား): Queen of the Southern Apartment (first senior wife)
- Myauk Hsaungdaw Mibaya (မြောက်ဆောင်တော် မိဖုရား): Queen of the Northern Apartment (second senior wife of the second rank)
- Shweye Hsaungya Mibaya (ရွှေရေးဆောင်ရ မိဖုရား): Queens of the third rank
- Myan Aung Taung Shweye Hsaung Mibaya (မြန်အောင်တောင်ရွှေရေးဆောင် မိဖုရား): Queen of the Southern Gilded Chamber (first senior wife of the third rank)
- Myan Aung Myauk Shweye Hsaung Mibaya (မြန်အောင်မြောက်ရွှေရဲဆောင် မိဖုရား): Myan Aung Myauk-shwe-ye-saung Mibura: Queen of the Northern Gilded Chamber (second senior wife of the third rank)
- Myan Aung Ale Shweye Hsaung Mibaya (မြန်အောင်အလယ်ရွှေရဲဆောင် မိဖုရား): Queen of the Central Gilded Chamber (second senior wife of the third rank)
- Myan Aung Anauk Shweye Hsaung Mibaya (မြန်အောင်အနောက်ရွှေရဲဆောင် မိဖုရား): Queen of the Western Gilded Chamber (third senior wife of the third rank)
- Myosa Mibaya (မြို့စားမိဖုရား) and Ywaza Mibaya (ရွာစား မိဖုရား): the fourth rank of minor wives
Concubines not of royal rank did not receive titles and were called Maungma Meithan (မောင်းမမိဿံ).
Princes and princesses
Princes were titled according to their mother's rank:
- Shwe Kodawgyi Awratha (ရွှေကိုယ်တော်ကြီး ဩရသ): The eldest son of the sovereign, by his chief Queen, i.e. Prince with the style of His Royal Highness
- Shwe Kodawgyi Razaputra (ရွှေကိုယ်တော်ကြီး ရာဇပုတြ): The younger sons of the sovereign, by his chief Queen, i.e. Prince with the style of His Royal Highness
- Shwe Kodawgyi (ရွှေကိုယ်တော်ကြီး): The sons of the sovereign, by his senior Queens, i.e. Prince with the style of His Royal Highness
- Kodawgyi (ကိုယ်တော်ကြီး): The sons of the sovereign, by his junior wives, i.e. Prince with the style of His Royal Highness
- Hteik Tin (ထိပ်တင်): The sons of a Prince, by a junior wife, i.e. Prince
Minnyi Mintha (မင်းညီမင်းသား): i.e. Princes of the Blood, divided into four principal grades:
- Maha Uparaza Anaukrapa Einshay Min (မဟာဥပါရာဇာအနောက်ရပအိမ်ရှေ့မင်း): The Great Deputy King, and addressed as His Royal Highness
- Bayin Hkan (ဘုရင်ခံ): Viceroys of the great provinces, i.e. Viceroy, with the style of His Royal Highness
- Minthaya Gyi (မင်းသာယာကြီး): Great Princes, a maximum of eighteen at any one time, divided into nine great princes of the left and nine great princes of the right, together with the rank of Thado Min (သတိုးမင်း), i.e. Prince, with the style of His Royal Highness
- Mintha Lat (မင်းသားလတ်): Middle Princes, a maximum of eighteen at any one time, divided into nine middle princes of the left and nine middle princes of the right, together with the rank of Min Ye (မင်းရဲ), Prince, with the style of His Royal Highness
The principal royal wives of the Minnyi Mintha were titled as follows:
- Einshay Hteik Hta Mibaya (အိမ်ရှေ့ထိပ်ထားမိဖုရား): The principal Royal wife of the Great Deputy King, addressed as Her Royal Highness
- Hteik Hta Mibaya (ထိပ်ထားမိဖုရား): The principal Royal wife of a Viceroy, i.e. Princess with the style of Her Royal Highness
The daughters of the King were titled according to their mother's rank:
- Hteik Suhpaya (ထိပ်ဆုဖုရား): The daughters of the sovereign by his Royal wives, i.e. Princess with the style of Her Royal Highness
- Hteik Hkaungtin (ထိပ်ခေါင်တင်): The daughters of the sovereign, by his junior wives, before marriage, i.e. Princess with the style of Her Royal Highness.
- Hteik Hta Mibaya (ထိပ်ထား မိဖုရား): The daughters of the sovereign, by his junior wives after marriage, i.e. Princess with the style of Her Royal Highness.
- Tabin Taing Minthami (တစ်ပင်တိုင် မင်းသမီး): The next Crown Princess in line to become chief queen
See also
References
- ^ Lieberman, Victor B. (၁၉၈၀). "The Transfer of the Burmese Capital from Pegu to Ava". The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland) 1: 66. JSTOR 25211086.