Last modified on Mon 14 Dec 2020 04.02 EST
In 1826, crowds poured into the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly to gape at a spoil of war: a Burmese imperial carriage, nearly 14ft long, its spokes silvered, its body clothed in gilt and its seven-tiers studded with 20,000 precious stones. An accompanying handbook showed, in a sketch, how the carriage would have been pulled by a pair of white elephants. How is it, the handbookâs authors wondered, that the Burmese, âscarcely removed from barbarismâ, produced an object so magnificent? It had been captured two years earlier, in the first Anglo-Burmese war, from a town on the Dawei River, as British forces moved up its waters to subdue the forces of the kingdom of Ava. For Britons, the Times predicted, the Burmese carriage would be âequally attractive with the carriage of Buonaparteâ, which had been displayed a decade earlier.