Halal Travel Guide: Yangon - Last Mughal Emperor Tomb and Qadiriyya Gongbei
Reposted from the web
Summary: Yangon holds the tomb of Bahadur Shah II, the last Mughal emperor, near Shwedagon Pagoda, along with a Qadiriyya gongbei connected to Muslim memory in Myanmar. This account keeps the source's shrine details, historical names, religious terms, and site observations.
The tomb of Bahadur Shah II, the last emperor of the Mughal Empire, is near the famous Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, Myanmar. This site was his home after he was exiled to Yangon in 1858. Because Bahadur Shah II was a devout Sufi sheikh during his life, his tomb has become a famous Sufi shrine (gongbei) in Myanmar.
Although Bahadur Shah II belonged to the Chishti order during his life, the shrine (gongbei) is now managed by the Qadiriyya order. I met a man here who was hanging fresh flowers on the shrine (gongbei), and after some local friends (dosti) finished their gathering (amali), they shared candy and bananas with us.
In 1803, the British East India Company used force to become the protector of the Mughal Empire, and the Mughal emperors lost their real power from then on. After Bahadur Shah II took the throne in 1837, his power was limited to the area around Delhi. He never had any ambition for the empire, but instead focused on Sufi practice and writing poetry. Legend says he started his Sufi practice at age 20 and became a murshid (guide) of the Chishti order by age 40. In 1843, he wrote a letter to Queen Victoria of Britain saying: "I am now old and have no ambitions left." I intend to devote myself entirely to religious work to comfort my remaining years.
The Sufi philosophy followed by Bahadur Shah II believed in embracing different cultures. Men, women, young, and old should all be able to express their love for Allah, and this love should transcend religion, gender, and social class. According to a report by Major Archer in 1828: "He is thin and small, and his clothes are simple, almost crude." He looks like a poor scholar or a language teacher. This is the typical appearance of a Sufi ascetic.
Like the Mughal rulers before him, Bahadur Shah II saw himself as the protector of his Hindu subjects. Under his rule, Hindu elites in Delhi would visit the Nizamuddin Sufi shrine (gongbei) to recite Persian poetry. Many people studied under great imams and attended religious schools (madrasas). The Mughal court would attend various Hindu events, and during the Shia month of Muharram, they would listen to elegies mourning Imam Hussein.
People say the Sufi poetry of Bahadur Shah II reached a level of perfection. His court had many famous Sufi scholars, writers, and poets, and a large number of poems were published during his reign. This style of lyric poetry became the main literary form of the late Mughal period.
In 1850, the knowledge and vitality of Delhi reached its final peak. At that time, the city had six famous religious schools (madrasas), nine Urdu and Persian newspapers, five academic journals, countless printers, and at least 130 doctors who mastered traditional Persian-Arabic medicine. Many new discoveries in Western science were translated into Persian and Arabic in Delhi. As the young poet Altaf Hussain Hali wrote at the time, "The capital, Delhi, was gathered with such a group of talented sages that it reminded people of the eras of Akbar and Shah Jahan."
In 1857, an uprising against the British East India Company broke out in India. It started because the British army made their Indian soldiers bite open greased rifle cartridges, and rumors immediately spread that the lubricant came from cow and pig fat. The insulted soldiers flooded into Delhi on May 11 and turned to Bahadur Shah II for help at the Red Fort. Bahadur Shah II initially refused them, but faced with the passionate soldiers surrounding him, he eventually had no choice but to accept them as they bowed before him one by one, changing the fate of the Mughal Empire.
As the Siege of Delhi dragged on and the outlook grew dim, Bahadur Shah II chose to escape reality through poetry. According to British spies, he recited the following lines one night:
The sky collapses on everyone
I can no longer rest or sleep
Only my final departure will come
Whether at dawn or in the dark of night
On September 14, the British army officially attacked the walls of Delhi, and on September 17, Bahadur Shah II fled the Red Fort through the Water Gate. He went to the most important Sufi shrine (gongbei) of Nizamuddin in Delhi and handed over his ancestors' relics to the Nizam family, the keepers of the shrine. It is said these included three hairs of the noble Prophet passed down by the Timurid family. Then he went to the tomb of his ancestor, the second Mughal emperor, Humayun. On September 20, Bahadur Shah II was finally captured by the British army.
By January 27, 1858, after all the dignitaries of the Mughal court had been tried, Bahadur Shah II faced his own trial. William Howard Russell, a foreign correspondent for The Times and the father of war journalism, saw Bahadur Shah II in captivity. He described him as silent, sitting motionless day and night, with his eyes cast down to the ground. People heard him reciting poems from his own works and writing poetry on the walls with a charred stick.
During the trial, Bahadur Shah II provided a written defense in Urdu. He denied any involvement in the uprising and insisted that he had been a helpless prisoner held by the Indian soldiers from start to finish. The trial dragged on for more than a month and was often adjourned because of Bahadur Shah II's poor health. On March 9, the British finally decided to exile Bahadur Shah II.
On October 7, 1858, after the Mughal Empire had ruled Delhi for 332 years, the last emperor, Bahadur Shah II, left Delhi in an ox cart. The group traveled slowly down the Ganges River by steamship and arrived at Diamond Harbour, south of Calcutta, on December 4. They boarded the British naval ship HMS Magpie there and finally reached Rangoon, Burma, where they lived in two small rooms in the British barracks area directly below the Shwedagon Pagoda.
In April 1859, Bahadur Shah II moved to a new wooden house near the fort guard camp. According to the report by his jailer, Captain Nelson Davies:
The residence consisted of four rooms, each 16 feet square. One room was assigned to the former king, another to Jawan Bakht and the young crown princess, and a third was occupied by Queen Zinat Mahal. Each of these rooms had an attached washing area. Shah Abbas and his mother lived in the remaining room.
The servants either lounged around the veranda or slept under the house, where the ground was covered in crushed brick to keep it dry. A drainage ditch ran around the house for the same reason. There were two washrooms, a double bathroom for the servants, and a place for cooking.
The veranda on the upper floors was full of chicks, which were kept inside by nailed-down slats. The frail former king and his sons usually sat there, where the floor was raised almost to the height of the railing, allowing them to enjoy the pleasant sea breeze and the wide, beautiful view. They watched people pass by and stared at the ships being loaded, which helped break up the monotony of their life behind bars and made them more willing to accept their current living situation.
Regarding the health of Bahadur Shah II, the report by Davis noted:
If given time to make up his mind, his memory was still good, but he spoke unclearly because he had lost his teeth. He was unable to handle anything requiring mental effort, and while that was the impression he gave, he seemed to be bearing the weight of his years remarkably well. He lived a dull, listless life, showing little interest in anything except eternal matters. This had been his normal state for a long time, and it would likely continue until his life ended, which would not surprise anyone.
Because the British did not allow him to use paper or pens, the world could only guess how he felt about his life in exile. By October 1862, his health took a sharp turn for the worse, and he could no longer swallow or eat food. On November 5, Davis ordered bricks and lime to be collected to prepare a quiet spot behind the house enclosure for his burial.
At 5:00 a.m. on November 7, 1862, Bahadur Shah II finally returned to Allah. Davis wrote: Everything was ready, and at 4:00 p.m. that day, he was buried in a brick grave behind the guard camp, with turf laid level with the ground... A bamboo fence surrounded the grave for a long time, and once the fence rotted, the area would be covered in thick grass, leaving no trace and making it impossible to identify the final resting place of the last Great Mughal. Davis specifically mentioned that only two of Bahadur Shah II's sons and a manservant attended the funeral, as women were not allowed to attend according to tradition.
The grave of Bahadur Shah II soon became impossible to identify. When a delegation from India came to visit in 1903, a local guide pointed out a jujube tree near the grave. In 1905, the Dosti group in Yangon protested and demanded that the grave site be marked. The British initially disagreed, but after a demonstration and a series of published reports, they finally agreed in 1907 to erect an inscribed stone slab and put a railing around it. In 1925, the railing was rebuilt into a temporary shrine (gongbei) covered with a corrugated iron roof.
It was not until February 16, 1991, when workers were digging a drainage ditch behind the shrine, that they discovered a brick-lined grave, finally confirming the remains of Bahadur Shah II. Later, this place was rebuilt into a mosque with a prayer hall (gongbei). Dignitaries from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have all visited, and Rajiv Gandhi even gifted a carpet here.
As a fallen monarch, Bahadur Shah II was a failure. He did not give the army the support it needed during the 1857 Indian Rebellion, which ultimately ended the Mughal civilization. Under the British policy of divide and rule, the various ethnic groups in India began to drift apart. But under his rule, Delhi was home to the most talented poets and writers in modern South Asian history, and literature and art reached their peak.
As a Sufi ruler, he never forgot how important it was for the different groups under his rule to depend on each other. During the Siege of Delhi, he refused the demands for a holy war (jihad) from the Wahhabis and tried his best to maintain relationships between all groups. When a large number of Muslim (dosti) elites moved from India to Pakistan in 1947, people could no longer imagine that just 90 years earlier, many Indian soldiers had rushed to the Red Fort in Delhi, gathered under the banner of a Sufi emperor, and faced national disaster with their Muslim brothers to fight against foreign invaders.
I found stone tablets standing around the front of the tomb.
Underground is the original location of the tomb.
Inside the tomb complex (gongbei), there is a portrait of Abdul Qadir Gilani, the founder of the Qadiriyya order.
Next to the tomb is a prayer hall. This is the same as the Qadiriyya order in China, where the tomb and prayer hall are adjacent, and there is an imam in the mosque.
In a forest near the Yangon Central Railway Station in Myanmar, the largest Sufi tomb complex in Yangon is hidden. Since most of the text inside the tomb is written in Burmese, I searched for information for a long time after I returned but could not find any leads. Recently, based on the few English words inside the tomb, I learned that this place belongs to the Maizbhandari order, which was established in the late 19th century by Bengali Muslims based on the Qadiriyya Sufi tradition.
The Maizbhandari order is the only indigenous Bengali Sufi order, and its founder was born in Chittagong in 1826. People say his ancestors were descendants of the Prophet, who moved through Medina, Baghdad, and Delhi before finally settling in Bengal, serving as imams for generations. Maizbhandari studied the scriptures from a young age. After graduating in 1853, he first served as a judge (qadi), but soon resigned to work as a teacher in Kolkata. In Kolkata, he met two sheikhs from the Qadiriyya Sufi order and joined them to practice Sufism. In the late 19th century, he established his own lodge and founded the Maizbhandari order.
From the 19th century to the present, the Maizbhandari order has grown into a modern organization with millions of followers and is the most important Sufi order in Bangladesh. The Maizbhandari order is known for its melodic and rhythmic way of chanting (dhikr). They have recorded tens of thousands of songs, which have had a great influence on the faith in Bengal. As Yangon, Myanmar, has a large population of Bengali Muslims, it is also an important area for the Maizbhandari order.
A live scene of the dhikr ceremony.
At the Sufi tomb in Yangon, not only Muslims but also Burmese Buddhists come to offer dua. This is the unique charm of Sufism in South and Southeast Asia. At many important shrines (gongbei) in India, you can see Hindus going inside to offer dua. In Malaysia and Singapore, many Chinese people also come to pay their respects at the shrines (keramat) of local saints.
I also saw white sugar placed in front of a shrine (gongbei).
A Sufi shrine (gongbei) inside the Thinchai Sunni Maha Maiden cemetery in Yangon, Myanmar.
Summary: Yangon holds the tomb of Bahadur Shah II, the last Mughal emperor, near Shwedagon Pagoda, along with a Qadiriyya gongbei connected to Muslim memory in Myanmar. This account keeps the source's shrine details, historical names, religious terms, and site observations.
The tomb of Bahadur Shah II, the last emperor of the Mughal Empire, is near the famous Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, Myanmar. This site was his home after he was exiled to Yangon in 1858. Because Bahadur Shah II was a devout Sufi sheikh during his life, his tomb has become a famous Sufi shrine (gongbei) in Myanmar.
Although Bahadur Shah II belonged to the Chishti order during his life, the shrine (gongbei) is now managed by the Qadiriyya order. I met a man here who was hanging fresh flowers on the shrine (gongbei), and after some local friends (dosti) finished their gathering (amali), they shared candy and bananas with us.
In 1803, the British East India Company used force to become the protector of the Mughal Empire, and the Mughal emperors lost their real power from then on. After Bahadur Shah II took the throne in 1837, his power was limited to the area around Delhi. He never had any ambition for the empire, but instead focused on Sufi practice and writing poetry. Legend says he started his Sufi practice at age 20 and became a murshid (guide) of the Chishti order by age 40. In 1843, he wrote a letter to Queen Victoria of Britain saying: "I am now old and have no ambitions left." I intend to devote myself entirely to religious work to comfort my remaining years.
The Sufi philosophy followed by Bahadur Shah II believed in embracing different cultures. Men, women, young, and old should all be able to express their love for Allah, and this love should transcend religion, gender, and social class. According to a report by Major Archer in 1828: "He is thin and small, and his clothes are simple, almost crude." He looks like a poor scholar or a language teacher. This is the typical appearance of a Sufi ascetic.
Like the Mughal rulers before him, Bahadur Shah II saw himself as the protector of his Hindu subjects. Under his rule, Hindu elites in Delhi would visit the Nizamuddin Sufi shrine (gongbei) to recite Persian poetry. Many people studied under great imams and attended religious schools (madrasas). The Mughal court would attend various Hindu events, and during the Shia month of Muharram, they would listen to elegies mourning Imam Hussein.
People say the Sufi poetry of Bahadur Shah II reached a level of perfection. His court had many famous Sufi scholars, writers, and poets, and a large number of poems were published during his reign. This style of lyric poetry became the main literary form of the late Mughal period.
In 1850, the knowledge and vitality of Delhi reached its final peak. At that time, the city had six famous religious schools (madrasas), nine Urdu and Persian newspapers, five academic journals, countless printers, and at least 130 doctors who mastered traditional Persian-Arabic medicine. Many new discoveries in Western science were translated into Persian and Arabic in Delhi. As the young poet Altaf Hussain Hali wrote at the time, "The capital, Delhi, was gathered with such a group of talented sages that it reminded people of the eras of Akbar and Shah Jahan."
In 1857, an uprising against the British East India Company broke out in India. It started because the British army made their Indian soldiers bite open greased rifle cartridges, and rumors immediately spread that the lubricant came from cow and pig fat. The insulted soldiers flooded into Delhi on May 11 and turned to Bahadur Shah II for help at the Red Fort. Bahadur Shah II initially refused them, but faced with the passionate soldiers surrounding him, he eventually had no choice but to accept them as they bowed before him one by one, changing the fate of the Mughal Empire.
As the Siege of Delhi dragged on and the outlook grew dim, Bahadur Shah II chose to escape reality through poetry. According to British spies, he recited the following lines one night:
The sky collapses on everyone
I can no longer rest or sleep
Only my final departure will come
Whether at dawn or in the dark of night
On September 14, the British army officially attacked the walls of Delhi, and on September 17, Bahadur Shah II fled the Red Fort through the Water Gate. He went to the most important Sufi shrine (gongbei) of Nizamuddin in Delhi and handed over his ancestors' relics to the Nizam family, the keepers of the shrine. It is said these included three hairs of the noble Prophet passed down by the Timurid family. Then he went to the tomb of his ancestor, the second Mughal emperor, Humayun. On September 20, Bahadur Shah II was finally captured by the British army.
By January 27, 1858, after all the dignitaries of the Mughal court had been tried, Bahadur Shah II faced his own trial. William Howard Russell, a foreign correspondent for The Times and the father of war journalism, saw Bahadur Shah II in captivity. He described him as silent, sitting motionless day and night, with his eyes cast down to the ground. People heard him reciting poems from his own works and writing poetry on the walls with a charred stick.
During the trial, Bahadur Shah II provided a written defense in Urdu. He denied any involvement in the uprising and insisted that he had been a helpless prisoner held by the Indian soldiers from start to finish. The trial dragged on for more than a month and was often adjourned because of Bahadur Shah II's poor health. On March 9, the British finally decided to exile Bahadur Shah II.
On October 7, 1858, after the Mughal Empire had ruled Delhi for 332 years, the last emperor, Bahadur Shah II, left Delhi in an ox cart. The group traveled slowly down the Ganges River by steamship and arrived at Diamond Harbour, south of Calcutta, on December 4. They boarded the British naval ship HMS Magpie there and finally reached Rangoon, Burma, where they lived in two small rooms in the British barracks area directly below the Shwedagon Pagoda.
In April 1859, Bahadur Shah II moved to a new wooden house near the fort guard camp. According to the report by his jailer, Captain Nelson Davies:
The residence consisted of four rooms, each 16 feet square. One room was assigned to the former king, another to Jawan Bakht and the young crown princess, and a third was occupied by Queen Zinat Mahal. Each of these rooms had an attached washing area. Shah Abbas and his mother lived in the remaining room.
The servants either lounged around the veranda or slept under the house, where the ground was covered in crushed brick to keep it dry. A drainage ditch ran around the house for the same reason. There were two washrooms, a double bathroom for the servants, and a place for cooking.
The veranda on the upper floors was full of chicks, which were kept inside by nailed-down slats. The frail former king and his sons usually sat there, where the floor was raised almost to the height of the railing, allowing them to enjoy the pleasant sea breeze and the wide, beautiful view. They watched people pass by and stared at the ships being loaded, which helped break up the monotony of their life behind bars and made them more willing to accept their current living situation.
Regarding the health of Bahadur Shah II, the report by Davis noted:
If given time to make up his mind, his memory was still good, but he spoke unclearly because he had lost his teeth. He was unable to handle anything requiring mental effort, and while that was the impression he gave, he seemed to be bearing the weight of his years remarkably well. He lived a dull, listless life, showing little interest in anything except eternal matters. This had been his normal state for a long time, and it would likely continue until his life ended, which would not surprise anyone.
Because the British did not allow him to use paper or pens, the world could only guess how he felt about his life in exile. By October 1862, his health took a sharp turn for the worse, and he could no longer swallow or eat food. On November 5, Davis ordered bricks and lime to be collected to prepare a quiet spot behind the house enclosure for his burial.
At 5:00 a.m. on November 7, 1862, Bahadur Shah II finally returned to Allah. Davis wrote: Everything was ready, and at 4:00 p.m. that day, he was buried in a brick grave behind the guard camp, with turf laid level with the ground... A bamboo fence surrounded the grave for a long time, and once the fence rotted, the area would be covered in thick grass, leaving no trace and making it impossible to identify the final resting place of the last Great Mughal. Davis specifically mentioned that only two of Bahadur Shah II's sons and a manservant attended the funeral, as women were not allowed to attend according to tradition.
The grave of Bahadur Shah II soon became impossible to identify. When a delegation from India came to visit in 1903, a local guide pointed out a jujube tree near the grave. In 1905, the Dosti group in Yangon protested and demanded that the grave site be marked. The British initially disagreed, but after a demonstration and a series of published reports, they finally agreed in 1907 to erect an inscribed stone slab and put a railing around it. In 1925, the railing was rebuilt into a temporary shrine (gongbei) covered with a corrugated iron roof.
It was not until February 16, 1991, when workers were digging a drainage ditch behind the shrine, that they discovered a brick-lined grave, finally confirming the remains of Bahadur Shah II. Later, this place was rebuilt into a mosque with a prayer hall (gongbei). Dignitaries from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have all visited, and Rajiv Gandhi even gifted a carpet here.
As a fallen monarch, Bahadur Shah II was a failure. He did not give the army the support it needed during the 1857 Indian Rebellion, which ultimately ended the Mughal civilization. Under the British policy of divide and rule, the various ethnic groups in India began to drift apart. But under his rule, Delhi was home to the most talented poets and writers in modern South Asian history, and literature and art reached their peak.
As a Sufi ruler, he never forgot how important it was for the different groups under his rule to depend on each other. During the Siege of Delhi, he refused the demands for a holy war (jihad) from the Wahhabis and tried his best to maintain relationships between all groups. When a large number of Muslim (dosti) elites moved from India to Pakistan in 1947, people could no longer imagine that just 90 years earlier, many Indian soldiers had rushed to the Red Fort in Delhi, gathered under the banner of a Sufi emperor, and faced national disaster with their Muslim brothers to fight against foreign invaders.
I found stone tablets standing around the front of the tomb.
Underground is the original location of the tomb.
Inside the tomb complex (gongbei), there is a portrait of Abdul Qadir Gilani, the founder of the Qadiriyya order.
Next to the tomb is a prayer hall. This is the same as the Qadiriyya order in China, where the tomb and prayer hall are adjacent, and there is an imam in the mosque.
In a forest near the Yangon Central Railway Station in Myanmar, the largest Sufi tomb complex in Yangon is hidden. Since most of the text inside the tomb is written in Burmese, I searched for information for a long time after I returned but could not find any leads. Recently, based on the few English words inside the tomb, I learned that this place belongs to the Maizbhandari order, which was established in the late 19th century by Bengali Muslims based on the Qadiriyya Sufi tradition.
The Maizbhandari order is the only indigenous Bengali Sufi order, and its founder was born in Chittagong in 1826. People say his ancestors were descendants of the Prophet, who moved through Medina, Baghdad, and Delhi before finally settling in Bengal, serving as imams for generations. Maizbhandari studied the scriptures from a young age. After graduating in 1853, he first served as a judge (qadi), but soon resigned to work as a teacher in Kolkata. In Kolkata, he met two sheikhs from the Qadiriyya Sufi order and joined them to practice Sufism. In the late 19th century, he established his own lodge and founded the Maizbhandari order.
From the 19th century to the present, the Maizbhandari order has grown into a modern organization with millions of followers and is the most important Sufi order in Bangladesh. The Maizbhandari order is known for its melodic and rhythmic way of chanting (dhikr). They have recorded tens of thousands of songs, which have had a great influence on the faith in Bengal. As Yangon, Myanmar, has a large population of Bengali Muslims, it is also an important area for the Maizbhandari order.
A live scene of the dhikr ceremony.
At the Sufi tomb in Yangon, not only Muslims but also Burmese Buddhists come to offer dua. This is the unique charm of Sufism in South and Southeast Asia. At many important shrines (gongbei) in India, you can see Hindus going inside to offer dua. In Malaysia and Singapore, many Chinese people also come to pay their respects at the shrines (keramat) of local saints.
I also saw white sugar placed in front of a shrine (gongbei).
A Sufi shrine (gongbei) inside the Thinchai Sunni Maha Maiden cemetery in Yangon, Myanmar.
