Saya San
Saya San was the former monk and village physician who had himself crowned king of Burma in a jungle clearing in December 1930 and led the largest rising against British rule between the annexation and the war; it took eighteen months and about ten thousand dead to put down, and he was hanged. He was born in 1876 near Shwebo, the district the last dynasty had come from, spent years in the monkhood and years as a practitioner of traditional medicine, and in the 1920s joined the General Council of Burmese Associations, the nationalist body that the monks' politics ran through, for which he toured the villages of the delta collecting grievances against the capitation tax, the forest laws and the Indian moneylenders. The depression halved the price of rice in 1930 and the tax did not fall with it. On 21 December 1930 at Tharrawaddy his followers, tattooed for invulnerability and armed with swords, attacked the village headmen and the police, and a few days later he was crowned Thupannaka Galon Raja under a white umbrella in a palace of bamboo. The galon is the bird that kills the naga, and the naga was the British. The rising spread through Lower Burma and into the Shan hills, and the government brought in troops from India and, for the first time, aircraft. Villages were burned, heads were displayed, and by the middle of 1931 the rebels were being hunted in bands. He was taken in August 1931 in the Shan states, tried by a special tribunal, and defended by Ba Maw, who made the trial a nationalist stage and lost it. He was hanged at Tharrawaddy jail on 28 November 1931. The British called it a peasant jacquerie led by a charlatan; the nationalists of the 1930s called it the beginning, and the Thakins who took power after 1945 dated their movement from the year of his death. His name was on the currency of independent Burma and is on it still.
- Lived: 1876 CE – 1931 CE
- Nationality: Burmese
- Roles: rebel, monk, physician
