Hteik Su Phaya Gyi
The princess at her home in Yangon in 2018
BornHteik Su Phaya Gyi
(1923-04-05)5 April 1923
Rangoon (now Yangon), British Burma
Died31 December 2021(2021-12-31) (aged 98)
Yangon, Myanmar
Spouse
Maung Maung Khin
​
​
(m. 1943; died 1984)​
DynastyKonbaung
FatherKo Ko Naing
MotherMyat Phaya Galay
ReligionTheravada Buddhism

Princess Hteik Su Phaya Gyi (Burmese: ထိပ်စုဘုရားကြီး pronounced [tʰeɪʔ sṵ pʰə.yá dʑí]; 5 April 1923 – 31 December 2021), also known as Su Su Khin or Pwar May or Princess Tessie,[1] was a Burmese princess and the final surviving royal of the Konbaung dynasty. Daughter of Princess Myat Phaya Galay (a daughter of the last king of Burma),[2][3][4] she was a senior member of the Royal House of Konbaung.[5]

Upon the death of her younger brother Taw Phaya in 2019, she became the last living grandchild of King Thibaw.[1]

Life

Hteik Su Phaya Gyi and her husband Maung Maung Khin

Hteik Su Phaya Gyi was born on 5 April 1923 in Rangoon, British Burma, to Ko Ko Naing and Princess Myat Phaya Galay, the fourth daughter of King Thibaw and Queen Supayalat.[6][7] She went to a Catholic school in Moulmein and was employed at the U.S. and Australian embassies in Rangoon. Fluent in English, she worked as a private English language tutor for many years.[8]

In a BBC interview, she asserted having received an engagement proposal from Ananda Mahidol of Thailand in 1936 when he was still a prince. The subsequent arrangements were reportedly overseen by her mother, sparking widespread expectations among many people at the time that she would become the future queen consort of Thailand. However, with the onset of World War II, the engagement discussions were halted and remained unresolved.[9][10]

In 1943, she married Maung Maung Khin, a descendant of the Mon royal family. He was a nephew of Premier Ba Maw and a brother of Khin Kyi, the wife of her younger brother Taw Phaya Gyi.[1] Maung Maung Khin died at Rangoon in 1984.[9] She sought to bring King Thibaw's body back to Myanmar as part of her family's mission.[11]

She died on 31 December 2021 at a Buddhist monastery in Yangon, at the age of 98.[12][13] Her funeral was held at Yayway Cemetery in Yangon on 2 January 2022. She was survived by twenty grandchildren and seventeen great-grandchildren.[14]

Documentary film

In 2017, Hteik Su Phaya Gyi and her younger brother Taw Phaya, her nephew Soe Win, and her niece Devi Thant Sin appeared as the main characters of We Were Kings, a documentary film by Alex Bescoby and Max Jones. The film premiered in Mandalay on 4 November 2017 at the Irrawaddy Literary Festival and also screened in Thailand at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand.[15] The film is about Myanmar's history, but also about the descendants of the last kings of Burma who lived unassuming lives in modern Myanmar, unrecognized and unknown.[16][17]

Family

She had three sons and two daughters: Win Khin (b. 1945), Kyaw Khin (b. 1948), Aung Khin (1953 – October 2008), Cho Cho Khin (b. 1943), and Devi Khin (b. 1951).[18]

Ancestry

Source:[18]

References

  1. 1 2 3 "သီပေါနောက်က တော်ဘုရားများ". BBC News (in Burmese). 10 February 2019.
  2. ↑ "Understanding the old kingdom in the new Myanmar". The Myanmar Times. 25 February 2013.
  3. ↑ "Planète. La princesse oubliée". Le Républicain Lorrain (in French). 1 December 2013.
  4. ↑ "ထိပ်စုဖုရားကြီးနဲ့ သမိုင်းအမွေ (Hteik Su Phaya Gyi and Historical Heritage)". VOA Burmese (in Burmese). 12 November 2013.
  5. ↑ "အလုပ်အကိုင် ခက်ခဲစွာ ရှာဖွေရပ်တည် ခဲ့ရရှာတဲ့ ကုန်းဘောင်မင်းဆက် အနွယ်တော်ရဲ့ ဘဝဖြတ်သန်းမှု". Mizzima (in Burmese). 27 January 2016.
  6. ↑ Jared Downing (19 April 2016). "Dinner with the princess of Burma". Frontier Myanmar. Retrieved 20 August 2018.
  7. ↑ Ben Dunant (2 December 2017). "Myanmar's living royals reclaim their past". The Nikkei. Retrieved 20 August 2018.
  8. ↑ Kelly Macnamara (25 November 2013). "Lost Kingdom: The forgotten Royal family". The Myanmar Times. Retrieved 20 August 2018.
  9. 1 2 "ထိပ်စုဘုရားကြီးနဲ့ ထိုင်းဘုရင်လောင်း". BBC (in Burmese). 26 October 2017.
  10. ↑ "သီပေါမင်းအလွန် ထိုင်း မြန်မာအနွယ် တော်ဝင်မိသားစုကြား ရွှေလမ်းငွေလမ်းခရီး". Kumudra. Archived from the original on 29 September 2017. Retrieved 16 January 2018.
  11. ↑ "သီပေါမင်း ရုပ်ကလာပ်တော် ပြန်သယ်ရန် ကြိုးပမ်း". Frontier Myanmar (in Burmese). 30 March 2017.
  12. ↑ Fame, Asian (31 December 2021). "သီပေါမင်းရဲ့ မြေးတော်ထိပ်စုဖုရားကြီး ကံတော်ကုန်ရှာ". Popular News Journal (in Burmese).
  13. ↑ "သီပေါမင်းနှင့် မိဖုရားခေါင်ကြီး စုဖုရားလတ်တို့၏ မြေးတော် ထိပ်စုဘုရားကြီး နတ်ရွာစံကံတော်ကုန်". Eleven Media Group (in Burmese). 31 December 2019.
  14. ↑ "Funeral of last surviving grandchild of Myanmar's King Thibaw held in Yangon". The Star. 4 January 2022. Retrieved 5 January 2022.
  15. ↑ Jim Pollard (10 February 2018). "The right to remember Myanmar's last king". Asia Times.
  16. ↑ Zuzakar Kalaung (2 November 2017). "We Were Kings: Burma's lost royal family". The Myanmar Times.
  17. ↑ "Documentary About Forgotten Myanmar Royalty Premieres in Mandalay". The Irrawaddy. 6 November 2017.
  18. 1 2 Shah, Sudha (14 June 2012). The King In Exile: The Fall Of The Royal Family Of Burma. Harper Collins. ISBN 978-93-5029-598-4.
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