The Burmese kingdom on the eve of the First Anglo-Burmese War was at the very height of its powers. The imperial formation over which the Court of Ava presided was the most expansive in its people's history. Burmese soldiers, following their mounted chiefs, had marched, almost unchecked, from the frost-covered foothills of the Himalayas to the malarial jungles of the Malay Peninsula. Though their hold on many of their new possessions remained tenuous, their newest campaigns, in the west, were meeting with growing success.

At home, along the banks of the Irrawaddy, the Court of Ava's authority was stronger than ever before. Building on core institutions which reached back to Pagan, increasingly bureaucratic royal structures peeled away the autonomy of local magnates and established a more direct administration. The gentry came under tighter control and the area under the sway of appointed provincial officers began to stretch beyond the neighbourhood of garrison towns and into more outlying areas. Within the walls of the royal city, a generation of relentless conquest had produced a cosmopolitan society and a cultural renaissance. Titles became grander and internal differences more marked. Food and entertainment became richer and more varied. A new capital was built and was named Amarapura, ‘the Immortal City’. The king of Ava, styling himself ‘The Master of the White Elephant’ and ‘The Lord of All Umbrella-Bearing Chiefs’, came to see himself as an equal of the emperor of China and more than an equal of the newly arrived and somewhat inscrutable English governors of India.