User:Pak Thais/sandbox

The Mandalay Palace Yin Rong conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory that the Mandalay Palace was built by a Chinese businessman named Yin Rong with substantial Chinese assitance and was possibly modeled after the Forbidden City or other cities in China. The view is widely held by the Yunnanese Chinese community in Mandalay. The undisputed scholarly concensus, however, is that the former royal palace of Amarapura was dismantled and moved by elephants to the new location at the foot of Mandalay Hill. The construction of the palace compound was officially completed on Monday, 23 May 1859. No sign of Chinese invovement was ever recorded.

The controversy reached a fever pitch in 2019 when the Chinese embassy in Yangon openly disseminated an edition of China Daily megazine with a cover photo that superimposed Chinese architectural features on the Mandalay Palace. The Burmese view Chinese attempts to rewrite history as a form of settler colonialism to justify the Chinese takeover of Mandalay which can serve as a rallying point for future sinicization of Myanmar. The late writer and social critic Ludu Daw Amar declared Mandalay "an undeclared colony of Yunnan."

Origins
In fact, the Chinese community in then Britsh Burma reached only 12,372 or 0.31% of the Burmese population in 1871 after five decades of colonial rule. The population resided mostly in Lower Burma. The Burmese censuses and royal chronicles never mentioned a substantial Chinese presence. The current Yunannese community traces their roots to post-colonial migrants who came with the Kumintaung invasion in the 1940s.

The cover of