Before Pagan
The Irrawaddy valley was home in the first millennium to the Pyu city-states, such as Sri Kshetra and Halin, Buddhist and Hindu urban centres. In the south lived the Mon. The Burmans, or Bamar, entered the dry zone of central Burma from the north, probably in the ninth century, after the Pyu cities were weakened by attacks from Nanzhao in Yunnan. The Burmese chronicles date the walls of Pagan to 849, a date historians accept as broadly plausible for the city's foundation.
Anawrahta
Anawrahta (r. 1044–1077) made Pagan a kingdom that controlled most of the Irrawaddy valley. He developed irrigation in the Kyaukse plain, the rice bowl of the dry zone, and extended his power south. The chronicles say he took the Mon city of Thaton in 1057, after its king refused to give him Buddhist scriptures, and brought back its king, monks and craftsmen, under the influence of the Mon monk Shin Arahan, who had converted him to Theravada Buddhism. Historians regard the story as an idealised account, since Pagan's religion remained a mixture of Theravada, Mahayana, tantric practices and local spirit cults, but Mon influence on Pagan's culture was very strong.
The great age
Under Kyansittha (r. 1084–1112/13) and his successors the kingdom was at peace and prosperous, and its rulers and people built thousands of temples. The Myazedi inscription, set up in 1113 by Kyansittha's son Rajakumar to record the dedication of a temple to his father, carries the same text in Pyu, Mon, Old Burmese and Pali, and was the key to deciphering the Pyu language. Burmese gradually replaced Mon as the language of inscriptions. In the late twelfth century, under Narapatisithu, monks returning from Sri Lanka introduced a new ordination line from the Mahavihara, splitting the sangha into rival orders.
Decline and fall
By the thirteenth century much of the kingdom's land had been given to monasteries, exempt from tax, and the crown's revenues and military strength declined. In the 1270s the Mongol Yuan dynasty demanded tribute. King Narathihapate refused and his army was defeated by the Mongols in 1277. Further Mongol campaigns in the 1280s reached Pagan itself, and the king fled south, earning his epithet. He was poisoned by his son in 1287. The kingdom fragmented: three brothers of Shan descent took power in the Kyaukse plain, the Mon of the south formed their own kingdom, and the Burmese centre later shifted to Ava. Pagan remained a sacred city, and its kings were remembered as the founders of the Burmese state.
Further reading
- Coedes, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. University of Hawaii Press, 1968
- Gombrich, Richard F. Theravada Buddhism: A Social History. Routledge, 2006
- Harvey, Peter. An Introduction to Buddhism. Cambridge University Press, 2013
See also
- Bagan — Bagan is an archaeological site on the Irrawaddy in central Myanmar, the capital of the Pagan kingdom from the ninth to the late thirteenth century, where more than two thousand Buddhist temples and stupas survive across a plain of about a hundred square kilometres.
- Ananda Temple — The Ananda temple at Bagan is a great cruciform Buddhist temple built by King Kyansittha around 1105, with four standing Buddhas facing the four directions, regarded as the masterpiece of the Pagan period.
- Shwedagon Pagoda — The Shwedagon is the great gilded stupa on Singuttara hill in Yangon, said by tradition to enshrine hairs of the Buddha, enlarged by the Mon queen Shin Sawbu in the fifteenth century and raised to its present height of about 99 metres in 1774.
- Buddhism — Buddhism is a religious and philosophical tradition founded in northern India in the 5th century BCE by Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, centred on the Four Noble Truths and a path to liberation from suffering.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.