Pagan Kingdom (Bagan)

The Pagan Kingdom, centred on the city of Bagan on the Irrawaddy River, was the first kingdom to unify the regions that would later constitute modern Myanmar, and it is regarded as the foundational 'charter' polity of Burmese civilisation.

Burmese chronicles traditionally date its founding to 849 CE, when the capital was established at Pagan, though modern scholarship treats this early date as legendary and archaeological evidence suggests the walled city dates closer to around 980; for its first two centuries Pagan was only a minor principality. The kingdom became a major power in the eleventh century under King Anawrahta (reigned 1044-1077), who unified the Irrawaddy valley, conquered the Mon kingdom of Thaton to the south in 1057, and adopted Theravada Buddhism as the state religion, drawing on Mon and Sri Lankan religious traditions. This conversion shaped the kingdom's enduring character and inaugurated a remarkable golden age of religious patronage. Over the following two centuries the rulers and wealthy elite of Pagan built an astonishing concentration of Buddhist temples, pagodas, and monasteries on the plains around the capital, numbering in the thousands, of which around two thousand survive, making Bagan one of the great architectural landscapes of the world. The period also saw the flourishing of Burmese script and literature and the development of a sophisticated agrarian economy. From the mid-thirteenth century the kingdom declined, weakened internally by the continual donation of tax-free land and labour to religious institutions, which eroded the crown's revenue and authority, and externally by pressure from neighbouring peoples. The decisive blow came from the Mongols, whose invasions from 1277 onward shattered Pagan's military power; the kingdom effectively collapsed in 1287 when the king fled and was killed, and the dynasty formally ended in 1297 when the Myinsaing brothers deposed the last Pagan ruler, ushering in roughly two and a half centuries of political fragmentation in Burma.

Key figures