The Pagan Kingdom (Burmese: ပုဂံပြည် Băgam pyi [bəɡàɰ̃ pji]; lit. 'Bagan state'), also called Bagan Empire (ပုဂံဧကရာဇ်နိုင်ငံတော်) or the First Burmese Empire, was the first Burmese kingdom to unify the regions that would later constitute modern-day Myanmar. Pagan's 250-year rule over the Irrawaddy valley and its periphery laid the foundation for the ascent of Burmese language and culture, the spread of Bamar ethnicity in Upper Myanmar, and the growth of Theravada Buddhism in Myanmar and in mainland Southeast Asia.
The kingdom grew out of a small 9th-century settlement at Pagan by the Mranma people, the predecessor to the modern Bamar ethnicity. Over the next two hundred years, the small principality gradually grew to absorb its surrounding regions until the 1050s and 1060s when King Anawrahta founded the Pagan Empire, presumably for the first time unifying under one polity the Irrawaddy valley and its periphery. By the late 12th century, Anawrahta's successors had extended their influence farther to the south into the upper Malay Peninsula, to the east at least to the Salween River, in the farther north to below the current China border, and to the west, in northern Arakan and the Chin Hills. In the 12th and 13th centuries, Pagan, alongside the Khmer Empire, was one of two main empires in mainland Southeast Asia.
The Burmese language and culture gradually became dominant in the upper Irrawaddy valley, eclipsing the Pyu, Mon and Pali norms by the late 12th century. Theravada Buddhism slowly began to spread to the village level although Vajrayana, Mahayana, Brahmanic, and animist practices remained heavily entrenched at all social strata. Pagan's rulers built over 10,000 Buddhist temples in the Bagan Archaeological Zone of which over 2,000 remain. The wealthy donated tax-free land to religious authorities.
The kingdom went into decline in the mid-13th century as the continuous growth of tax-free religious wealth by the 1280s had severely affected the crown's ability to retain the loyalty of courtiers and military servicemen. This ushered in a vicious circle of internal disorders and external challenges by the Arakanese, Mons, Mongols and Shans. Repeated Mongol invasions (1277–1301) toppled the four-century-old kingdom in 1287. The collapse was followed by 250 years of political fragmentation that lasted well into the 16th century.
Names
The classical name for the kingdom in Pali was Arimaddanapura (meaning "Foe-Crushing City"). The Burmese name for the kingdom is ပုဂံ (translit. pugam), which is usually rendered as Pagan or Bagan in English. Arimaddana is attested in the Ceylon Pāli chronicles, identified as the city of Pagan in Burma (Rāmañña) (Bode: op. cit., 14). During the time of Parakkamabāhu I of Ceylon, the King of Arimaddana quarrelled with him, ill-treated his envoys, and seized by force a princess sent from Ceylon to Kamboja. Parakkama sent a punitive expedition under the Damilādhikāri ādicca, who reduced the country to subjection (Cv. lxxvi. 10-75).
Later Vijayabāhu II of Ceylon entered into friendly negotiations with the ruler of Arimaddana, and wrote him a letter in the Māgadha language composed by himself. As a result, a friendly treaty was made between them which also resulted in closer contact between the monks of the two countries (Cv. lxxx. 6-8).
According to some authorities, quoted by Minayeff (Recherches sur Bouddhisme, p. 70), the city was full of learned women．The Gandhavamsa (p. 67) mentions a list of twenty-three teachers who wrote their works in Arimaddana. From this context it appears that Arimaddana was known also as Pukkāma (Pukkāmasankhāte Arimaddananagare)．This is supported by evidence from elsewhere (Forchhammer: Jardine Prize Essay, pp. 29, 32. Ind. Ant. 1893, p. 17). It was a minister in Arimaddana who wrote the Nyāsappadīpatīkā (Svd. v. 1240). Arimaddana was also the city of birth of the Thera Chapata (Svd. v. 1247).
History
Origins
The origins of the Pagan Kingdom have been reconstructed using archaeological evidence as well as the Burmese chronicle tradition. Considerable differences exist between the views of modern scholarship and various chronicle narratives.
Chronicle tradition
The local myths and chronicles written down in the 18th century trace its origins to 167 AD, when Pyusawhti founded the dynasty at Pagan (Bagan). But the 19th-century Glass Palace Chronicle (Hmannan Yazawin) connects the dynasty's origins to the clan of the Buddha and the first Buddhist king Maha Sammata (မဟာ သမ္မတ).
The Glass Palace Chronicle traces the origins of the Pagan Kingdom to India during the 9th century BC, more than three centuries before the Buddha was born. Abhiraja (အဘိရာဇာ)of the Sakya clan (သကျ သာကီဝင် မင်းမျိုး) – the clan of the Buddha – left his homeland with followers in 850 BC after military defeat by the neighbouring kingdom of Panchala (ပဉ္စာလရာဇ်). They settled at Tagaung in present-day northern Myanmar and founded a kingdom. The chronicle does not claim that he had arrived in an empty land, only that he was the first king.
Abhiraja had two sons. The elder son Kanyaza Gyi (ကံရာဇာကြီး) ventured south, and in 825 BC founded his own kingdom in what is today Arakan. The younger son Kanyaza Nge (ကံရာဇာငယ်) succeeded his father, and was followed by a dynasty of 31 kings, and then another dynasty of 17 kings. Some three and a half centuries later, in 483 BC, scions of Tagaung founded yet another kingdom much farther down the Irrawaddy at Sri Ksetra, near modern Pyay (Prome). Sri Ksetra lasted nearly six centuries, and was succeeded in turn by the kingdom of Pagan. The Glass Palace Chronicle goes on to relate that around 107 AD, Thamoddarit (သမုဒ္ဒရာဇ်), nephew of the last king of Sri Ksetra, founded the city of Pagan (formally, Arimaddana-pura (အရိမဒ္ဒနာပူရ), lit. "the City that Tramples on Enemies"). The site reportedly was visited by the Buddha himself during his lifetime, and it was where he allegedly pronounced that a great kingdom would arise at this very location 651 years after his death. Thamoddarit was followed by a caretaker, and then Pyusawhti in 167 AD.
The chronicle narratives then merge, and agree that a dynasty of kings followed Pyusawhti. King Pyinbya (ပျဉ်ပြား) fortified the city in 849 AD.
Scholarly reconstruction
Modern scholarship holds that the Pagan dynasty was founded by the Mranma of the Nanzhao kingdom in the mid-to-late 9th century AD; that the earlier parts of the chronicle are the histories and legends of Pyu people, the earliest inhabitants of Myanmar of whom records are extant; and that Pagan kings had adopted the Pyu histories and legends as their own. Indeed, the Mranma and Pyu people became mixed after years of immigration and settlement.
The earliest archaeological evidence of civilisation dates to 11,000 BC. Archaeological evidence shows that as early as the 2nd century BC the Pyu had built water-management systems along secondary streams in central and northern parts of the Irrawaddy basin and had founded one of Southeast Asia's earliest urban centres. By the early centuries AD, several walled cities and towns, including Tagaung, the birthplace of the first Burman kingdom according to the chronicles, had emerged. The architectural and artistic evidence indicates the Pyu realm's contact with Indian culture by the 4th century AD. The city-states boasted kings and palaces, moats and massive wooden gates, and always 12 gates for each of the signs of the zodiac, one of the many enduring patterns that would continue until the British occupation. Sri Ksetra emerged as the premier Pyu city-state in the 7th century AD. Although the size of the city-states and the scale of political organisation grew during the 7th to early 9th centuries, no sizeable kingdom had yet emerged by the 9th century.
According to a reconstruction by G.H. Luce, the millennium-old Pyu realm came crashing down under repeated attacks by the Nanzhao kingdom of Yunnan between the 750s and 830s AD. Like that of the Pyu, the original home of the Burmans prior to Yunnan is believed to be in present-day Qinghai and Gansu provinces. After the Nanzhao attacks had greatly weakened the Pyu city-states, large numbers of Burman warriors and their families first entered the Pyu realm in the 830s and 840s, and settled at the confluence of the Irrawaddy and Chindwin rivers, perhaps to help the Nanzhao pacify the surrounding countryside. Indeed, the naming system of the early Pagan kings—Pyusawhti and his descendants for six generations—was identical to that of the Nanzhao kings where the last name of the father became the first name of the son. The chronicles date these early kings to between the 2nd and 5th centuries AD, scholars to between the 8th and 10th centuries CE. (A minority view led by Htin Aung contends that the arrival of Burmans may have been a few centuries earlier, perhaps the early 7th century. The earliest human settlement at Bagan is radiocarbon dated to c. 650 AD. But evidence is inconclusive to prove that it was specifically a Burman (and not just another Pyu) settlement.)
Thant Myint-U summarises that "the Nanzhao Empire had washed up on the banks of the Irrawaddy, and would find a new life, fused with an existing and ancient culture, to produce one of the most impressive little kingdoms of the medieval world. From this fusion would result the Burmese people, and the foundations of modern Burmese culture."
Early Pagan
Evidence shows that the actual pace of Burman migration into the Pyu realm was gradual. Indeed, no firm indications have been found at Sri Ksetra or at any other Pyu site to suggest a violent overthrow. Radiocarbon dating shows that human activity existed until c. 870 at Halin, the Pyu city reportedly destroyed by an 832 Nanzhao raid. The region of Pagan received waves of Burman settlements in the mid-to-late 9th century, and perhaps well into the 10th century. Though Hmannan states that Pagan was fortified in 849—or more accurately, 876 after the Hmannan dates are adjusted to King Anawrahta's inscriptionally verified accession date of 1044—the chronicle reported date is likely the date of foundation, not fortification. Radiocarbon dating of Pagan's walls points to c. 980 at the earliest. (If an earlier fortification did exist, it must have been constructed using less durable materials such as mud.) Likewise, inscriptional evidence of the earliest Pagan kings points to 956. The earliest mention of Pagan in external sources occurs in Song Chinese records, which report that envoys from Pagan visited the Song capital Bianjing in 1004. Mon inscriptions first mentioned Pagan in 1093, respectively.
Below is a partial list of early Pagan kings as reported by Hmannan, shown in comparison with Hmannan dates adjusted to 1044 and the list of Zatadawbon Yazawin (the Royal Horoscopes Chronicle). Prior to Anawrahta, inscriptional evidence exists thus far only for Nyaung-u Sawrahan and Kunhsaw Kyaunghpyu. The list starts from Pyinbya, the fortifier of Pagan according to Hmannan.
By the mid-10th century, Burmans at Pagan had expanded irrigation-based cultivation while borrowing extensively from the Pyus' predominantly Buddhist culture. Pagan's early iconography, architecture and scripts suggest little difference between early Burman and Pyu cultural forms. Moreover, no sharp ethnic distinction between Burmans and linguistically linked Pyus seems to have existed. The city was one of several competing city-states until the late 10th century when it grew in authority and grandeur. By Anawrahta's accession in 1044, Pagan had grown into a small principality—about 320 kilometres (200 mi) north to south and about 130 kilometres (81 mi) from east to west, comprising roughly the present districts of Mandalay, Meiktila, Myingyan, Kyaukse, Yamethin, Magwe, Sagaing, and the riverine portions of Minbu and Pakkoku. To the north lay the Nanzhao Kingdom, and to the east still largely uninhabited Shan Hills, to the south and the west Pyus, and farther south still, Mons. The size of the principality is about 6% of that of modern Burma/Myanmar.
Pagan Empire
In December 1044, a Pagan prince named Anawrahta came to power. Over the next three decades, he turned this small principality into the First Burmese Empire—the "charter polity" that formed the basis of modern-day Burma/Myanmar. Historically verifiable Burmese history begins with his accession.
Formation
Anawrahta proved an energetic king. His acts as king were to strengthen his kingdom's economic base. In the first decade of his reign, he invested much effort into turning the arid parched lands of central Myanmar into a rice granary, successfully building/enlarging weirs and canals, mainly around the Kyaukse district, east of Pagan. The newly irrigated regions attracted people, giving him an increased manpower base. He graded every town and village according to the levy it could raise. The region, known as Ledwin (လယ်တွင်း, lit. "rice country"), became the granary, the economic key of the north country. History shows that one who gained control of Kyaukse became kingmaker in Upper Myanmar.
By the mid-1050s, Anawrahta's reforms had turned Pagan into a regional power, and he looked to expand. Over the next ten years, he founded the Pagan Empire, the Irrawaddy valley at the core, surrounded by tributary states. Anawrahta began his campaigns in the nearer Shan Hills, and extended conquests to Lower Myanmar down to the Tenasserim coast to Phuket and North Arakan. Estimates of the extent of his empire vary greatly. The Burmese and Siamese chronicles report an empire which covered the present-day Myanmar and northern Thailand. The Siamese chronicles assert that Anawrahta conquered the entire Menam valley, and received tribute from the Khmer king. One Siamese chronicle states that Anawrahta's armies invaded the Khmer kingdom and sacked the city of Angkor, and another one goes so far as to say that Anawrahta even visited Java to receive his tribute.