Pagan (Bagan)

← Encyclopedia

On the dry central plain of Myanmar, where the Irrawaddy makes its long bend south, some two thousand brick temples, stupas, and monastery shells still stand across roughly forty square kilometers of scrub and tamarind. They are what remains of a building program that, over two and a half centuries, set more than ten thousand religious structures on this one stretch of riverbank. The plain is the body of a kingdom — the first to gather the Burmese-speaking peoples of the Irrawaddy under a single crown, and the one under which the Theravada form of Buddhism became the religion of the country it has remained ever since. The capital and the dynasty take their name from the city: Pagan, in the older romanization fixed by colonial administration; Bagan, in the spelling closer to the modern Burmese and now official. The kingdom’s conventional span runs c. 849 to 1297, though both ends, as so often, are tidier on paper than in the ground.

Out of the Pyu cities

The Burmans did not arrive to an empty land. For most of the first millennium the irrigated basins of Upper Burma — the Mu valley, the Kyaukse plain, the Minbu tract near the Irrawaddy–Chindwin confluence — held a network of walled city-states built by the Pyu, a people whose Tibeto-Burman speech and Buddhist-and-Hindu material culture are read today chiefly from their brick cities at Sri Ksetra, Beikthano, and Halin and from cremation urns and gold relic-texts. The Pyu cities absorbed religious currents carried up the Bay of Bengal trade routes from India — early forms of Buddhism alongside the cults of Vishnu and Shiva — and they declined in the eighth and ninth centuries under raids from Nanzhao, the Tai-speaking power in what is now Yunnan, whose campaigns into the upper Irrawaddy ran from the 750s into the 830s.

Into that weakened landscape moved the Mranma — the Burmans — settlers of Tibeto-Burman speech who entered the valley, by the mainstream reconstruction, from the Nanzhao orbit to the northeast. Pagan emerges as the first securely attested Burman settlement, one polity among the surviving Pyu towns until it began, in the late tenth century, to outgrow and absorb them. Burmese tradition credits a king named Pyinbya with walling the city in 849 — with the Sarabha gate and the moat still pointed out to visitors. The archaeology is more cautious: radiocarbon work by Bob Hudson and colleagues on Bagan’s earthen and brick defenses places the eastern wall’s construction somewhere between roughly 990 and 1230, so the round number 849 reads as a dynasty’s chosen origin rather than a frontier visible in the soil. What the spade does confirm is continuity: the people who raised Bagan were heirs to the irrigation and the religion of the Pyu, not strangers to them.

The political consolidation has a name and a date that the sources agree on. On 11 August 1044, after a duel that unseated the usurper Sokkate, Anawrahta took the throne. With him the loose settlement on the Irrawaddy becomes a kingdom with reach.

Anawrahta and the turn to Theravada

Anawrahta (r. 1044–1077) is the founder figure — the king under whom Pagan secured the rice plains of Kyaukse with weirs and canals, pushed its authority out toward the Shan hills and the Arakan coast, and committed the realm to a single religious order. The pivot is the monk Shin Arahan, by tradition a Mon from the south, who is said to have converted the king from the practices of the Ari — a body of forest monks whose discipline the reform-minded later remembered as lax and heterodox, wine-drinking and tied to the indigenous spirit cults. Whether the Ari were as corrupt as the chronicles paint them is a question scholars now hold open; the chronicle tradition that records their suppression was written to celebrate the purification that displaced them.

The central episode is the conquest of Thaton. In the standard narrative, fixed by the Burmese chronicles, Anawrahta asked the Mon king Manuha of Thaton, on the lower coast, for a copy of the Pali canon; Manuha refused; Anawrahta marched, took the city after a siege in 1057, and carried home the Tripitaka — the three baskets of scripture — along with Manuha himself, his learned monks, relics, and the artisans whose hands would shape the temple plain. From that transfer, the conventional account runs, flows everything that follows: Bagan as the new custodian of Mon Theravada culture, the language of the canon and the forms of the temple carried north into the Burman heartland.

This narrative — what Michael Aung-Thwin has named the “Mon Paradigm” — is the most contested thing in the field. In The Mists of Rāmañña (2005), Aung-Thwin re-read the contemporary record and found, he argued, no evidence of a Theravada Mon kingdom of Rāmaññadesa in lower Burma before Anawrahta, and no contemporary witness to a conquest of Thaton at all; the fully formed Thaton story, on his reading, surfaces in Burmese chronicles only by the 1730s and in Mon texts later still, a colonial-era fusion of separate legends that cast a “civilizing” Mon south over a Burman north. Other scholars dispute the demolition, pointing to the Mon-language inscriptions and the unmistakably Mon architectural and artistic vocabulary of early Bagan as marks of real southern contact. The debate matters because it is, at bottom, a debate over how Theravada reached the Irrawaddy — by a single dramatic conquest, or by the slower seepage of texts, monks, and craftsmen along the Bay of Bengal. What is not in doubt is the outcome: by the 1070s Bagan was a Theravada center of such standing that when the Buddhist order of Sri Lanka had been broken in the wars with the Chola Empire, it was to Bagan that the island looked, in 1071, for the ordained monks and scriptures needed to restart its own lineage.

Anawrahta did not erase the older devotions; he absorbed them. The great reliquary stupa he began at Nyaung-U, the Shwezigon, became the model for the standardized Burmese bell-shaped stupa — and around its base he set the images of the thirty-seven nats, the indigenous spirits whose cult centered on the volcanic massif of Mount Popa, bringing them under the umbrella of the new dispensation rather than driving them out. The king died in 1077, by tradition gored by a wild buffalo on his return from a campaign. The institution he built outlived him by two centuries.

Kyanzittha and the temple in stone

The reign that fixed Pagan’s architectural language belongs to Kyanzittha (r. 1084–1113), a general who took the throne after the short, troubled reign of Anawrahta’s son Saw Lu. Under him the kingdom turned its wealth fully toward building, and toward a deliberate cosmopolitanism: his inscriptions invoke the Buddhist world from Sri Lanka to Bengal, and he is credited with sending craftsmen to help repair the Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya, the site of the awakening, then under the patronage of the Pala Empire of eastern India.

That eastern connection is not incidental. The Buddhism and the art that flowered at Bagan reached the Irrawaddy along two channels that the kingdom held open at once. One ran from the Theravada world of Sri Lanka and the Mon south. The other ran across the Bay of Bengal from the Pala domains of Bihar and Bengal, where the great monastic universities of Nalanda, Vikramashila, and Somapura were the beating heart of late Indian Buddhism and the workshops of the Pala bronze and stone style. Pagan’s painters and sculptors absorbed that Pala idiom — the slim, sharp-featured Buddha figures, the throne-backs and flame-haloes, the crowded narrative registers — and reworked it into something local. The result is a fusion: the Mahayana and tantric iconography that the Pala monasteries cultivated appears on Bagan’s walls alongside an order that called itself Theravada, and the Jataka stories of the Buddha’s former lives run in glazed plaques and mural sequences around temple after temple, the working out of karma across lifetimes rendered for a lay public to walk past and read.

Kyanzittha’s masterwork is the Ananda, completed around the turn of the twelfth century — a perfectly symmetrical Greek-cross plan rising in receding terraces to a gilded spire, with four colossal standing Buddhas facing the cardinal directions down vaulted corridors lit by pierced stone windows. Its form is read as a synthesis of Mon plan and Indian temple-mountain, and it set a template the dynasty would elaborate for two centuries. The Burmese builders worked in two broad types: the solid stupa (zedi), a reliquary mound not meant to be entered, of which the Shwezigon is the paradigm; and the hollow temple (gu, from the word for cave), a vaulted brick shrine whose interior held images and murals — Ananda, the towering five-storeyed Thatbyinnyu, the massive Dhammayangyi, the Sulamani and Gawdawpalin. The brick was local; the true arch and vault, mastered here on a scale rare in the medieval Buddhist world, let the builders roof large interior halls without timber. Around 1215 a king of the later dynasty raised a scale replica of the Mahabodhi temple itself on the plain, a deliberate copy of Bodh Gaya’s tower — the Pala-India link made literal in brick.

The making of merit

The temples were not monuments to power for its own sake; they were merit — kusala, the wholesome action whose fruit ripens in better rebirth and, at length, toward release. To build a temple, endow a monastery, gild a stupa, or dedicate land and bonded labor to the order was to bank merit against the long arc of karma, and Pagan’s society organized itself around that economy of merit from the crown downward. Kings, queens, ministers, and prosperous commoners all built; the dedicatory inscriptions that survive — carved on stone slabs and on the famous quadrilingual pillar — record the gift, name the donor, list the lands and the people assigned to maintain the foundation, and pronounce a curse on whoever should disturb it.

That same pillar is the hinge of Burmese literacy. The Myazedi inscription of 1113, set up by Prince Yazakumar in memory of Kyanzittha, repeats a single proclamation in four scripts — Old Burmese, Pali, Old Mon, and Pyu. It is the earliest securely dated Old Burmese text, and because it sets the lost Pyu language beside three readable ones, it has been the key that let scholars begin to decipher Pyu at all. The pillar registers, in stone, the linguistic layering of the kingdom: the canonical Pali of the Tripitaka, the administrative Mon inherited from the south, the dying speech of the Pyu predecessors, and the rising vernacular Burmese that would outlast them all.

The weight of the gift

The merit economy that raised the plain also undermined the crown that ran it. Land and the people who worked it, once dedicated to the order, became religious land — exempt from tax and from royal levy in perpetuity, and not easily clawed back, for to seize what had been given to the Buddha was to court both clerical resistance and the karmic ruin of demerit. Generation on generation of pious endowment moved an ever-larger share of the productive land of Upper Burma into the hands of the order. By the 1280s, by the estimates scholars draw from the surviving land records, somewhere between a third and two thirds of the kingdom’s cultivable land lay tax-free with the sangha.

The arithmetic of that is fatal to a state that pays its soldiers and officials from the land. The crown periodically tried to recover ground — purging the order in the name of purification and reclaiming dedicated estates — but the reclamation never kept pace with the dedication, and the powerful monastic foundations largely held what they had been given. As royal revenue thinned, so did the loyalty that revenue bought; the court fragmented, the frontiers grew restless under Shan, Mon, and Arakanese pressure, and the kingdom that could build ten thousand temples found it harder each decade to field an army.

The Mongol storm and the end

Into that hollowed strength came the Mongols. From his throne over the Yuan dynasty in China, Kublai Khan demanded tribute of the Burmese king Narathihapate (r. 1256–1287); the demand was refused, and a Mongol envoy party was killed. Between 1277 and 1287 a series of campaigns — collectively the first Mongol invasion of Burma — pushed down out of Yunnan into the upper Irrawaddy. Narathihapate, who fled south before the advance, is remembered in Burmese tradition by the bitter epithet Tarokpyemin, “the king who ran from the Chinese.” He submitted to the Khan and was assassinated in 1287 by his own son, the viceroy of Prome; with his death the unified kingdom broke into contending fragments.

What followed was not a sack so much as a slow dissolution. A Mongol-recognized king, Kyawswa, held a shrunken Pagan as a Yuan vassal from 1289, formally acknowledged by the Yuan court in March 1297. In December of that year the three brothers of Myinsaing — Burmese-Shan strongmen who had become the real power in the rice country of Kyaukse — deposed and later killed him, and with him ended the line of kings that had ruled from Bagan for two and a half centuries. The brothers founded the kingdom of Myinsaing in the heartland Anawrahta had once irrigated, and the political center of Burma moved away from the great plain for good. Bagan endured as a sacred town and a place of pilgrimage, never again a capital.

Reading the plain

The kingdom left no narrative history of itself; the Burmese chronicles that tell its story in full — the Maha Yazawin of the seventeenth century, the Hmannan Yazawin or Glass Palace Chronicle compiled by royal commission in 1829–1832 — were written centuries after the fall and braid documented event with legend, which is why the Thaton conquest and the foundation date can be argued at all. The firmer ground is the stone the kingdom carved in its own lifetime: the dedicatory inscriptions, of which several thousand survive, and the Myazedi pillar of 1113. Gordon H. Luce and U Pe Maung Tin, who translated the Glass Palace Chronicle in 1923 and spent careers on Pagan’s epigraphy and art, laid the foundations of the modern study; Luce’s Old Burma–Early Pagán (1969–1970) remains a touchstone. The most consequential recent voice is Michael Aung-Thwin, whose Pagan: The Origins of Modern Burma (1985) reconstructed the kingdom’s economy and the fatal logic of its tax-free religious land from the inscriptions, and whose Mists of Rāmañña (2005) put the whole Mon-conquest account on trial. The archaeology has its own revisionists: Bob Hudson, Nyein Lwin, and Win Maung’s radiocarbon study of the city walls detached Bagan’s foundation from the traditional 849 and showed an occupation deeper and messier than the chronicle date allows. Aung-Thwin’s case against the Mon Paradigm can be read in full in the open-access edition of The Mists of Rāmañña, and the conservation status of the plain itself is set out in the UNESCO World Heritage listing that inscribed Bagan in 2019, after decades in which over-eager restoration, an earthquake in 2016, and the press of tourism all left marks on the brick.

Today the plain is alive in a way the rest of the record is not. Pilgrims still climb to the gilt terraces of the Shwezigon and the Ananda; lamps are lit and flowers laid before the four standing Buddhas; the festival crowds gather at the old foundations as they have for nine hundred years. The kingdom that gathered the Burmans, took the canon north, and bound itself to the Buddha’s order so tightly that the binding helped bring it down is legible now in the one form it trusted to outlast kings — the temple, raised as merit, standing on the bend of the river where the merit was meant to ripen.

→ Related: Buddhism · Buddhism Theravada · Mahayana · Hinduism · Vishnu · Shiva · Jataka · Tripitaka · Karma · Pala Empire · Chola Empire · Gupta Empire · Khmer Empire · Sukhothai