The Pyu

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A brick wall once ran more than thirteen kilometers around a single city on the Irrawaddy plain — a rough circle of fired brick enclosing something near fourteen hundred hectares of field and orchard, palace ground and stupa, laid out on the dry earth south of the river’s great bend. Its builders raised it by hand, course on course, and set into it gates whose stubs still stand in the scrub near modern Pyay; a traveler on the old ground can walk from the remains of the Yahanda gate toward the tall cylindrical tower of the Bawbawgyi and never leave the footprint of one ancient town. This was Sri Ksetra, the largest of the walled cities that the Chinese, looking west from Yunnan, called the country of the Piao. That engineered circumference is the plainest measure of the people who made it — not foragers of the forest but an urban civilization, the first the valley knew, laid out with an engineer’s confidence a thousand years before the Bamar raised their temples a little upstream.

The Bawbawgyi Pagoda at Sri Ksetra (Thayekhittaya), near Pyay — a solid cylindrical brick stupa some forty-six meters high, held to prefigure the Burmese pagoda. Htetmyetwin, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

The walled country of the Piao

The Pyu reach the present by three converging paths, and none of them alone would be enough. The first is the ground itself. Across the arid central belt of the Ayeyarwady — the Irrawaddy — and up its tributary valleys, the Mu and the Yin, the earth carries the outlines of enormous cities, best read from the air: brick rings and rectangles traced by walls now worn to low ridges, moats silted into shallow ditches, and here and there a brick tower still standing above the paddy. The second path is the Pyu’s own voice, in a script derived from the Indian Brahmi, cut into stone and gold; and in their mortuary custom, which set the cremated remains of the dead in urns of pottery and stone and buried them in or near isolated stupas. The third is the witness of outsiders: the dynastic histories of Tang China, which knew the Pyu as the Piao and preserved a fuller external account of them than the Pyu left of themselves.

Who they were, the linguistic and archaeological record agrees. The Pyu were a Tibeto-Burman-speaking people — a branch of the great Sino-Tibetan family — who, in about the 2nd century BCE, began to enter the Irrawaddy valley from present-day Yunnan, to the northeast. They are, on the surviving testimony of their own writing, the earliest inhabitants of Myanmar of whom written records remain. They called themselves, in one rendering of their name, Tircul; the Chinese wrote it Piao. From roughly the 2nd century BCE to the middle of the 11th century CE — better than a thousand years — their settlements held the dry plain in an arc of city-states bound by a common script, a common way of burying the dead, and a shared religion, yet never, so far as the record shows, gathered under a single crown. UNESCO, framing the same span, describes the Pyu kingdoms as having flourished “for over 1,000 years between 200 BC and AD 900,” a period whose completeness the radiocarbon record confirms from dated architectural features reaching back to about 190 BCE.

Three of their cities dominate the account. Beikthano, in the Minbu district of the central dry zone near modern Taungdwingyi, is the earliest excavated of them; radiocarbon dates place its walls across a long span between roughly 180 BCE and 610 CE, and its rectangular circuit — some three kilometers by one — enclosed about three hundred hectares. Its name means, in Burmese, “the city of Vishnu,” a later gloss on a place whose own gods are unrecorded. Halin, or Halingyi, lay north in the Mu valley; its wooden gates have been radiocarbon-dated to about 70 CE, making its foundation a matter of the 1st century, and at some six hundred sixty-four hectares it was nearly twice the size of Beikthano, pierced by twelve gates that a later tradition read against the twelve signs of the zodiac. Largest of all was Sri Ksetra — Thayekhittaya in Burmese — near Pyay, circular in plan, more than thirteen kilometers around, enclosing about fourteen hundred hectares. These were not merely fortified; they were engineered landscapes. The Pyu commanded water in a country the monsoon largely passes over, cutting canals and tanks and weirs to irrigate the rice that fed the towns, and it was that hydraulic mastery, as much as the brick, that made an urban civilization possible on ground that looks, for much of the year, like scrub and thorn.

The outside witness fills in what the ruins cannot say aloud. The Tang records report eighteen Pyu states, nine of them walled cities, spread across two hundred ninety-eight districts — a political geography of many centers rather than one capital. They preserve, too, one of the few moments when the Pyu step out of archaeology into narrated event. In the years around 800 and 801–802, Sri Ksetra sent formal embassies to the Tang court, and with one of them traveled a troupe of some thirty-five musicians and dancers, led — the Chinese sources say — by a Pyu prince. Their performance in the capital at Chang’an, before the Emperor Dezong, so struck the court that the great poet Bai Juyi (772–846) set it down in verse, a piece known as the “Music of the Piao Kingdom”; his contemporary Yuan Zhen wrote of the same performance. It is a rare gift to the historian: a moment when the walled cities of the dry zone are heard, for once, as living sound — reed and drum and dancer carried four thousand kilometers to a Chinese emperor, and remembered by a Chinese poet, from a people who otherwise speak to us only in brick and ash.

The first civilization of the valley

Within the frame of the Burmese sacred world, the Pyu hold a particular and founding place: they are the first Burmese civilization, the stratum on which everything later — Bagan, the reign of Theravada Buddhism in the valley, the cult of the Thirty-Seven Nats — was raised. Their significance runs along two lines, the one technological and the other religious, and in the end the two are the same brick.

They were, first, master builders in fired clay. The great cities were brick; so were the monuments that studded them. The most eloquent of these is the Bawbawgyi at Sri Ksetra, a solid cylindrical stupa rising some forty-six meters on a five-tiered platform, its long brick drum hollow through much of its height, built around the sixth or seventh century. Archaeologists read the Bawbawgyi, and its Pyu cousins, as a prototype of the Bagan-era pagoda — the ancestral form from which the bell-and-spire reliquary of classical Burma descends. When, centuries later, the kings of Bagan covered their plain with stupas, and when one of them raised the golden Shwezigon as the mold for every Burmese pagoda after it, they were building in a brick tradition whose deepest Burmese root runs back to Pyu hands. The Burmese tradition’s own sense of its antiquity rests here: the conviction that the land was urban, literate, and Buddhist long before the Bamar rose, and that the soil beneath the living faith is a full millennium deep.

For it was through the Pyu, on the documentary record, that the teaching of the Buddha entered this land. UNESCO, inscribing the three cities, calls them the earliest testimony of the introduction of Buddhism into Southeast Asia — the record, in walls and reliquaries and inscribed scripture, of a faith arriving and taking root almost two thousand years ago. By about the fourth century, the archaeology indicates, Theravada Buddhism had become predominant among the Pyu. But their devotional world was plural, and the sources are clear that this plurality is a documented fact and not a confusion. Alongside the Theravada, Pyu finds carry Mahayana and Tantric Buddhist elements and Hindu ones, and beneath all of them older, pre-Buddhist practices remained entrenched. The Pyu buried their cremated dead in urns near their stupas; they inscribed Buddhist texts in Pali and Sanskrit and their own tongue; they set Vishnu’s name, in a later reading, on the walls of Beikthano. This layered faith — the many currents held together, the new teaching absorbing rather than erasing the old — already carries the shape of the religion the valley would keep: a Buddhism that does not stand alone but holds other powers within its frame.

The Pyu script belongs to this same account of transmission. Derived from the Indian Brahmi, it was the vehicle in which the Buddhist scripture and the royal record were first written in the valley; and recent scholarship, though the matter is not settled, suggests that the Pyu script may have been the source of the later Burmese script itself. If so, the letters in which the Burmese chronicles and the nat-legends would one day be written descend, by way of the Pyu, from the alphabets that carried Buddhism out of India. The Mon of the lower country would become, in the tradition’s telling, the great teachers of Theravada to the Bamar; but the Pyu were there first and further north, the earlier channel by which the Dhamma reached the dry zone. Their meaning for the tradition is that they teach it its own age — that Burma was a civilization of walled cities and written scripture and brick stupas while the Bamar were still, on the usual account, a people yet to descend into the valley.

Remains of the Yahanda Gate in the city wall of Sri Ksetra (Thayekhittaya), near Pyay. Jakub Hałun, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

How the Pyu became the Bamar

The Pyu did not so much end as be absorbed, and the distinction matters, because in the tradition’s own telling the people who ended the Pyu were not their enemies but their heirs. The waning came first from without. From the middle of the eighth century the country of Yunnan to the northeast had consolidated into the aggressive kingdom of Nanzhao, and the Tang records report Nanzhao raids on Pyu territory beginning as early as 754 or 760 CE. The decisive blow fell in 832, when Nanzhao warriors overran the Pyu land and carried off some three thousand captives from Halin. This is remembered as a hard, sober event — a walled city broken and its people led away north — and it broke the old order of the eighteen states.

As Pyu power failed, the Bamar rose in the same valley. The Burmese chronicles date the founding of Bagan to the year 849; the radiocarbon evidence from the old walls of Bagan points rather to a later emergence, nearer 980 to 1020. Either way, the Bamar gathered at Bagan in the dry zone that the Pyu had already made habitable, on ground where Pyu brick and Pyu irrigation and Pyu Buddhism had prepared the way. And the Pyu did not vanish at a stroke. Their settlements and their language persisted for generations after Nanzhao and after Bagan’s rise; the Pyu tongue is attested in the valley into the late twelfth century, and only by the thirteenth had the Pyu wholly assumed the Burman ethnicity. In the frame of the living tradition this is continuity, not conquest-erasure: the Pyu became the Bamar. The people of Bagan carried Pyu blood, built in Pyu brick, and prayed in a Buddhism the Pyu had first received. When a king of Bagan — remembered as Anawrahta, who reigned 1044 to 1077 — is credited by tradition with gathering the images of the Thirty-Seven Nats and setting them at the Shwezigon to stand as devotees of the Buddha, he was ordering the spirits of a realm already a millennium old, on a foundation the Pyu had laid. The tradition draws that line back with care, and it should be drawn no further than it goes: the Pyu are the deep root beneath the Shwezigon where the nats were later folded into the Buddhist order, but this is the tradition’s sense of its own antiquity, not a claim that the Pyu themselves kept the cult of the Thirty-Seven, which took its formalized shape long after they had become the Bamar.

The last afterlife of the Pyu was their recovery from the earth. For centuries they survived chiefly as the vast, half-legible footprints in the fields and as a name in the Chinese and Burmese records; the walled cities kept their outlines but lost their story. The modern reading of the Pyu began with the colonial-era Archaeological Survey of Burma. The epigrapher Charles Duroiselle, superintendent of the Survey through much of the interwar period, excavated at Hmawza within Sri Ksetra — the Khin Ba mound, opened in 1926–27, yielded a spectacular reliquary trove of Pyu Buddhist gold — and Duroiselle’s catalogs of inscriptions first fixed the Pyu among the written languages of Burma. A generation later, U Aung Thaw directed the first systematic modern excavation of a Pyu city, working the great enclosure of Beikthano across four seasons from 1959 to 1963 and publishing his findings in a full report in 1968; his trenches through the brick mounds recovered the monasteries, the palace foundations, and the hydraulic works that established Beikthano as an urban civilization of the early centuries CE. The archaeology of the later twentieth century, drawing in international teams and the radiocarbon laboratory, carried the reading further, dating the walls and the reliquaries and reconstructing the water systems that fed the towns.

Recognition of the whole came in 2014. In that year the World Heritage Committee inscribed the three brick, walled and moated cities of Halin, Beikthano, and Sri Ksetra together, as the Pyu Ancient Cities — Myanmar’s first property on the World Heritage List, entered under criteria (ii), (iii), and (iv). The inscription frames the Pyu, in the words of its statement of value, as the first, largest, and longest-lived urbanized settlements of the region — and as the earliest testimony of Buddhism’s arrival in Southeast Asia, set down in the dated brick of cities that stood for a thousand years. What the World Heritage listing honors is not a ruin but a foundation: the walled country of the Piao that a Chinese poet once heard as music, the engineers who ran a thirteen-kilometer circuit of brick around a city in the dry zone, the people who received the Buddha’s teaching into the valley and then, without vanishing, became the Bamar who keep it still. The Pyu are spoken of in the past tense, as the ancient civilization they were; but their brick is the soil the living tradition grew from, and the golden spires of Bagan and the Shwezigon rest, at their deepest course, on the fired clay the Pyu learned to raise.

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