Pagan Kingdom

The Pagan Kingdom, also called the Bagan Empire or the First Burmese Empire, was the first Burmese kingdom to unite the lands that would become modern Myanmar. It grew from a small ninth-century settlement of the Mranma people at Pagan into a principality that, in the 1050s and 1060s under Anawrahta, first brought the Irrawaddy valley and its edges under one rule. By the late twelfth century his successors had carried its influence south to the upper Malay Peninsula, east to the Salween, north towards China and west into Arakan and the Chin Hills, standing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries beside the Khmer as one of the two great empires of mainland Southeast Asia. Burmese speech and custom spread through the upper valley, displacing Pyu, Mon and Pali usage, and Theravada Buddhism spread to the villages under kings who raised more than ten thousand temples in the Bagan plain, of which two thousand survive, the pious endowing the monks with tax-free land. Decline set in by the mid thirteenth century, as the swelling of tax-free church wealth weakened the crown, and a spiral of disorder and Mongol pressure ended the kingdom when the Yuan armies came down from Yunnan in the 1280s.