Fall of Civilizations Podcast - 16. Bagan - City Of Temples

Episode Date: October 2, 2022

In the lowlands of Burma lie the remains of thousands of crumbling temples...In this episode, we tell one of the most colourful stories of civilizational survival: the story of the Bagan Empire of Myanmar. Find out how this kingdom rose up in the Irrawaddy river valley of central Myanmar, and built one of the most remarkable series of monuments to have survived from the medieval world. Discover what life was like for the people who lived there, and find out what happened to cause its sudden and complete collapse.

Towards the end of the 13th century, around the year 1293, the Venetian explorer and adventurer Marco Polo was traveling through Southeast Asia in the region of what is today Myanmar or Burma. Marco Polo had spent much of the last 20 years traveling around the Asian continent in a remarkable series of journeys along the ancient route known as the Silk Road, and recently he had come into the employment of the Mongol Emperor of China, a man named Kublai Khan. Impressed by this foreign visitor, the emperor had appointed Marco Polo an ambassador, and he was now traveling through the forested mountains of southwestern China

that now stand on the border of Myanmar. He passed through these jungle hills, thick with bamboo forests and shaded groves, and then down into a wide river valley full of wild animals. Leaving the province of Cardendan, you enter a vast descent, which you travel without variation for two days and a half, in the course of which no habitations are to be found. You then reach a spacious plane, Beyond this, in a southerly direction, towards the confines of India, lies the city of Mi Yan.

The journey occupies 15 days, through a country much depopulated, and forests abounding with elephants, rhinoceroses, and other wild beasts, where there is not the appearance of any habitation. In this country were found many elephants, large and handsome wild oxen, with stags, fallow deer and other animals in great abundance. But finally, after more than two weeks, Marco Polo came across a large city, and it was a city that despite all he'd seen on his travels, still stood out to him for its size and magnificence. a city where more than 4,000 golden temples sent their spires lancing up into the afternoon air over the flat pan of the river valley. After the journey of 15 days that has been mentioned, you reach the city of Mien, which is large, magnificent, and the capital of the kingdom. The inhabitants are idolaters and have a language peculiar to themselves.

It is related that there formerly reigned in this country, a rich and powerful monarch. The city that Marco Polo called Mien had fallen on hard times. Everywhere, homes were abandoned and temples had fallen into disuse and disrepair. There would have been the signs of war, hungry and displaced people on the streets. But over these sorry sites, the golden shrines of the city towered. and attested to its former magnificence. And of all of these, two enormous temples stood out in particular. When his death was drawing near, the king gave orders for erecting on the place of his interment

at the head and foot of the sepulchre, two pyramidal towers, entirely of marble, ten paces in height, of a proportionate bulk, and each terminating with a ball. One of these pyramids was covered with a plate of gold an inch in thickness, so that nothing besides the gold was visible, and the other were the plate of silver of the same thickness. Around the balls were suspended small bells of gold and of silver, which sounded when put in motion by the wind. The whole formed a splendid object.

Years later, he would return to Italy, and fall on the wrong side of a war between the city-states of Genoa and Venice. And he would be thrown in prison by the Genoese. He would share his jail cell with a writer named Rustichello da Pisa, who was greatly impressed with Polo's tales of his travels. While waiting in prison for the war to end, the pair of them worked to clarify Polo's memories and write them down in vivid detail, with what many scholars consider to be a surprisingly high degree

of accuracy and authenticity. Together with the writer Rostikello, Marco Polo would become the first outsider to write a description of a city at the heart of an empire that today we know by the name Bagan. For centuries, it had united the lands of Myanmar and presided over a boom in our lives. art and architecture, constructing one of the most striking collections of religious buildings that the world has ever seen. The Empire of Bergan had flourished and survived, and then in a flash its golden age had ended, its people had left, and its grand temples had fallen slowly into ruin. My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast.

Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory, and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common, what led to their fall, and what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode, I want to tell one of the most colorful stories of civilizational survival, the story of the Bagan Empire of medieval Myanmar. I want to show how this kingdom rose up in the Irawaddy River Valley of central Myanmar and built one of the most remarkable series of monuments to have survived anywhere in the world.

I want to show what life was like for the people who lived there and what happened to cause its sudden and complete collapse. The modern country of Myanmar is today the lives. nation by continuous landmass in Southeast Asia. It's the size of Texas, and it's nearly three times larger than the United Kingdom. Myanmar borders India in the west and China in the east, and its lands stretch between the mountain ranges, the Arakhan, the Phegu, the Chin and the Shan Yomar. Between the bony peaks of these mountain ranges that run like a series of spines north the south down the whole country, flow the rivers Chindwin, Shui Li, Namai, and Marli.

Many of these rivers begin in the Himalayan glaciers of Upper Burma, and all of them flow down through the gorges of the high mountains, and join the largest watercourse of all in a wide and sinuous flow. This is the great river Irawadhi. The name of the Irawadhi River derives from the Sanskrit name, Iravati, a legendary white elephant with four tusks and seven trunks, who in Hindu mythology is the trusted mount of the god Indra. And it's not hard to see why the river deserves this grand and mythical name. The Irawaddy River winds for more than 2,000 kilometers across the dry zone of Burma, through palm forests and scrublands and around sandy islands. The river is also one of Asia's widest, and at points during the rainy season, it can swell to nearly a

kilometer across. These floods can be so dramatic that for millennia, the people of Burma have built houses along the river, on top of tall bamboo stilts that allow the floodwaters to rise below them. At the end of the river's journey, the Irawadhi branches out into a wide delta of mangrove forests, marshes and meandering streams, where it finally ends. It's a very end. It's empties into the southern ocean. The general center of the river's course is an arid heartland that's known as Myanmar's dry zone, since it receives a relatively small amount of rainfall every year. The mountains that surround this wide basin on three sides soak up much of the moisture, holding back the clouds like a great wall. But the rain falls instead in the hills, and this

rainwater then flows down through the Great River Irawaddy. This means that so long as you stay close to the river, the dry zone is actually never short of water. Since humans first arrived in Myanmar, people have flocked to the banks of this river to make their livelihoods, to farm their rice, and to build their towns. The earliest cultures we have evidence for, arrived in Myanmar around 11,000 BC, and by about 1,500 BC, people in the region were already turning copper into bronze, growing rice and domesticating chickens and pigs, and they would be among the first people in the world to farm these animals for food. By around 500 BC, iron was being worked in the region. Since the earliest history, the rivers have also been highways. The people of Myanmar,

have always built watercraft, often rafts made out of the strong and light Burmese bamboo, that grows everywhere along stream banks and in the lower hills, or more refined barges made of teak wood. The teak tree has adapted to contain a large amount of natural oil, giving it an exceptional water resistance. The teak growing in Burma is so abundant that it has been used to make enormous construed. like bridges that have lasted for nearly 200 years. One famous bridge named Ubein spans more than a kilometer across Taung Taman Lake,

and is made up of more than a thousand teakwood pillars driven into the lakebed. The people here even build floating island gardens that rise and fall with the water level, and which for centuries have turned the surface of the lake into productive agricultural land. If people wanted to travel south, they could easily float their boats downstream, but the prevailing winds also blew south to north, meaning that it was also possible to sail against the current, making travel in both directions along the river relatively easy. The Irawaddy River was so conceptually important to the history of this region, that people in Burma would rarely talk about the country in terms of north and south. But rather use the words, Anya and Akiy, upstream and downstream.

One traditional Burmese poet describes the coming of summer in the landscape of the Irawaddy Valley. As the hot season revolts against the cold in the pattern of contrasts, the sky becomes cloudy and winds are hot again. It is summer. Leaves on trees turn yellow to fall, to show new leaves. Stems twist or break, yet sprouts on tamar trees are now soft greens like parrot eggs. While in summer trees thirst in foothills, tarsen flowers are climbing tabby trees, effusing fragrance, mixing with the wafting air. At sunset, crow-fesants are cooing, and from afar come the cuckoo's notes. Now and again, thunder is beating through heaven's expanse.

like Lambara and A-Indy drums. And I, oh, I think of the pouring of water on the Bodhi tree and of the absent companion in the Golden Palace of Victory. And I am mournful. Like many languages in Southeast Asia, the Burmese language has different levels of register, depending on how polite or formal you need to be. and the land itself has different names, depending on the register you're using.

In everyday speech, people most commonly use the name Barma to describe the country and its people, while the grander and more poetic name is Myanmar. Both of these names have been used alongside each other for centuries. When the country became a British colony, the colonial government used the informal name Burma, which is the name that British people first heard being used by common sailors and traders. But in 1989, the military dictatorship that then ruled the country changed the name officially to the grander name of Myanmar. Because of this complicated history, in Myanmar today, the question of the country's name has deep-rooted controversies. But in this episode,

I will follow the example of the majority of Burmese people and use both names. interchangeably, depending on context. And so it's on this geographical stage that the story of the Bagan Empire would play out, in the dry zone of the country, surrounded on all sides by mountains, and watered by the great river highway, the Irawaddy. For much of this region's history, whoever controlled the dry zone controlled the rest of the country, and so it was also a land soaked in the blood of conflict. There are two major sources for events in Myanmar during the medieval period. The first of these are the inscriptions left carved in stone at many temples and other buildings, which kings left in order to celebrate their deeds. And the second of these sources is the

so-called Chronicles of Burma. These chronicles are a diverse collection of documents, written over many centuries by monks and scholars on different materials. Some are written on paper made of the Siamese rough bush tree or paper mulberry, glued into very long sheets and folded in a concertina fashion, while others are written on palm leaf or even carved into stone tablets. The first chronicle that has survived was written in the 13th century during the Bagan era. The so-called Mahayazawin, or Great Chronicle, was completed several centuries later in the year 1724, and it was followed nearly a century later by the Yazawin Tiet, or New Chronicle, which attempted to square some of the contradictions between the Chronicles and the Stone Inscriptions,

as its author writes in his introduction. There are chronicles written by ancient scholars, But in those chronicles written by ancient scholars, there are some matters which do not accord with the inscriptions. Like many such historical documents, these chronicles were paid for by kings and produced under their supervision, and they are instruments of official propaganda. They are also full of exaggeration, poetic license and mythology, especially in the earlier reaches of Burmese history. They include truly ludicrous exaggerations about the size of armies, often describing battles involving tens of millions of soldiers,

and they frequently include the colourful appearances of ogres, ghosts, ghouls, demons and magicians, along with countless figures from Burmese mythology. But in all their fantastical presentation, these chronicles can combine with official inscriptions to preserve relatively accurate dates and events, and they also preserve the folklore and traditional memory of the people. In the year 1829, the King Bagu Diao of Burma appointed a committee of scholars to write a chronicle of the Burmese kings that would act as the final complete addition. He gathered them in the glittering front wing of his residence, known as the Glass Palace, and instructed them to get to work. The king of the law, seeing the many discrepancies and repetitions in the former chronicles, gave thought to the matter.

Being convinced that a chronicle of kings should be the standard, and not a thing of conflicting and false statements, he assembled his ministers and ecclesiastical teachers in the front chamber of the palace, which was variegated with divers gems and a fit place for the most exalted personages, and caused the chronicle to be purified by comparing it with. with other chronicles and a number of inscriptions, each with the other, and adopting the truth in the light of reason and the traditional books. This document, full of tangents and footnotes, would become known as the Glass Palace Chronicle. Despite its complicated nature, it's a remarkable text that gives us a real glimpse of how the people of ancient Bagan felt and thought about

their lives and the world around them, as well as the birth of their empire. The origins of the people who first spoke the Burmese language are wreathed in mystery. The Burmese chronicles claim a line of kings going back to the second century, but modern scholars and archaeologists consider this to be extremely unlikely. One more plausible account traces the history of these people back to the early 9th century, and the powerful kingdom named Nanchao. The power of Nanchao ruled over the area across the mountains to the east, in what is today the lofty province of Yunnan in western China. For years, the kings of Nancao had set their sights on the rich river valley of the Irawadhi.

The year was 832, Around the world at this time, the Byzantine Empire, the last remaining part of what had been the Roman Empire, was fighting for its life against increasingly confident Arab empires, inspired by the young religion of Islam. In the Mayan lowlands of southern Mexico, the last king of the soaring city of Kopan, a man named Ukitouk, was commissioning a stone monument that would never be finished. because his entire society was collapsing under the pressures of drought and warfare, and the population was fleeing the city. In what is today France, King Pepin I of Akitem and his brother Louis the German revolted against their father, the Frankish Emperor Louis the Pius, the son of Charlemagne. And in the mountains of southern China, the armies of Nan Chao marched out to conquer the lands of Burma. At that time, the society occupying the dry zone around the Irrawaddy

was a people who are remembered as the Pew. Exactly who the Pew were and what they called themselves, we have little idea. It seems they spoke a language of the Sino-Tibetan family and lived in a loosely connected group of five city states in the valley of the Irrawadhi. Their culture was heavily influenced by trade with India. In the preceding centuries, they had imported Buddhism, as well as other Indian cultural concepts, architectural styles and political structures, and they had based their writing system on the Indian Brahmi script. One 9th century Chinese text, known as the Manchu, or the book of southern barbarians, records the Chinese impressions of this land and the Pew people who lived there. To the south of Yongchang City, one first passes beyond the lands of the Tang Empire,

to Phoenix Blue jungles, then to vast skies, then to clearings. There lie huge rivers and settlements. They live in multi-storied houses, without city walls, sometimes paint-deges, their teeth, always dressing an untreated cloth with rat and worn about their waist, red silk cloth wrapped about their top knot, and other hair hanging behind in a decorative fashion. Peacocks nest in nearby trees and elephants are as large as water buffalo. The locals customarily raise elephants to till the fields and burn their dung as fuel. The armies of Nan Chow marched through the narrow mountain passes, thickly carpeted with forest, and swept through the Burmese lowlands on a series of devastating raids, taking both plunder and slaves.

In the 10th year of the Genuwan era, Nan Chow sought out and attacked them. On the 21st day of the 12th month of the third year of the Cheyentong era, at the cliffs of the Suu River, some 2,000 to 3,000 troops massed. According to ancient sources, the Nan Chau deported many thousands of the Pew people who lived and farmed in this fertile valley and sent them away into slavery. Among the troops of Nanchau

were a group of cavalry warriors from a people known as the Mien, a small ethnic tribe from the high plateaus who spoke an ancestor of what would become the Burmese language. But these troops had dreams of going their own way, and once they had tasted freedom in the valley of the Irowadi, they had no desire to return to Nanchao. Used to life in the rocky mountain plateaus of the north, the arid plains of Burma were a familiar ecology to them, and with the native population there devastated by the Nanchal raids, their lands were there for the taking.

The Mienne broke away from the kingdom of Nanchao and decided to settle in this new land, and ultimately they would found a kingdom there. Other historians contest that the Burmese speakers already existed in the valley, and that they were part of the Piao people, and had nothing to do with the Nanchau raids. But as with everything in these early stages of the chronicles, were left with a hazy fog of contradictions and uncertainties. And the answer actually may have been a mix of both. On the other side of the world at the same time,

sea-going Norsemen from Scandinavia were arriving in great numbers on the shores of eastern England, sometimes as raiders, sometimes as settlers, and sometimes as refugees. And over the next century, they would come to topple the Saxon kingdoms that ruled there. And as they did so, they would plant a distinctly Norse character

on the people of England and the English language that emerged from them. I think it's possible that the Burmese people then settling in the Irohadi Valley may have arrived in similarly complex circumstances and formed a similar hybrid culture with the people who lived there. With much of this matter concealed in the fog of history, what we can say with some certainty is that around the year 849, just 17 years after the date given to the Nanshaal raids, the Mien built a walled fortress at a place on the eastern bank of the Irawadhi River,

a place that would later come to be known as Bagan. The chosen location for the city of Bagan owed much to the geography of the land around it. It seems to have been built on the ruins of a previous settlement, belonging to the Pew people, and stood on a sizable bend in the meandering course of the Irawadhi River. The settlement had easy access to water and was surrounded by countryside that would be the most fertile and productive of all Myanmar for the next 500 years. Part of the reason for this was the region's violent geological history. Around 50 kilometres to the southeast of Bergan was a great dormant volcano named Mount Popper.

This volcanic cone, covered in thick forest and shaded bamboo groves, is a sacred site that for centuries has been the focal point of worship for the people of Burma. Southwest of Mount Poppa is Taon Karlat, or Pedestal Hill, a striking, sheer-sided volcanic plug which rises more than 650 meters above sea level, and where a Buddhist monastery now sits, towering over the forested landscape below. Mount Popper has long been believed to be the home of powerful spirits that the Burmese call Nats, and the worship of these spirits has always existed alongside Buddhist religious practices in a complex relationship. While this soaring mountain rising out of the flat plain has long captured the imaginations and religious sensibilities of the people,

It was also partly to thank for the success of their society. The ash that volcanoes spew out during their eruptions is rich in elements such as iron, magnesium and potassium, minerals that are crucial for the healthy growth of plants. When volcanic rock and ash weather and leech into the soil, these elements are released. And so, combined with the fertility of the silty soil along the river itself and the plentiful water, supply. This meant that the soils in this region were immensely productive, and the people of Bagan were able to conduct two bountiful rice harvests per year, and grow other crops like palses, sesamum, cucumbers, and millet. On the spot that they'd chosen for their new city, the Mienn built

a thick and high wall out of brick, and they built it according to the traditions of Buddhist cosmology and numerology. The inner wall of Bagan was broken by 12 gates to represent the 12 signs of the zodiac, with four main gates at each of the cardinal directions, north, south, east and west. The walled area of the city wasn't huge, little over a square kilometre, in fact, but the walls contained only the palaces of the kings and the headquarters of his administration. Outside this fortified center, a sprawling city would soon grow up around it, much of it built out of teak and bamboo that has left little trace in the archaeological record. By the mid-10th century, a king was in place in Bagan, although we don't know the exact names and dates for these early kings. One 9th-century

Arab traveler to India and Burma named Suleiman Nadvi wrote an account of the powerful army that one king of Burma fielded. They say that when he marches to battle, he is accompanied by about 50,000 elephants. He campaigns only in winter. Indeed, his elephants cannot stand thirst, and so they can go forth only in winter. They say that in his army, even the washermen amount of between 10 and 15,000. Thanks to the ongoing study of inscriptions, we do know the names of at least two kings, who rule around the turn of the first millennium, Nyang-u-Saur-Han and Kyeong-Pi-min, both of whom were once considered

to be legendary. By the year 2004, a Chinese source from the Song Dynasty records an ambassador arriving from what they called the Pū-U-Kan kingdom, which is thought to refer to Bagan. And it seems this ambassador was seeking recognition from Song China, which was then considered the great power in the region, suggesting that the kingdom of Bagan was now confident enough to look outwards and assert itself to its neighbors. But reliable sources on these early kings are extremely thin and all mixed up with legend. The first king of Bagan, who steps out of the historical record in full color, would not come for another half century. He was long considered the founder of the Bagan Empire, and although we now know that it was likely in existence for two centuries or so before

his reign, he is arguably its first great king, and certainly the king who would lead it to new and glorious heights. He was a man named Anaurata. Anarata's early life was one of upheaval and family conflict. His father was the king, but he had been a usurper on the throne of Bagan, having overthrown the previous king in a rebellion. And like most usurpers, Anorata's father lived in constant fear of one day being overthrown himself. Anorata grew up as a prince in the palace, with his two older stepbrothers, men named Kizzo and Sokate. These brothers were actually the sons of the previous king, but Anorata's father had adopted them and raised them as his own, and so they grew up together. But his older stepbrothers,

Kizzo and Sokate, always treated the younger Anaurata as though he were an inferior, something that must have rankled the young prince. And it's clear that these two brothers also dreamed of one day reclaiming some of the glory that their adoptive father had stolen from them. While he was still a boy, Anaurata's treacherous brothers plotted a coup to overthrow his now aging father, as the Glass Palace Chronicle recalls. When Kizor and Sokete came of age, they built a pleasant monastery and said to King Konsor, come and call thy blessings on the monastery. And the king took no heed nor scrutiny, but hearken to them. And Kizzo and Sokete seized the king and thyselfthay seize the king and threat

threatened him and made him become a monk. And they spread the rumor far and wide that the king in his zeal for bliss hereafter had become a monk. This palace coup must have scandalized the royal court. And despite the relative commonness of coups of this kind, the historians of Burma are clear in their view on it. The Glass Palace Chronicle recounts how a number of evil omens accompanied this shocking act. About the time of his fall, a miracle was seen in the Pato Pagoda. The Friday star trampled on the moon. The moon was a full circle on the second day of waxing.

The earth quaked seven days. The water stood still in the river. First, the brother named Kizo ruled as king. But the chronicles recall that he was killed one day by a hunter who mistook him for a deer. He built a royal box in the marshes of the Chindwin and visited the ten villages of Bangyi, hunting deer. One day a hunter lay waiting for famine at the place where they drank water. The king likewise came to the spot to wait for deer, and the hunter knew not that it was the king, but shot with the bow and hit him that he died.

He passed at the age of 28. About the time of his death, an ogre laughed for a full half-month and threw stones at the palace. After this unfortunate accident, the other treacherous brother Sokate took the throne. And it's perhaps not unreasonable to wonder whether this story of the hunter accidentally killing the king might actually be a polite way for the chroniclers to get around the fact that the new king had actually had his brother Kizzo assassinated. Through all of this upheaval and treachery, the boy Anaurata seems to have simply got on with things. He was allowed to keep his royal status at court and to live there with his mother,

and in exchange he attended to the two kings, who had overthrown his father and taken away the throne that would one day have been his. But when Anaurata had reached the age of 30, Sokete took things too far. He referred to Anaurata at court, using the word Nita Naungme, a compound word that means something like brother-son. Confused by this, Anaurata traveled to the monastery where his father had been exiled and asked him what it meant. To the old, embittered former king, the meaning of this was clear. Sokate intended to marry Anaurata. as mother. Anorata told that word to his father, King Kyongbiu, and his father said, Because he wishes to take thy mother, thus he speaks. Anonorata was exceedingly angry,

and he begged for the horse and weapons and gear that Sakra gave his father, and his father gave him the Arendama lance, the Thilawunta sword, the ruby ring, and the ruby hairpin. It's hard to know whether Anaurata was truly motivated by his mother's honor, or whether he had been planning this the whole time and had just now found a convenient excuse. Whatever the case, Anaurata rose in rebellion against his stepbrother. He fled to the Holy Volcano Mount Polly. and marshalled his forces there, gathering lords and chieftains who had had enough of the brother's treacherous antics. Then he marched on the capital of Bagan. The Glass Palace Chronicle records what happened next. Now, when he had mustered his forces, he marched on Bagan and sent

a message to his brother saying, will you give up the throne or will you do battle? And when When Sokate heard the words of his younger brother, he was exceedingly wrathful, and answered, His mother's milk is yet wet upon his lips, and he says he will fight me. Let all my ministers look on. I will fight him, man to man, on horseback. When Anorata heard his brother's words, he was glad. And when the appointed day was come, he took the lance and sword his father had given him, and mounted the demon horse and came to the stream of Tamati.

And Sokete, his brother, saw him coming and went forth to meet him. Then said Anorata, brother, you the elder strike first. And Sokete thrust at him with his lance, but Onorata parried it with the Arendama lance, and it reached not his body, but pierced the pommel of his sand. and when Sokete saw it, he was sore afraid and trembled. Then said Anorata, brother, your turn is over. Now it is mine. Meet it as best you can. And he smote him and pierced him with the Arendamalanse, so that it went in at the front and came out behind. And Socrates's horse ran away with him to the river.

and there he died. This encounter, as rendered in the Glass Palace Chronicle, feels like something out of the Arthurian legends, complete with chivalric duels, legendary weapons of great power, and the fight to save a woman's honor. We would be foolish to take it at face value as a historical source, but it does give us a sense for the turbulent political landscape

of medieval Myanmar, and what must have seemed like the clashing of great heroic forces, the stuff of medieval romances, of myth and poetry. With his brother defeated, Anaurata took the throne. The chronicle records that Anaurata was riven with guilt over the death of his brother, and attempted to soothe his conscience with the construction of great temples and works of infrastructure throughout the kingdom. Anarata could not sleep for full six months because he had slain his elder brother. Then Sacra visited him with a dream, saying, King, if thou wouldst mitigate thine evil deed in sinning against thine elder brother,

build many pagodas, monasteries and resthouses, and share the merit with thine elder brother. Divise thou many wells, ponds, dams, and ditches, fields and canals, and share the merit with thine elder brother. Archaeological evidence does show that Anaurato was indeed a prolific builder. Soon after coming to the throne in the year 1044, he marched into the north to secure the northern border and built 43 forts along the Irawaddy River. The north was traditionally the gateway to Burma, the lands through which all potential conquerors had previously marked.

and so it's clear he was keen to secure his land from invasion. King and Aorata built his network of fortresses as an armoured corridor that protected the valuable farmlands of the north and allowed his armies to move quickly along well-supplied routes. He also fortified many of the towns in this region, building strong city walls and garrisons. While in the north, he also built extensive irrigation canals and improved the existing water infrastructure to get the most out of the land's potential, and many of the canals and reservoirs that he built are still in use today, nearly a thousand years later. Having secured the north to his satisfaction, King Anaurata turned his attention to the south. The coastal cities of southern Myanmar were a clutter of independent city states,

many of which had grown wealthy on the traffic of trade that passed by sea to the lands of India and China. Passage through the mountains that surround Myanmar was difficult, and so most goods that came into the country flowed through these port towns. Having the good farmland was one thing, but if Began had to keep paying the trade tariffs to these wealthy port cities, it could never become the kind of great power that King Anaurata clearly dreamed of. According to the Chronicles, he marched south and first besieged the city of Tharton, as the Glass Palace Chronicle records. Although it's worth noting that in its typically exaggerated style, it's probably multiplying the size of the army by at least a factor of a thousand.

He gathered all his mighty men of valor and marched by the, land and water. By water, he sent 800,000 boats and 18 million fighting men. By land, he made his four generals march up front while he marched forth with the main army in the rear. His land force, it is said, contained 800,000 elephants, 8 million horses and 18 million fighting men. It is said that the line of troops was so long that when the first troops of the army reached the frontier of Thadon territory, the rearguard still had not departed from the capital. Seeing as this enormous force would far exceed the population of Burma today and would have

constituted about a quarter of the world's total population at the time, we can assume this is an exaggeration. But through exaggeration, the chronicles make their point. The army was no doubt impressive. With this force, he laid siege to the city of Tarton, and after holding out for three months, the city capitulated. From there, an Aorata absorbed a number of the other coastal cities into what was now becoming a true empire. By this time, the city of Bagan had earned itself the Sanskrit title, Arimadana Pura, or the city that tramples its enemies. Linking his capital to

these coastal cities meant that Bagan was now connected by sea routes to the great centers of culture in India, and perhaps most crucially, with the island of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is a nation off the coast of southern India, and for much of its history it has held on to a distinct cultural character. While Buddhism, in its homeland of mainland India, had mostly died out by this point, it had survived in Sri Lanka, and this island nation had become the heartland of an ancient and austere form of Buddhism, known as Terravada. These new cultural links would transform the culture and religion of Myanmar and bring it into contact with new forms of religious thought. And for King Anaurata, freshly returned from the battlefields of the south, they would provide an irresistible opportunity. That was a chance

to take on some of his oldest rivals, not an enemy kingdom or empire, but an institution at the heart of his own kingdom, the Buddhist church itself. For centuries, a strain of Buddhism known as Ari Buddhism was the predominant form of religion in Myanmar. Ari Buddhism was a hybrid form of Tibetan Buddhism and drew heavily on traditional Burmese beliefs. As a result, their practices were quite different to how we might picture a Buddhist monk today. Unlike in most strains of Buddhism, the Ari monks grew beards and had long hair. They wore blue-black robes dyed with indigo, drank alcohol, and practiced a form of martial arts similar to boxing. They rode horses and even occasionally went to war.

They also worshipped the figure of the Naga, a powerful form of snake spirit drawn from Hindu mythology, and built statues depicting these in their temples. Owing to their long history in Burma, the Aari monks enjoyed enormous power in the kingdom of Bagan. They owned vast estates and held enormous stores of wealth. The Mahayazawin, or Great Chronicle, even records the scandalous claim that the monks were practicing a version of the right of prima nocte, or first knight, taking the virginity of brides before their wedding nights. From then on, the sons and daughters of all, starting with and including the king,

ministers, generals, village administrators, at that time when preparing to get married, must be sent to the monks' nightfall to give the prime, of their flower of virginity. It was said that at dawn they were freed and allowed to wed. The king, having matured, had become virtuous, and he was disconsolate to hear and observe such wrongful practices. It's hard to know whether to take this scowalus claim seriously, or whether it was a later piece of royal propaganda, designed to discredit these monks. But one thing was for certain. The Ari monks were extremely. extremely powerful, and King Anaurata had long dreamed of crushing their establishment,

and remaking the church in a different image, an image more closely under the control of the crown. King Anaurata would find the opportunity to do this when he met a visiting sage named Shin Arahan. This Shin Arahan was from the south of Myanmar, the region Anaurata had recently absorbed. The sage had travelled in Sri Lanka, and he told King Anaurata of the merits of the different branch of Buddhism practiced there, a branch that claimed to be the closest to the original teachings of the Buddha. This was the Terravada Buddhism incubated in the grand Sri Lankan cities of Anradapura and Polonarwa. This strain of Buddhism emphasizes priests living simple lives, living by begging, not eating after midday, refusing all intoxicants, and not even touching money.

Considering the seemingly uncontrollable nature of Burma's Ari monks, to King Anorata, this must have sounded ideal. The Glass Palace Chronicle recount the king's conversion as a spiritual epiphany. The king was full of joy and rapture and spoke again in treating his. him, my lord, preach me somewhat, yes but a little, of the law preached by the Lord, the master, and Shin Arahan preached the law, beginning with the things not to be neglected. Then the king's heart was full of faith, steadfast and immovable. Faith sank into him as oil filtered a hundred times, soaks into cotton a hundred times teased. Perhaps King Anaurata was genuinely moved, by the sage's teachings, but it's clear he also spotted an opportunity. If he brought this new branch

of Buddhism to his kingdom, he could weaken the hold of the Ari monks. And so King Anaurata went to war with the church. First, the king went after the monk's ability to recruit. He brought in new laws that meant that common people were no longer obliged to give up their young children to become monks. as they had been before. Next, he changed the law to remove the punishment for those who deserted their life as a monk. As a result, many dissatisfied monks simply hung up their robes and left to do something else. Bit by bit, anaurata chipped away at the monk's power with every tool at his disposal. There were, of course, those who fought the changes. Anaerata banished thousands of monks who resisted his reforms. Many of these fled to the nearby volcano of Mount Poppa, or east into the

narrow forested valleys of the Shan Hills, and while they were never completely wiped out, they would never again wield the same power in the kingdom. To celebrate the conversion of his land, Anarata sent an envoy to Sri Lanka, and asked rather boldly that their most precious relic, a tooth belonging to the Buddha himself, be sent to Myanmar to be placed in one of his great temples. The Sri Lankans understandably refused, but at the last moment they remembered that they had a spare, and the envoy was sent back to Burma, with what they were told was another tooth of the Buddha. Like the small fragments of wood, taken from the cross used at Jesus' crucifixion, that showed up in churches across medieval Europe,

teeth of the Buddha had a way of multiplying in Southeast Asia, according to the needs of the people. But it was good enough for Anaurata. When the new tooth relic arrived in the capital by boat, the king himself waded out into the river to meet it. Anaurata was an effective ruler, but at times he could also be uncompromising and harsh. While he was often able to achieve,

what he wanted in his kingdom, he did this largely at the expense of his popularity. And this is nowhere more apparent than in the story that is remembered as the tragic romance of his son, Kianzita. Kianzita was a great general, and had led his father's armies into battle many times. And when the people in the region of Pai Gou complained about raiders destroying their homes and stealing their animals, the king sent Kianzita to deal with the situation. The story goes that the prince saw off the raiders, and the people of Pai-Gu were so grateful that they sent him home with various gifts for the king, gifts of gold, hairs belonging to the Buddha, and a beautiful young woman named U-Kin intended to be offered to the king as a bride.

But on the journey home, Prince Kian Sita and U-Kin fell in love. When anaurata found out about this Arthurian betrayal, he exiled his own son, who was forced to flee across the countryside of Myanmar and go into hiding. This story, with its forbidden love, betrayal and dramatic finale, has proved irresistible to generations of playwrights, songwriters and poets in Myanmar. But ultimately, it seems that this uncompromising nature, would finally lead to the downfall of King Anaurata. On the 11th of April 1077, the king was riding through the outskirts of Bagan on the back of his elephant. The chronicles record that a tree spirit that the king had previously displeased

appeared in the guise of a wild buffalo and gored him to death, and then demons took away his body, so that it was never found. Much more likely is that the king's unpopularity finally got the better of him, and he was ambushed and killed by a group of rivals who ensured that no evidence remained of their crime. The chronicles recall his death with great sorrow. Thus this noble king, full of glory, might of arm and dominion, who for full 33 years of royal prosperity had, advance the welfare of the religion, his own welfare, and that of the generations of his sons, grandsons and great-grandsons, died at the age of 75. About the time of his death, bees claved to the throne door of the palace. An ogre laughed from the top of the Taraba gate, and lustre of the

royal sword faded, and a vulture alighted on the palace. After the death of the great king Anarata, his son Saulu took the throne at the age of 26. Although not particularly young by the standards of royalty, he would soon gain the title Min Lulin, or the boy king, on account of his inexperienced and naive style of ruling. After only five years of mismanaging the kingdom, he faced a rebellion in the south. among the Mon people who lived in the coastal cities that his father had conquered. For not the first time, the Chronicles recall a quite unlikely sounding version of events. In this version of the story, the King Saulu lost at a game of dice with one of his nobles,

a childhood friend of his named Yaman Khan, and in a fit of sore losing rage, he dared the noble to rebel against him. One day the king in Yaman Khan played at dice, and Yaman Khan won, and he rose up and clapped his elbows, said King Sulu. You have won a mere game of dice, and you dare to arise and clap your elbows. If you are a man, rebel with Pegu your province. In truth, asked Yaman Khan. We kings, said the king, should we utter anything but truth? According to the chronicle, Yaman Khan promptly returned to Pegu and started a rebellion,

as the king had suggested. While this account may not exactly be true, it probably does contain some truth about the character of King Saulu, who by all accounts had a petty and childish nature, and seems to have treated the business of ruling as though it were little more than a game. Now facing an open rebellion, the childish king Saulu turned to someone that his father had long ago exiled for the crime of falling in love with a woman promised to him. That is, his half-brother, the romantic hero of songs and poetry, the man named Kian Sita. Kian Sita came out of exile and agreed to help the childish king lead his armies against the rebellion in the south. But King Salu would prove to have no better judgment on the battlefield than of it,

and he would be fooled one day by a devious ploy. King Sulu and Kianzita encamped when they reached the island of Pai Dota, saying, it is too late today. Tomorrow we shall fight. Then in the dim moonlight, Yaman Khan came forth and provoked. them to do battle. So they followed and fought without heed or observation. And the king Sulu, thinking that an elephant figure sat in the mud was a real elephant, set forth to fight, and the royal elephant he was riding fell into the mud and stuck. And King Sulu climbed down

from his back and ran, and entering a hole in the Banyan tree in the forest, hid there, and his elephant was captured, and the whole army was despoiled and fled. There was none to stop them. Saulu was soon found hiding in the Banyan tree, and was taken into captivity by the rebel Yaman Khan. According to another slightly fantastical episode in The Chronicles, Saulu did actually have one chance to escape, when the hero Kianzita personally snuck into the enemy camp to rescue him. But Saulu feared that Kianzita secretly wanted to kill him, and he refused to go with his rescuer. He believed that the rebel Yaman Khan, who had been his friend, and who he had played many games of dice with, would not harm him.

And he stole him from the place where he was kept. Now while Kianzita bear him on his shoulder, Salu thought, Kianzita is one whom my father has injured, whom I have injured. I fear he steals me away to kill me. But Yaman Khan is son of my tutor. Surely he will not kill me. Salu yelled out, Kianzita is stealing me.

Kianzita exclaimed, Then die, you fool. Die the death of a dog at the hands of these scum, flung him down and ran for his life. He swam across the Irrawaddi and eventually made back to safety. But like many of his other calculations, Saulu's gamble didn't pay off. Fearing more escape attempts, Yaman Khan had the king killed in April of the year 1084. In the game of life, it seems the king Saulu was always rolling ones.

After the death of Saulu, Kianzita continued to lead the royal armies of Bagan, against Yaman Khan's rebellion, and the rebel leader fled south on the river on his opulent gosal. golden barge. Kianzita sent a hunter named Yarsin to follow him and to kill him if he could. The chronicle recounts what happened next. And Yarsin, the hunter, caught him up below Yawatha, and he climbed a fig tree and uttered lovely notes like the voice of a bird. When Yaman Khan heard that sound, he opened the door of the golden raft and looked saying,

What bird is that? Uttering notes so sweet and wonderful. Now he had but one good eye and Yassin the hunter from the place where he waited peeping, drew his bow and shot and hit the eye of Yaman Kan. And he died. Now the once exiled Kianzita was the only person in line for the throne. Kianzita came to the throne on the throne on the

21st of April 1084, and assumed the title Sri Tribuvanaditya Damaraja, which means something like fortunate Buddhist king, son of the three worlds. In many ways, he was the perfect uniting figure for the country after such a period of violence and division. While in exile from his father, he had lived for seven years in the southern Mon region, among those coastal cities, and there he had developed a genuine love for the Mon people and culture. Kianziter invited Mon Nobles to court and appointed them to high positions in the kingdom, some of whom had been part of the rebellion only years before. The result of this generous approach was a long period of peace in Myanmar, and with that peace came a period of great prosperity.

During this time, the capital city of Bagan grew to previously unimaginable size and wealth. The population boomed as a result of the growing agricultural potential of the city, but Bagan also attracted people from across the region, artists, sculptors, masons, architects, monks, scholars and teachers. We can track the booming of the city in the ever-increasing number of of temples that were built in the 300 years after the reign of King Anaurata, each of which we can reliably date with carbon dating. During this time, as many as 4,000 temples were built, along with thousands more brick structures supporting them. Many of these temples had vast stupas or domed shrines at their centre, and the effort and expense of constructing these must have been enormous.

This building effort would have required an army of masons and carpenters, plasterers and sculptors, gold and silversmiths, either paid in cash or working in exchange for food, animals and land. These artists would have required the support of an even larger array of supporting industries. Mason's required brick builders, who required firewood brought by lumberjacks and porters. The sculptors of countless statues of the Buddha, needed miners of marble and dollarite, and elephant trainers to transport the heavy stone blocks. And all of them needed rice, fruit, vegetables, meat and game. And of course the alcoholic spirits brewed from rice, or the foaming toddy made from the fermented sap of the palm tree.

With work to be had in every corner of the city, people travelled for thousands of kilometers to find employment in the enormous construction site that the city of Bagan had become. At one point, the Glass Palace Chronicle lists the professions of people who were deported from a conquered city during the reign of King Anaurata, and from it we get a sense of all the ways that someone could make their livelihood in the city of Bagan. Thereafter, he sent away separately without mixing, such men as were skilled in carving, turning, and painting. Mason's molders of plaster and flower patterns, blacksmiths, silversmiths, braziers, founders of gongs and symbols, filigree flower workers, doctors and trainers of elephants and horses, makers of shields round and embossed, men skilled in frying, parching, baking, and frisling, yak in hairdressers, and men cunning in perfumes, odourses, flowers, and the juices of flowers.

From the small fortress capital that it had once been, Begarn expanded to fill an area of more than 100 square kilometers, or more than twice the size of ancient Rome. Estimates for the population around this time range as high as 400,000 people living in the city alone. During this time, many of the largest temples were constructed, and the The largest of all is the temple known as the Tat Binyu Temple. Consecrated in the year 1144, the vast spired pagoda of this temple rises to a height of over 61 metres, or more than 20 stories. Another temple nearby is called the Ananda Temple, and it rises to a height of 51 meters. This temple serves not only as a place of worship, but also as a monastery and a library.

The temple's first and second floors were used as the residents of monks, while the third floor was used to hold images. The fourth floor was used to store manuscripts and books, and the fifth and top floor stored the precious relics. The building of temples in Bagan was seen as the ultimate form of devotion that a king could engage in. When one later king, Alaung Situ, dedicated the completing of the Shwe-Gugi Pagoda, He spoke the following prayer, in which he envisions the temples as a kind of grand infrastructure of the soul, as a bridge across samsara, or the endless cycle of rebirth, and towards

eternal enlightenment. By this abundant merit, I desire here nor hereafter no angelic pomp of Brahmers, suras, nor the state and splendors of a monarch. not even to be the pupil of the conqueror. But I would build a causeway sheer across the river of Samsara, and all folk would speed across thereby until they reached the blessed city. These temples were held in the highest reverence. One of the inscriptions at the unfinished Min-Gun Patodhawgi temple,

built some time after the Began era, contains the following blessings for those who, respect the sanctity of the temple, as well as a series of blistering curses against any who damage or desecrate it. Who favours and upholds like me the gift of faith which I thus offer with all my heart? Be he my son, grandson, or any future king who comes after me? Queens, princes, royal ministers, high or low, may he be favored above others with the wheel of treasure.

May he be endued like King Mandata with glory, majesty and power. But whoever spoils even so much as an oil lamp here, may he be oppressed with the eight dangers, the ten punishments, the 32 results of karma, the eight calamities, the 96 diseases. May he be suddenly overtaken with a great affliction which a thousand doctors may not avail to cure. having suffered thus for long, generation after generation, when his bodily elements dissolve, may he suffer by going in and out among the eight chief hells, and the twelve minor hells, and the forty limboes of Yama and Lokika, may he suffer with the hosts of demons,

titans, and hungry ghosts. Even if he survive all these sufferings, may he revisit five thousand times these lands in the form of a boneless and miserable creature, a ghost, a worm, a water leech. While royal annals, like the Glass Palace Chronicle, are extremely detailed on the comings and goings of Bergan's kings, unfortunately, they have very little to say about what life was like for the average person during this time. For a picture of daily life, for the average person in Bergen, we can turn to the pages of the classical poetry of Myanmar. Myanmar has had a great poetic tradition for centuries, and the time of

Bergan was no exception. Many poets flourished among its scholarly communities in its temples and royal courts, and the manuscripts that these scholars produced were exceptionally valuable. Records showed that in the year 1273, a complete set of the Buddhist texts, known as the Tripitaka, cost up to 3,000 kiyats, or nearly 50 kilos, of silver. That would be enough to buy more than 5,000 acres of rice land, four large monasteries, or 150 slaves. The exceeding expense of these texts meant that literacy was never widespread, and most common people would not love. learn to read or write. One 15th century poet named Shin Maharatatara wrote a poem that describes the qualities required

by a man of learning. If one does not try with the eagerness of a daring eagle that firmly catches a hen, if one does not study and ponder, does not question and doesn't. not discuss and knows only how to read palm leaves. How can one become a well-known man of letters? Like a cat eating a shrimp with special enjoyment, a learner must study all texts. He must become sharp as teeth of a sore penetrating deeply into all discussed matters, to unravel the subject from beginning to end without fear like a lion. One area that the people

and then one area that these poets can really educate us about is in the realm of food. A 17th century poet named Wung Yi Padetayaza gives a description of the diet of an ordinary farmer who supplements his meals of rice and curry with various kinds of animal life

that he finds in his fields. The peasant plows his field, and in his rice fields are water-filled holes, home to many small crabs, tossing these into his shoulder basket, together with frogs, snails, supu plants, kazoon and Kinhon leaves, and Pilo, all for his curry. Stoopingly, he goes back home. Sweet and juicy is the curry, cooked on arrival and laid out quickly with Kianhing and Kewatna vegetables. The rice is hot, and the curry is hot with pungent spices that make one suck, scooping sizable handfuls, bending he eats, surrounded on all sides by his sons and grandsons. Another source of information is the painted walls of certain temples and pagodas in Bagan,

which show us a little of the city's dress styles too, at least among the wealthy. The people's costumes in these paintings are combinations of Indian and Chinese cultures. They wore long dresses and shawls, with most of the materials made of silk and cotton. Both men and women wore bangles on their wrists and arms, necklaces and footchains, and seemed to have worn jeweled belts on their waists. One prominent cultural practice among many ethnic groups in Burma was extensive tattooing, especially of the legs, and this would likely have been evident on the streets of Bagan. One European visitor in the 19th century commented on this practice.

Every male Burman is tattooed in his boyhood from the middle to his knees. In fact, he has a pair of breeches tattooed on him. The pattern is a fanciful medley of animals and arabasks. But ultimately, the people who lived out their countless lives in the streets and alleys of Bagan, farming rice and cucumbers, tending to their animals and constructing the temples, have been forgotten. And it's only the raging dramas of the royal court that have been remembered in any true detail. In the coming centuries, those dramas would reach a fever pavilion. Throughout his reign, King Kyan Sita struggled to have a son, so much so that he almost lost hope.

Without a son to provide a clear line of inheritance, the kingdom could be thrust into civil war. When a son was finally born to him in the year 1090, he was so overjoyed that he immediately crowned the baby boy king and stepped down to serve only as his regent. The boy was called Situ. Kian Sita would die 22 years later, and his son Situ took the throne with no opposition. Like his father, he would be an excellent ruler in terms of politics and warfare, but it seems he wasn't the best parent. He had several sons, but before they could come of age, it became clear that for one reason or another,

his oldest son was not suitable for the throne, and so Situ had him banished. The second son, who would go on to take the throne, was a man named Naratu, and he has been remembered to history as a tyrant and a psychopath. When King Situ finally fell ill in his old age, this impatient son took the opportunity to speed up his inheritance. Now when he reached the age of 101, he fell grievously sick. His son Narathu removed him from the throne and kept him within Shwego Pagoda. And the king recovered consciousness a while and said, This is not my palace.

Whose trickery is this? And the king was convulsed with anger. His whole body burned like fire. Then his son, Naratho, thought, if the king arises from his sickness, I shall be utterly destroyed. So with clothes and garments, he pressed down the king until he died. Naratu wanted to take the throne for himself, but there was still the problem of his banished older brother. He devised a plan to place his brother on the throne first, to make things look a little less suspicious, but of course he would not

sit there for long. When he reached Leppon port, Narathu, according to the oath he had sworn, went down to the boat and, shouldering his brother's sword, he raised and set him on the throne. After his anointing, his food was poisoned, and that night he died. With all these threats dealt with, King Naratu ascended to the throne himself, and he would rule in a predictably tyrannical style. as the Glass Palace Chronicle recalls. King Narathu had once been the demon guardian of a mountain who had shaded the Lord,

so he was great in glory, might and dominion. His ministers, both great and small, his followers, and all the people stood in fear and awe of him. He raged furiously with wrath and pride. The king was brutal and savage. His queens, concubines and handmaids stood in fear. and awe of him and loved him not, but hated him and cursed him in their hearts. All the inhabitants of the kingdom starved in toil and sweat, and many forts, villages, and domains were ruined.

Seemingly desperate to assuage his guilt for his heinous actions, Naratu increasingly isolated himself in his palace and ordered the construction of what he intended to be the largest and most ambitious of all of Bagan's temples, known as the Dharma Yangi temple. But Naratu would not live to see this great temple completed. It's not clear who gave the order, but Naratu was in his palace one day when he was approached by a group of eight men dressed as monks. When the men got close enough to the king, they drew their daggers and each stabbed him. When they were sure that he was dead. In a kind of suicide pact, they turned their knives on each other and themselves, as the Glass Palace Chronicle records.

They ascended the palace and drew Nye the king, encircling him under guise of presenting the conchent nesagrass, and they pierced the king with the sword until he died. Thereafter, they pursued the minister Thedekir to pierce him, but they could not catch him. Then they pierced their own bodies with the sword and died, all eight of them. The reign of King Naratu did great damage to the kingdom of Bagan and harmed its reputation abroad. But in the end, it wasn't tyranny, rebellion or kingly blundering that brought down the empire. After several more royal assassinations, coups and throne seizures, the kingdom would eventually return to peace, under the long reign of a king named Narapati Situ,

who would reign until the year 12-11. But all this time, the forces that would eventually tear this great city of temples apart were already at work. In fact, in an ironic twist of fate, it would be the temples themselves that would contribute to the gradual weakening and the eventual fall of this entire civilization. Despite the efforts of King Anaurata, to rein in the excessive power and wealth of the Ari monks, the Taravada Church that replaced them,

would soon become just as wealthy, and by the height of Bagan's golden age, it would far surpass the wealth and power that its predecessors had enjoyed. For the rulers of Bagan, the church was a powerful tool for building their own legitimacy among their subjects. The kings of Burma ruled under the title Dharma Raja, meaning a king who would uphold the duties of the church. Whenever a new king was crowned, he would begin his reign by lavishing gifts on nearby religious institutions, building new temples and donating plots of land to the monks. But it wasn't just the king who contributed to these institutions. The church also encouraged private citizens to donate land and money.

In exchange for benefits when they were reborn in the next life, one ancient Burmese poem offers a starkly transactional approach to these incentives, offering a kind of tiered system of rewards. He who gives and urges others to give things in charity will be reborn, rich, surrounded by numerous attendants and holding vast possessions. He will be a shining moon in the assembly of men. He who earnestly encourages others to give donations freely, while himself offering nothing.

In future rebirth will be deficient in material belongings, yet many attendants and relatives, sons and grandsons will be in his entourage. Whosoever neither himself is generous, nor urges others to be, will encounter evil fate after his body's disillusion. Never feeling satiated, scarcely finding eating plants, showing hunger day and night. He will become a hungry spirit, meeting all kinds of misery.

With such punishments awaiting those who refuse to donate to the church in the next life, it's not hard to see why people donated freely. and generously. These donations of gold, goods and labor made the church incredibly wealthy, but it was the donations of land that really tipped the balance in the kingdom. Anything given to the church was given forever. And so as time went on, an increasingly large amount of the landmass of Myanmar and much of its productive farmland was slowly donated away piece by piece to the Buddhist church. This wouldn't have been so much of a problem except for one thing.

That's the fact that, according to a long-standing tradition, the Buddhist church in Bagan was exempt from paying all taxes. This meant that these large temple estates ended up acting like tax havens. Today, the equivalent of 10% of the world's wealth is held in tax havens, where the rich keep their money to avoid pay. tax on it. But in some modern states like Russia, several Latin American countries like Argentina, and in the oil states of the Persian Gulf, the amount of wealth held in offshore tax havens can exceed 60%. A state's ability to function is directly linked to its ability to raise funds

and to marshal its collective resources for the public good. Money taken into tax havens has effectively left the economy, and in Myanmar, between the 10th and the 13th centuries, the situation began to look similar to some of the modern world's worst areas for tax evasion. In Bergan, by the late 13th century, as much as 63% of the kingdom's land that had once belonged to the crown, as well as the majority of its gold and silver, was in the hands of the tax-exempt church. For successive kings of Bagan, this resulted in something of a bind. Their entire legitimacy rested on the system of belief that began and ended with the Buddhist Church. And so the thought of using any kind of force to seize land from the unarmed Buddhist monks was unthinkable. The church wasn't just a beloved religious institution,

it was also the land's biggest employer, and countless people depended on it for their livelihood. and so if the Burmese kings had any hope of getting their land back, they would have to use the doctrines of the church against it. Buddhist doctrines in Burma did allow for a sort of release valve on the power and influence of the church. Monks were supposed to live by the Vinaya or the Buddhist Code of Conduct, which emphasizes relinquishing yourself of earthly possessions. And it was considered the duty of king,

to periodically purge the church when it wandered too far from this ideal. If the church had become too wealthy, then by definition it must have strayed from the Vinaya, and so a process called Sasana could begin. This was a kind of inquisition, in which individual temples were inspected, and excess wealth or land could be confiscated, according to a strict religious code. It was a way for the crown to claw back. some of the wealth it had lost to the church. But the process of Sasana was slow and often insufficient.

Once a stage of Sasana purifying of the church was finished, often the population felt newly inspired to donate to their now pure and righteous church, and money would start flowing back to the monks in even greater amounts. After a king had purified the church, his descendants would often give even more lavish donations the moment they came to the throne in order to increase their own legitimacy. And so over the centuries, the wealth of the Empire of Bagan flowed in only one direction. From the great reservoir of the royal treasury downhill into the tax-exempt sector of the religious establishment, the historian Michael Aung Twin summarizes the situation in the following terms. The kingdom of Bagan declined because the factors that had nurtured it in the first place

became, in time, forces that contradicted and destroyed it. The seeds that sowed the destruction of Bagan are what earlier made its success possible, and the institutions that led to prosperity and power eventually involuted and impoverished the state. What had been a blessing became a curse, but because Bagan society was unable and unwilling to change what were once constructive forces when they became destructive ones, the political power of the dynasty collapsed. By the reign of a king named Tilo Minlo, who ruled in the early 13th century, it's clear that the royal treasury was struggling.

He was the last king of Bagan to build any significant. temples, although he did so mostly in remote regions away from the capital. The kings who followed would be apparently penniless, and no great constructions would go up after this period. When discussing the collapse of societies, historians often talk about what they call the remote origins of the collapse. These are slow, broad trends that build up over time, cracks that begin to appear and wear away at the structure, sometimes invisible. And then there's what they call the immediate origins. This is the wrecking ball that comes swinging in and delivers one decisive blow,

that reverberates through the cracked and weakened structure and sends the whole thing shattering into smithereens. The state of Bergan's reduced ability to marshal its land and resources was not fatal by itself, but it left it increasingly vulnerable to outside events. In the year 1258, a series of rebellions began in South Aracan and Martaban, and posed a challenge to the empire. With as much as two-thirds of its land held by the church, the Bagan state struggled to fund the military campaign necessary to contain these rebellions, though it would ultimately bring order back to those regions after a struggle of many years, it was a clear indication of the weakened

state of the country. But soon, an even more terrible threat began to loom. This was a force of the size and strength that the people of Bagan had never encountered before, a force that even now was sweeping across the Eurasian landmass, washing away empires that had ruled for centuries, and leaving death and destruction in its wake. These were the armies of the Mongol emperor, Kublai Khan. Kublai Khan was a grandson of the great Mongol warlord Genghis Khan, who had united the steppe peoples of Mongolia and led them on a campaign of conquest, the likes of which the world had never seen, conquering lands from the South China Sea to the Mediterranean, from

Siberia to Afghanistan. Kublai was 12 years old when his grandfather, Genghis Khan, died, and after the death of the Great Khan, the vast Mongol Empire began to split into warring rival states. Kublai Khan would find himself at the head of the Chinese portion of the Mongol Empire and founded a dynasty known as the Yuan, with his capital at Beijing. In just three generations, the Mongols had gone from nomadic wanderers to emperors, and over time, the Yuan dynasty would come to rule over most of present-day China, Mongolia, Korea, and southern Siberia. In the late 13th century, at the same time that the Bagan Empire was struggling to contain

its rebellious northern provinces and claw back some of its land and wealth from its church, The Emperor Kublai Khan was engaged in an immense war against his last remaining rivals in China. These were the southern Song Dynasty, a large Chinese kingdom that had until now resisted the advances of the Mongols. But by the year 1270, the Song were on the ropes. Kublai Khan had blockaded the Yangtze River, cutting off their supply routes, and he was now keen to encircle and destroy any remaining Song armies. But he had one problem. There was still a single remaining escape route for the Song armies,

and that was through the narrow mountain passes in the southwest of China and into the lands of Myanmar. If the Song armies were able to escape through the lands of Bagan, they could continue their fight. And so Kublai Khan resolved to bring the empire of Bagan under his sway, and close off the song's final escape route. With his forces all tied up in total war against the song, Kublai at first had no desire for conflict with Bagan. He sent an envoy to the Burmese court, and demanded that the king there swear loyalty to him and pay a small tribute. As Mongol tactics went,

this was about as polite as you could get. But things would not go, according to his plan. The king of Bagan at this time was a man named Naratiyapate. He was a man of overwhelming appetites who loved his food and drink, so much so that the Glass Palace Chronicle records that he was the reincarnation of an ogre who lived on Mount Poppa. The Lord had left a prophecy upon the top of Mount Tangvi, that the ogre, guardian of the mountain, should become king thrice in Bagan. Even so it came to pass, for he became king once, it is said, as Narathia patte. And because he had become a man from the state of an ogre, he was violent in envy, proud and wrathful, and gluttonous in eating and drinking. He was great in

wrath, haughtiness and envy, exceeding covetous and ambitious. He had three thousand concubines and maids of honour. If the chronicles are to be believed, this king Naratiyapate also ruled tyrannically, with some of his preoccupations ranging into the territory of the bazaar. The king, being one who had received the Lord's prophecy, suffered not from any of the 96 diseases and never so much as sneezed nor yawned. And so none was allowed to sneeze or yawn in his presence. If anyone happened to sneeze or yawn, he beheaded him.

One day, a young handmaid in the king's presence was dearly desired to sneeze, and because she could not refrain it, she put her face to a great jar and sneezed, hoping that the king would not hear. But alas, the sound was louder than if she had sneezed openly, and the king asked, what sound is that? It's only through the gentle intervention of one of his queens that the unfortunate girl was allowed to escape with her life. King Naratiyapati was also given over to boasting,

especially about his famous appetite, as one inscription left by him at the Mingala Zedi Pagoda in 1774 shows. King Naratiyapati, Supreme Commander of 36 Meehani, million soldiers, and who is the consumer of 300 dishes of curry daily, enshrined 51 golden silver figurines of kings, queens, nobles and maids of honor. On Thursday, the full moon of Kaysen of the year 636. And so in January of the year 1271, a group of ambassadors arrived in Bagan, from the court of Kublai Khan in Beijing, with the Mongol emperor's offer. These ambassadors asked to see the Burmese king Naratiyapati, and when they were let into the throne

room, they demanded that the king submit to being a vassal of the Mongols. This ogre-like king refused. The Glass Palace Chronicle remembers this encounter in dramatic terms, and uses the Burmese name Taruk or Turk to describe the Mongol ambassador. The Taruk sent ten ministers and a thousand horsemen to demand golden rice pots. Vessels of gold and silver, gold and silver ladles, because, said he, they were once offered by King Anar Rutter. Furthermore, some chronicles say that they came demanding a white elephant.

The Taruk ambassadors in making demands showed no due resource. nor reverence in the king's presence. Therefore, the king commanded, slay these ten ministers and thousand horsemen. Let none escape. Both Burmese and Mongol inscriptions of the time indicate that this sentence was not actually carried out, with the king's advisors, perhaps pleading with him to be rational.

But it shows the extent to which the Mongol demands angered this king, Naratiyapati. Back in Beijing, we can only imagine the scenes as Kublai Khan was informed of this insult. But he was still reluctant to order an invasion. He was battling the last remnants of the Song Dynasty in the south, and he had just attempted an ill-fated sea invasion of Japan, capturing the island of Tsushima and attempting to land on the Japanese mainland. But his ships had been destroyed in a pair of typhoons that the Japanese would later name the Divine Winds, or Kamikaze, and 10,000 Mongol soldiers had been lost. After this embarrassment, Kublai Khan had no great desire to commit a large number of troops to a small border dispute with Bagan. Instead, he ordered

his armies to move into a wide swath of contested borderlands in the forbidding mountain ranges, between his empire and Burma. In response, the King of Bagan refused to back down, and sent his own armies to recapture the region, backed by a large force of war elephants. This Burmese army marched up into the thickly forested hills. We can only imagine how the soldiers felt, marching to war with this unknown enemy, of which they must have heard terrifying tales. One Burmese poet writing later would give a description of an army marching to battle. We are not afraid of anything. We are daring and brave ready to sacrifice our lives marching to the royal city. On this day, fixed as the day of victory, at our camp in the forest verdant,

are the branches full of small flower buds. Sweet are the sounds of the military drums and gongs in the soft evening's twilight. Just as mists and clouds are dispersed, so too must we destroy our enemy. This army finally met the Mongol garrison at a rocky forested gully known as the Vochang Valley. The explorer and adventurer Marco Polo by this time was serving as a diplomat in the court of Kublai Khan. He recalls the force that the king of Bagan sent. So, this king prepared a great force and munitions of war. And he had, let me tell you, 2,000 great elephants, on each of which was set a tower of timber,

well-framed and strong, and carrying from 12 to 16 well-armed fighting men. And besides these, he had of horsemen and of footmen good 60,000 men. In short, he equipped a fine force, as well befitted such a powerful prince. It was indeed a host capable of doing great things. And what shall I tell you? When the king had completed these great preparations to fight the tartars, he tarried not. They arrived within three days of the great Khan's host, which was then at Vokan in the territory of Zardandan. It's likely that for many of the Mongol soldiers,

this was their first experience of seeing war elephants fielded in combat. These enormous creatures would have advanced in a terrifying wall with their wooden superstructures carrying archers. Marco Polo describes what happened to. Next. When the king's army had arrived in the plain and was within a mile of the enemy, he caused all the castles that were on the elephants to be ordered for battle, and the fighting men to take up their posts on them, and he arrayed his horse and his foot. The horses of the Tartars took such fright at the sight of the elephants that they could not

be got to face the foe, but always swerved and turned back, whilst all the time the king and his forces, and all his elephants, continued to advance upon them. But the Mongols had learned their tactics on the vast open steps of Central Asia, and they knew that when an enemy was too strong to face directly, you could always retreat and pepper them with arrows from a distance, and that's exactly what they did. When the Tartas perceived how the case stood, they were in great wrath and knew not what to say or do, But their captain acted like a wise leader who had considered everything beforehand. They did as he bade them, and plied their bow stoutly,

shooting so many shafts at the advancing elephants that in a short space they had wounded or slain the greater part of them, as well as of the men they carried. When the elephants felt the smart of those arrows that pelted them like rain, they turned tail and fled, and nothing on earth would have induced them to turn and face the Tartars. And then too they plunged into the wood and rushed this way and that, dashing their castles against the trees, bursting their harness, and smashing and destroying everything that was on them.

With the enemy in disarray, the Mongol cavalry charged down on them, and the forces of Bagan were scattered. The Mongol chronicles can barely conceal their peasant. pride at the size of this victory. They record that only 700 Mongol soldiers were able to defeat a Burmese army of 50,000, while only losing a single soldier. But this is clearly an exaggeration. The Burmese chronicles, perhaps understandably, make no mention of this disastrous campaign. The main force of Bagan had been utterly defeated on what should have been their home turf. and there was now little standing between the Mongol armies and the rich river valley of the Irawadhi.

The Mongols were quick to capitalize on their victory. Kyeongsin, the next fort along the road, fell just six days later on the 9th of December 1283, and now the Mongol forces pushed on into the Iroadi Valley. It's clear from the exaggerated tones of the Burmese chronicle. just how much of a threat this Mongol invasion force was. The Turk mustered all the parts of his army to the number of 6 million horsemen and 20 million footmen, and they came marching. The situation clearly looked bleak.

King Naratiyapate ordered two of his generals to take his remaining forces and fortify the town of Nia Saung-Gyan on the crucial river crossing of the Irrawadhi. Coming to Nassan Gang town, they made it strong and girded it with forts and moats and ditches and fought in their defense at the river crossing of Bamu. For three full months they slew the enemy and spared not even the feeders of elephants and horses, but slew them all. But when ten myriad men were dead, the Tarug's sent 20 mists. When 20 myriad were dead, he sent 40 myriad. The king's men were weary and foredone,

and as soon as the Turooks cross the river, Nassan Gyang fell. At the news of the fall of Nya Saungyan, the ogre-like king's courage failed him. He fled the city of Bagan and headed to the south. Then the king called his ministers and consulted with them, saying, Bug-un town is now too narrow for us, in depth too shallow. It cannot contain the hosts of fighting men, the hosts of elephants and horses. Let us go straight away to the south and establish a strong town. For this reason, King Naratiyaparte would go down in history,

in Burma by the name Taruk Piedimin, or the king who fled from the Turks. He retreated into the south of Burma and left the rest of the country leaderless and in chaos. With no remaining confidence in the king of Bagan to protect them, many of the empire's provinces simply broke away and looked to their own defences. For the next year, the king attempted to negotiate with the Mongol influence. invaders, and throughout this time, the lowlands of Burma were a battlefield, convulsed in a series of constant running skirmishes. It's not actually certain whether or not the Mongol forces reached the capital city of Bagan. According to Burmese sources, the generals that the king had sent

to defend the north seemed to have been able to slow the Mongol advance, and even repel them about 160 kilometers north of the capital. Some sources claim quite plausibly that the Mongol soldiers struggled in the baking heat of Myanmar's dry zone and suffered from diseases like malaria, which sapped the momentum out of their campaign. Archaeology seems to support this story, since on the temples and structures of Bagan, there's little evidence of war damage or burning. Marco Polo, in the court of Kublai Khan, claims that the Mongols did reach Bagan, but explains that they left the temples intact out of some mixture of respect and superstition.

They marched until they came to the country and province of Mien, and they did conquer the whole of it. And when they found in the city the two towers of gold and silver, they were greatly astonished, and sent word thereof to the great Khan, asking, what? he would have them do with the two towers, seeing what a great quantity of wealth there was upon them. And the great Khan, being well aware that the king had caused these towers to be made for the good of his soul, and to preserve his memory after his death, said that he would not have them injured, but would have them left precisely as they were. And that was no wonder either, for you must know that no tartar in the world will ever, if you can help it, lay hand on ever,

anything appertaining to the dead. Whatever the situation, the Mongols had no interest in a drawn-out conflict. By the year 1287, the Mongol Khan had agreed to a tentative peace. The Burmese delegation formally acknowledged Mongol power over their kingdom and agreed to pay an annual tribute there was a certain proportion of the annual agricultural output of the country. But the agreement broke down only a month. later. In late June, the defeated and humiliated King Naratiyapate was returning from the south,

traveling north up the river on his royal barge to take up his position as a puppet king in the capital he had fled years before. But on the 1st of July, 27, King Naratiyapate was intercepted on route by his second son, the Hattu, who had him assassinated. They went upstream in rout and disarray, without union or order. And when they reached the port of Pramai, Theratu stopped the royal raft and put poison in the food. He offered it and said, O king, eat. But the king knew that there was poison in the food, and he would not eat. When Theratu heard he had caused 3,000 soldiers to go and stand around the royal raft

with gleaming swords unsheathed within their hands, Then he took the ring off his finger, and he let fall drops of water over it, and gave it to his queen. And he made a solemn bow and said, In all the lives wherein, I wander through at samsara until I reach Nirvana. May I never have a son born to me again, and he took the food and ate. And even as he ate, he died. The death of this king was the final death blow for the disintegrating king. kingdom of Bagan. All remaining provinces that had once been loyal to it now broke away. There was no king at all for the next two years, and when one of Nartia Pate's sons named Kiaoswa

did emerge as ruler, he would reign over only the diminished and impoverished city of Bagan itself, and he had virtually no army. He would be assassinated along with his son and heir, on the 10th of May 1299. It was during this time that the explorer Marco Polo visited the city of Bagan, and saw with his own eyes the glorious sights of its temples, now diminished by the years of war. Throughout this whole period, the Mongols could have easily moved in to occupy the territory of Bagan,

but it seems they had no interest in doing so. In fact, they would send no more expeditions to restore order. Their policy seems to have been to allow the fragmentation of the kingdom to continue, and to watch from afar as the once great power that had challenged them simply tore itself apart and sank into irrelevance. One 14th century king named Minghi Swasaulke wrote a later inscription with a brief, sad note about this. time. The Bernese Empire disintegrated because of internal strife. The collapse of the Empire of Bagan was now complete. The area of the city of Bagan would remain occupied for much of the century that followed,

and people would continue to farm and keep animals in the lands around the great temples and stupas as they slowly crumbled beneath the forces of the elements. Other kings, would occupy this region over time, some kings even crowning themselves at Bagan, and giving themselves the titles of the old emperors. But the city would never again hold the same prominence. A smaller number of new and impressive religious monuments still went up to the mid-15th century. But after that, new temple constructions slowed to a trickle, and then stopped entirely. And bit by bit, The city fell into ruin. The area of the city of Bagan remained a pilgrimage site up until the modern day.

While farmers grazed their cattle on the grasses pushing up through the bricks, pilgrims traveled for hundreds of miles to visit its unique landscape and see the awe-inspiring sight of its golden domes and spires, rising out of the morning mist of the flat river valley. Some of the larger and more impressive temples would even be maintained and repaired for centuries to come. But thousands of the less famous and more out-of-the-way temples fell into disrepair and ruin, some disappearing entirely, crumbling into ruin mounds, swallowed up by the forests. The English writer William Somerset Maugham, who travelled through Burma and Thailand in 1923,

wrote a memoir of his travels entitled A Gentleman in the Parlor. In it, he writes about how he was affected by the site of the ruins of cities, like Angkor, Ayutaya and Bagan. In these eastern countries, cities are founded, increased to greatness, and are destroyed in a manner that cannot but fill the Western traveller, accustomed for many centuries now to a relative stability, with a certain misgiving. Here and there in the jungle, far from any habitation, you will find ruined temples, overgrown with trees, and among the dank verger broken gods and elaborate bass reliefs,

as the only sign that here was once a thriving city, and you will come across poverty-stricken villages that are all that remain. of the capital of a rich and powerful kingdom. It is a sombre reminding of the mutability of human things. For Maum, the site of these ruins reminded him that the empire he lived at the heart of might also one day be consigned to history. Maum writes evocatively of his first visit to the ruined temples of Bagan, as he approached by steamboat along the great river Irrawaddy. A light rain was falling and the sky was dark with heavy clouds when I reached Bagan.

In the distance I saw the pagodas for which it is renowned. They loomed huge, remote and mysterious, out of the mist of the early morning like the vague recollections of a fantastic dream. I do not know how many pagodas there are at Bagan. When you stand on an eminence, they surround you for as far as the eye can reach. They are almost as thickly strewn as the tombstones in a cemetery. They are of all sizes, and in all states of preservation. Their solidity and size and magnificence are the more striking by reason of their surroundings.

For they alone remain to show that here a vast and populous city once flourished. Today, there is only a straggling village, with broad untidy roads lined with great trees. A pleasant enough little place. Over the next few days, Maugham would explore the crumbling ruins of these temples and pagodas and walk among the dilapidated buildings. And everywhere he found the place infused with a strange and lingering melancholy. Within the pagodas, images. of the Buddha sit in meditation. The gold leaf has long since worn away from the colossal figures,

and the figures are crumbling to dust. The fantastic lions that guard the entranceways are rotting on their pedestals, a strange and melancholy spot. Grass grows in the chinks of the pavement, and young trees have taken root in the crannies. They are the refuge. They are the refuge. of birds. Hawks wheel about their summits and little green parrots chatter in the eaves. The birds were singing noisily in the trees. The crickets chirped and the frogs croaked, croaked, croaked. Somewhere, a boy was whistling a melancholy tune. I'd like to end the episode with a reading from one of the great poets of the Bagan period, a man named Ananta Surya. Anantasuria was a scholar who served as the chief minister in the kingdom of Bagan under King Naratanka,

who ruled in the latter half of the 12th century. As a result of a palace coup, the king's brother seized the throne and began purging the government of those loyal to the previous king. because of this Ananta Surya was ordered to be executed. And just like Marco Polo, sitting in his jail cell in Genoa, a century later on the other side of the world, Ananta Surya turned in his time of imprisonment to writing. While he sat in prison awaiting his death, he wrote the following poem, which has gone down in history as one of the most beautiful pieces of writing, produced during the efflorescence of art and culture that took place during the Empire of Bagan.

It's a poem of loss and forgiveness about ultimately accepting the fate of all things to pass into darkness and dust. As you listen, imagine what it would feel like to walk the emptying streets of the city of Bagan as its temples crumbled and grasses grew up through its streets and homes. Imagine watching trees push through the bricks of the temple stupors and shaded doorways, animals running wild in the streets, while the sun set in a red haze over the hills, and the poets sang of the end of days. Often when one man prospers, another must suffer. destruction. Such is the nature of things. A courtier's satisfaction in enjoying kingly confidences

in golden palaces and a king's own good fortune are merely bubbles on the surface of a vast ocean, momentary and evanescent. If, dictated by mercy and pity, I were to be released and freed from execution, still I would not escape death. Inseparable am I from my from me. karma. It is the nature of every living thing to decay. Should I again meet my Lord the king in one of my future rebirths in the cycle of samsara? Begrudging him nothing, all I would do is to lovingly forgive him, for impermanent is my body of blood. Danger and death are constant foes, and in this world must ever be. and Naysa, not can I thee. Thank you once again for listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast.

I'd like to thank my voice actors for this episode, Jay Forrester, Michael Haji Antonis, Alexander Boulton, and Paul Kassel. Readings in Burmese were performed by Daniel San. Thank you also to my researcher, Brian Stolk. If you enjoy listening to Fall of Civilizations as a podcast, but would like to see them brought to life on video, you can also find us on YouTube,

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