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 Kardandan,
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 plain. Beyond this, in a southerly direction, towards the confines
of India, lies the city of Mien. 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 formally 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 sights, the golden
shrines of the city towered and attested to its former magnificence. 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 internment, at the head and foot of the sepulcher, 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 with a 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 Rustichello, 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 art and architecture, constructing one of the
most striking collections of religious buildings that the world has ever seen.
The empire of Bagan 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 Irrawaddy 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 largest nation by continuous landmass in Southeast Asia. It's the size of
Texas and 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 Arakan, the Pegu, the Chin, and the Shan Yoma.
Between the bony peaks of these mountain ranges that run like a series of spines
north to south down the whole country, flow the rivers Chindwin, Shweli, N’mai,
and Mali. 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 Irrawaddy.
The name of the Irrawaddy River derives from the Sanskrit name Airavati, a
legendary white elephant with four tusks and the 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 Irrawaddy River winds for more than two thousand 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 flood waters to rise below them.
At the end of the river's journey, the Irrawaddy branches out into a wide delta
of mangrove forests, marshes, and meandering streams, where it finally
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 Irrawaddy. 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 1500 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 teakwood. 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
constructions like bridges that have lasted for nearly 200 years.
One famous bridge named U Bein spans more than a kilometer across
Taungthaman Lake, and is made up of more than a thousand teakwood pillars driven into
the lake bed. 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 Irrawaddy 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 used the words anya and
akye, upstream and downstream. One traditional Burmese poet describes
the coming of summer in the landscape of the Irrawaddy 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. The leaves on trees turn yellow to fall to show new leaves.
Stems twist or break, yet sprouts on tama trees are now soft greens like parrot
eggs, while in summer trees thirst in foothills, tazin flowers are climbing
tabye trees, effusing fragrance, mixing with the wafting air. At sunset, crow
pheasants are cooing, and from afar come the cuckoo's notes. Now and again, thunder
is beating through Heaven's expanses like lambara anddeindi 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 Bama 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. 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
Irrawaddy. 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 were 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 Maha Yazawin, or Great
Chronicle, was completed several centuries later in the year 1724, and it
was followed nearly a century later by the Yazawin Thit, 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 colorful 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 Bagyidaw of Burma appointed a committee of
scholars to write a chronicle of the Burmese kings that would act as the
final complete edition. 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 diverse gems and a fit
place for the most exalted personages, and caused the chronicle to be purified
by comparing it 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 Nanchao had set
their sights on the rich river valley of the Irrawaddy.
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 Copan, a man named Ukit Took, 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 Aquitaine and his brother Louis the German revolted against their father,
the Frankish Emperor Louis the Pious, the son of Charlemagne,
and in the mountains of southern China, the armies of Nanchao 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 Pyu.
Exactly who the Pyu 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 Irrawaddy.
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 Pyu
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 painting their teeth, always
dressing in untreated cloth with rattan warn 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 Nanchao 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 Zhenyuan era, Nanchao sought out and attacked them. On
the 21st day of the 12th month of the third year of the Sheeantong era, at the
cliffs of the Suli River, some 2,000 to 3,000 troops massed.
According to ancient sources, the Nanchao deported many thousands of the Pyu
people who lived and farmed in this fertile valley and sent them away into
slavery. Among the troops of Nanchao 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 Irrawaddy,
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 Nanchao raids, their
lands were there for the taking. The Mien 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
Pi’ao people and had nothing to do with the Nanchao raids.
But as with everything in these early stages of the chronicles, we’re 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, seagoing 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 Irrawaddy 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 Nanchao raids, the Mien built a
walled fortress at a place on the eastern bank of the Irrawaddy 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 Pyu people,
and stood on a sizable bend in the meandering course of the Irrawaddy 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 kilometers to the southeast of Bagan was a great dormant volcano named
Mount Popa. 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 Popa is Taung Kalat 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 Popa 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 leach into the soil, these
elements are released. 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 pulses,
sesamum, cucumbers, and millet. On the spot that they'd chosen for their
new city, the Mien 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
twelve gates to represent the twelve 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, a little over a square kilometer 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
Sulayman Nadwi, wrote an account of the powerful army that one king of Burma
fielded. They said 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 amounted between 10 and
15,000. Thanks to the ongoing study of
inscriptions, we do know the names of at least two kings who ruled around the
turn of the first millennium; Nyaung-u Sawrahan and Kyaung Pjy Min, both of whom were once
considered to be legendary. By the year 1004, a Chinese source from the Song
Dynasty records an ambassador arriving from what they called the P’u-kan
kingdom, which is thought to refer to Bagan. 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 Anawrahta. Anawrahta'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, Anawrahta’s father lived in constant fear of
one day being overthrown himself. Anawrahta grew up as a prince in the
palace with his two older step-brothers, men named Kyizo and Sokkate.
These brothers were actually the sons of the previous king, but Anawrahta's father
had adopted them and raised them as his own, and so they grew up together.
But his older stepbrothers Kyizo and Sokkate always treated the younger
Anawrahta as though he were an inferior, something that must have rankled the
young prince. 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, Anawrahta's
treacherous brothers plotted a coup to overthrow his now aging father, as the
Glass Palace Chronicle recalls. When Kyizo and Sokkate came of age, they
built a pleasant monastery and said to King Kunhsaw, ‘Come and call thy blessings
on the monastery,’ and the king took no heed nor scrutiny,
but hearkened to them, and Kyizo and Sokkate seized the king and 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 Pahto 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 Kyizo 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 thamine 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 Sokkate 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 Kyizo assassinated.
Through all of this upheaval and treachery, the boy Anawrahta 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 Anawrahta had reached the age of 30, King Sokkate took things
too far. He referred to Anawrahta at court using
the word Nyitha-naungme, a compound word that means something like brother-son.
Confused by this, Anawrahta 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; Sokkate intended to marry Anawrahta's
mother. Anawrahta told that word to his father
King Kyaungbyu, and his father said, ‘Because he wishes to take thy mother,
thus he speaks.’ Anawrahta was exceedingly angry and he begged for
the horse and weapons and gear that Sakra gave his father,
and his father gave him the Areindama lance, the Thilawuntha sword, the ruby ring,
and the ruby hairpin. It's hard to know whether Anawrahta 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, Anawrahta rose in rebellion against his stepbrother.
He fled to the holy volcano, Mount Popa, and marshaled his forces there, gathering
lords and chieftains who had had enough of the brothers 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 Sokkate 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 Anawrahta 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 Sokkate, his brother, saw him coming and went forth to meet him. Then said,
‘Anawrahta, brother, you the elder strike first,’ and
Sokkate thrust at him with his lance, but Anawrahta parried it with the Areindama
lance, and it reached not his body but pierced the pommel of his saddle, and when
Sokkate saw it, he was sore afraid and trembled.
Then said Anawrahta, ‘Brother, your turn is over. Now it is mine. Meet it as best you
can.’ And he smote him and pierced him with
the Areindama lance so that it went in at the front and came out behind.
Sokkate’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, Anawrahta took the throne. The chronicle records that Anawrahta 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. Anawrahta could not sleep for full six
months because he had slain his elder brother.
Then Sakra visited him with a dream, saying, ‘King, if thou wouldst mitigate
thine evil deed and sinning against thy elder brother, build many pagodas,
monasteries, and rest houses, and share the merit with thine elder brother.
Devise thou many wells, ponds, dams and ditches, fields and canals,
and share the merit with thine elder brother.’ Archaeological evidence does show that
Anawrahta 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 Irrawaddy River. The north was traditionally the gateway
to Burma, the lands through which all potential conquerors had previously
marched, and so it's clear he was keen to secure his land from invasion.
King Anawrahta built his network of fortresses as an armored 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 Anawrahta 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, but 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 Bagan had to keep paying the trade tariffs to these wealthy port
cities, it could never become the kind of great power that King Anawrahta clearly
dreamed of. According to the chronicles, he marched
south and first besieged the city of Thaton, 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 land and water.
By water he sent 800,000 boats and 80 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 Thaton territory, the rear guard 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 Thaton, and after holding out for three months, the city capitulated.
From there, Anawrahta 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 Arimaddana-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 Theravada. 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 Anawrahta, 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 worshiped 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
Ari monks enjoyed enormous power in the kingdom of Bagan. They owned vast estates
and held enormous stores of wealth. The Maya Yazawin, or Great Chronicle, even
records the scandalous claim that the monks were practicing a version of the
right of prima noctae, or first night, 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 at 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
scurrilous 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 powerful, and King Anawrahta 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 Anawrahta 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 Anawrahta had recently absorbed. The sage had traveled in Sri
Lanka, and he told King Anawrahta 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 Theravada Buddhism incubated in
the grand Sri Lankan cities of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa.
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 Anawrahta, this must have sounded ideal.
The Glass Palace Chronicle recounts the king's conversion as a spiritual
epiphany. The king was full of joy and rapture, and
spoke again, entreating 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 Anawrahta 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. So, King Anawrahta went to war with the
church. First, the king went after the monks’
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, Anawrahta chipped away at the monks’ power with every tool at his
disposal. There were, of course, those who fought
the changes. Anawrahta banished thousands of monks who resisted his reforms. Many
of these fled to the nearby volcano of Mount Popa 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, Anawrahta 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's 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 Anawrahta. When the new tooth relic arrived in the
capital by boat, the king himself waded out into the river to meet it. Anawrahta 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, Kyansittha. Kyansittha was a great general and had led his
father's armies into battle many times, and when the people in the region of
Pegu complained about raiders destroying their homes and stealing their animals,
the king sent Kyansittha to deal with the situation.
The story goes that the prince saw off the raiders, and the people of Pegu 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 Khin,
intended to be offered to the king as a bride. It
was on the journey home Prince Kyansittha and U Khin fell in love.
When Anawrahta 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 Anawrahta.
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 advanced 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 clave to the throne door
of the palace, an ogre laughed from the top of the Tharaba gate, and luster of
the royal sword faded, and a vulture alighted on the palace.
After the death of the great king Anawrahta, his son Sawlu 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 Sawlu lost at a game of dice with one of
his nobles, a childhood friend of his named Yamankan, and in a fit of sore
losing rage, he dared the noble to rebel against him.
One day, the king and Yamankan played at dice, and Yamankan won, and he rose up
and clapped his elbows. Said King Sawlu, ‘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 Yamankan. ‘We kings,’ said the king,
‘should we utter anything but truth?’ According to the chronicle, Yamankan
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 Sawlu, 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 Sawlu 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 Kyansittha. Kyansittha came out of exile and agreed to help the
childish king lead his armies against the rebellion in the south,
but King Sawlu would prove to have no better judgment on the battlefield than
off it, and he would be fooled one day by a devious ploy. King Sawlu and Kyansittha encamped when they reached the island of
Pye-dawta, saying, ‘It is too late today; tomorrow we shall fight.’
Then in the dim moonlight, Yamankan came forth and provoked them to do
battle. So, they followed and fought without heed
or observation, and the King Sawlu, 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.
King Sawlu 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. Sawlu was soon found hiding in the banyan
tree and was taken into captivity by the rebel Yamankan. According to another
slightly fantastical episode in the chronicles, Sawlu did actually have one
chance to escape when the hero Kyansittha personally snuck into the enemy
camp to rescue him. But Sawlu feared that Kyansittha secretly
wanted to kill him, and he refused to go with his rescuer.
He believed that the rebel Yamankan, 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 Kyansittha bare him on his shoulder, Sawlu thought,
‘Kyansittha is one whom my father has injured, whom I have injured. I fear he
steals me away to kill me. But Yamankan is son of my tutor; surely he will not
kill me.’ Sawlu yelled out, ‘Kyansittha is stealing me!’
Kyansittha 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 Irrawaddy and
eventually made back to safety. But like many of his other calculations,
Sawlu's gamble didn't pay off. Fearing more escape attempts, Yamankan
had the king killed in April of the year 1084.
In the game of life, it seems the king Sawlu was always rolling ones. After the death of Sawlu, Kyansittha
continued to lead the royal armies of Bagan against Yamankan's rebellion, and
the rebel leader fled south on the river on his opulent golden barge.
Kyansittha sent a hunter named Ya-sin to follow him and to kill him if he could.
The chronicle recounts what happened next. Ya-sin in the hunter caught him up
below Ywatha, and he climbed a fig tree and uttered lovely notes like the
voice of a bird. When Yamankan 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 Ya-sin the hunter, from the place where he
waited peeping, drew his bow and shot and hit the eye of Yamankan,
and he died. Now the once-exiled Kyansittha was the
only person in line for the throne. Kyansittha came to the throne on the 21st of April,
1084, and assumed the title Sri Tribhuvanaditya Dhammaraja, 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.
Kyansittha 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 temples that were built in the 300 years after
the reign of King Anawrahta, 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 center, 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. Masons required
brickbuilders who required firewood brought by lumberjacks and porters. The
sculptors of countless statues of the Buddha needed miners of marble and
dolerite 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 traveled 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 Anawrahta, 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; masons, 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 frizzling, yakin
hairdressers, and men cunning in perfumes, odors, flowers, and the juices of flowers. From the small fortress capital that
it had once been, Bagan 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 largest of all is the temple known as the
Thatbyinnyu Temple. Consecrated in the year 1144, the vast
spired pagoda of this temple rises to a height of over 61 meters, or more than 20
stories. Another temple nearby is called the
Ananda Temple, and it rises to a height of 51 meters. This temple served 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 Alaungsithu
dedicated the completing of the Shwegugyi 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 Brahmas, Suras, Maras, nor the state and splendors
of a monarch, nay 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 Mingun Pahtodawgyi temple, built some time after the Bagan
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 favors 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 Mandhata 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 40 limbos 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 Bagan'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 Bagan, 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 Bagan 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 show that in the year 1273, a complete set of the Buddhist texts known
as the Tripitaka, cost up to 3,000 kyats, or nearly 50 kilos of silver. That would
be enough to buy more than 5,000 acres of riceland, four large monasteries, or
150 slaves. The exceeding expense of these texts
meant that literacy was never widespread, and most common people would not learn
to read or write. One 15th century poet named Shin
Maharattathara 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 does 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 saw penetrating deeply into all discussed matters, to unravel the subject
from beginning to end without fear like a lion. One area that these poets can really
educate us about is in the realm of food. A 17th century poet named Wungyi Padethayaza
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, su-pou 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 kyan-
-hing and kee-wet-na vegetables. The rice is hot, and the curry is hopped with pungent
spices that make one suck, tht, tht, tht. 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 foot chains, 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 Berman 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 arabesques.
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 pitch. Throughout his reign, King Kyansittha
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 Sithu. Kyansittha would die 22 years later, and
his son Sithu 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, Sithu had him banished.
The second son, who would go on to take the throne, was a man named Narathu, and he
has been remembered to history as a tyrant and a psychopath.
When King Sithu 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 Schwegu pagoda. The king recovered consciousness a
while and said, ‘This is not my palace. Whose trickery is this?’
The king was convulsed with anger; his whole body burned like fire. Then his
son Narathu 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. Narathu 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 Leppan 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
Narathu 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, Narathu
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 Dhammayangyi Temple. But Narathu would not live to see this
great temple completed. It's not clear who gave the order, but Narathu 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 nigh
the king, encircling him under guise of presenting the conch and neza grass, and
they pierced the king with the sword until he died. Thereafter they pursued
the minister Theiddika 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 Narathu 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 Narapatisithu, who would reign until the year
1211. 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 Anawrahta
to reign in the excessive power and wealth of the Ari monks, the Theravada
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 rebirths 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 dissolution,
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
refused 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
paying 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 percent.
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 Bagan, by
the late 13th century, as much as 63 percent 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.
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 kings 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.
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-Thwin 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 Htilominlo,
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 Bagan’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 Arakan 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. 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 Narathihapate. 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 Popa.
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 Narathihapate,
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 honor. If the chronicles are to be believed,
this King Narathihapate also ruled tyrannically, with some of his
preoccupations ranging into the territory of the bizarre.
The king, being one who had received the Lord's prophecy, suffered not from any of
the 96 diseases, and never so much has sneezed nor yawned. 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 Narathihapate was also given over to boasting,
especially about his famous appetite, as one inscription left by him at the
Mingalar Zedi Pagoda in 1274 shows. King Narathihapate, supreme commander of
36 million soldiers and who is the consumer of 300 dishes of curry daily,
enshrined 51 gold and silver figurines of kings, queens, nobles, and maids of
honor, on Thursday the full moon of Kason of the year 636.
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 Narathihapate, 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 10 ministers and a thousand horsemen to demand golden
ricepots, vessels of gold and silver, gold and silver ladles, because, said he, they were
once offered by King Anawrahta. Furthermore, some chronicles say that
they came demanding a white elephant. The Taruk ambassadors in making demands
showed no due respect nor reverence in the king's presence.
Therefore, the king commanded, slay these 10 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 Narathihapate. 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 ten thousand 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 swathe 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 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, two thousand 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.
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 Vochan, 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 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 steppes 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 Tartars 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.
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 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 Irrawaddy. The Mongols were quick to capitalize on
their victory. Kaungsin, 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 Irrawaddy valley. It's clear from the exaggerated tones of
the Burmese Chronicles 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 Narathihapate ordered two of his generals to take
his remaining forces and fortify the town of Ngahsaunggyan on the crucial river
crossing of the Irrawaddy. Coming to Ngahsaunggyan town, they made
it strong and girded it with forts and moats and ditches, and fought in their
defense at the river crossing of Bhamo. For three full months they slew the
enemy and spared not even the feeders of elephants and horses, but slew them all.
But when 10 myriad men were dead, the Taruk sent 20 myriad. When 20 myriad
were dead, he sent 40 myriad. The king's men were weary and fore-done, and as soon
as the Taruks crossed the river, Ngahsaunggyan fell. At the news of the fall of Ngahsaunggyan,
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 Bagan 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 Narathihapate would go down in history in Burma by the
name Taruk-Pye Min, 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 defenses. For the next year, the king attempted to
negotiate with the Mongol 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. Archeology 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. 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
ye must know that no Tartar in the world will ever, if he can help it, lay hand on
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 that 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 Narathihapate 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, 1287, King Narathihapate
was intercepted en route by his second son Thihathu, who had him
assassinated. They went upstream in route and disarray
without union or order, and when they reached the port of
Promay, Thihathu 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 Thihathu heard he had caused three
thousand 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 four drops of water over it, and gave it to his queen.
And he made a solemn vow and said, ‘In all the lives we're in, I wander
throughout 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 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 Narathihapate’s
sons, named Kyawswa, 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 Mingyi
Swasawke wrote a later inscription with a brief sad note about this time.
The Burmese 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 kingdoms 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 ruined mounds, swallowed up by the forests. The English writer William Somerset
Maugham who traveled 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 sight of the ruins of
cities like Angkor, Ayuthaya, and Bagan.
In these Eastern countries, cities are founded, increased to greatness, and are
destroyed in a manner that cannot but fill the Western traveler, 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 somber reminding of the
mutability of human things. For Maugham, the sight of these ruins
reminded him that the empire he lived at the heart of might also one day be
consigned to history. Maugham 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 goldleaf 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 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
Anantasuriya. Anantasuriya was a scholar who served as
the chief minister in the kingdom of Bagan under King Naratheinka, 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, Anantasuriya 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, Anantasuriya 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 stupas
and shaded doorways, animals running wild in the streets while the sun set in a
red haze over the hills and 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 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. 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 Hajiantonis,
Alexandra Boulton, and Paul Casselle. Readings in Burmese were performed by
Daniel San. Thank you also to my researcher, Brian Stolk.
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