Mongols end the Pagan Empire

The Pagan kingdom ruled most of what is now Myanmar from about the middle of the eleventh century, and its capital on the Irrawaddy was filled with thousands of temples. In the 1270s it clashed with the Mongol Yuan dynasty over the border region of Yunnan. In 1277 a Mongol force defeated a larger Pagan army at Ngasaunggyan, and further Mongol campaigns in 1283 and 1287 finished the job. The Burmese king Narathihapate fled the capital, and the chronicles remember him as the king who ran away from the Chinese.¹²

Pagan was already weakened. Its kings had given so much land and wealth to Buddhist temples and monasteries that the crown could not raise enough soldiers and tax. Local chiefs, especially the Shan in the east and Mon in the south, were growing more independent. When the Mongols came, there was little left to hold the state together. Chinese records suggest the Mongols did not intend to occupy Burma for long, and they installed a puppet ruler while the real power moved to others.¹

In the decades that followed, the old empire fractured. Shan brothers took control in the center, the Mon founded a rival kingdom in the south, and Arakan stood apart on the west coast. The temple plain at Bagan survived, and about two thousand temples and pagodas still stand there today. A new Burmese state did not unify the country again until the Toungoo dynasty in the sixteenth century.²