The history of Myanmar

Myanmar, long known in English as Burma, lies between India, China and Thailand, its heartland the long valley of the Irrawaddy River, ringed by hills where many distinct peoples live. Its history begins with the Pyu city-states and the Mon of the south, and its first great kingdom, Pagan, made Theravada Buddhism the faith of the lowlands. Three times, under Pagan, Toungoo and Konbaung, Burman kings unified the valley and made war on their neighbours, before Britain conquered the country in three wars between 1824 and 1885. Since independence in 1948, Myanmar has been shaped by the conflict between the central state and its ethnic minorities and by the political power of the army, which ruled from 1962 to 2011 and seized power again in 2021, setting off a civil war that continues.

People were living in the Irrawaddy valley more than 10,000 years ago, and Bronze and Iron Age cultures with rice farming and burial sites flourished there in the first millennium BCE. The first urban civilisation was that of the Pyu, a Tibeto-Burman-speaking people who built walled cities from around the second century BCE, among them Beikthano, Halin and Sri Ksetra near modern Pyay. They traded with India, adopted Indian scripts and both Buddhism and Hindu cults, and in 638 CE the rulers of Sri Ksetra introduced the calendar that became the Burmese calendar. Chinese records of the eighth century describe eighteen Pyu states.

In the south, the Mon, speakers of an Austroasiatic language related to Khmer, founded port kingdoms such as Thaton on the coast of the Gulf of Martaban and were among the earliest Theravada Buddhists of mainland Southeast Asia. On the western coast, separated from the valley by the Arakan Yoma mountains, the Rakhine developed their own kingdoms, at Dhanyawadi and later Waithali, which looked across the Bay of Bengal towards India.

From the ninth century, the Mranma or Bamar, Tibeto-Burman speakers who had come down from the north, settled around Pagan on the middle Irrawaddy. King Anawrahta, who came to the throne in 1044, conquered the Mon kingdom of Thaton in 1057 and extended his rule over most of the valley, creating the Pagan Kingdom, the first state to unite the lands that became Myanmar. Pagan's kings championed Theravada Buddhism, and over two and a half centuries they and their subjects built more than 10,000 temples, stupas and monasteries on the plain of Bagan, of which over 2,000 survive. The Burmese script and language replaced Pyu and Mon as the language of the court, and Pagan, alongside the Khmer Empire, was one of the two great powers of mainland Southeast Asia.

By the thirteenth century the crown had given so much tax-free land to the Buddhist clergy that its revenues were weakened. When King Narathihapate refused to pay tribute to the Yuan dynasty, armies of the Mongol Empire invaded from Yunnan, winning a battle at Ngasaunggyan in 1277. Pagan collapsed in 1287, and the valley broke apart.

For two and a half centuries no single power ruled the region. Shan chiefs, Tai-speaking peoples from the eastern hills, dominated Upper Burma for a time and set up principalities that endured as the Shan States. A Burman kingdom at Ava, founded in 1364, held the dry zone of the north, while the Mon kingdom of Hanthawaddy, centred on Pegu, flourished on sea trade in the south. The two fought the Forty Years' War from 1385 to 1424. The Mon queen Shin Sawbu and her successor Dhammazedi presided over a golden age at Pegu in the later fifteenth century.

In Arakan, King Min Saw Mon founded Mrauk U in 1430 after returning from exile in Bengal. Its kings, though Buddhist, used Islamic titles and minted coins with Persian inscriptions, and the city became a wealthy port with Muslim, Portuguese and Dutch traders, its armies and fleets raiding deep into Bengal. Muslim communities have lived in Arakan since at least this period.

The small Burman principality of Toungoo, on the Sittaung River, rose in the early sixteenth century. Its king Tabinshwehti conquered Pegu in the 1530s and moved his capital there. His brother-in-law and successor, Bayinnaung, who reigned from 1550 to 1581, built the largest empire in the history of Southeast Asia: he subdued the Shan States, Lan Na and Manipur, and took the Siamese capital of the Ayutthaya Kingdom in 1564 and again in 1569. The empire was too large to hold and fell apart after his death. A restored Toungoo dynasty, ruling from Ava from the early seventeenth century, governed a smaller but more stable kingdom, reformed its administration and kept out the Portuguese adventurer Filipe de Brito, who had seized the port of Syriam until his execution in 1613.

In 1752 a revived Mon kingdom at Pegu captured Ava and ended the Toungoo dynasty. A village chief from Shwebo named Aung Zeya rallied resistance, took the royal name Alaungpaya, and within a few years had defeated the Mon, founded the city of Dagon as Yangon and established the Konbaung dynasty. His son Hsinbyushin destroyed Ayutthaya in 1767, carrying off its people and treasures to Burma, and between 1765 and 1769 Burmese armies defeated four invasions sent by the Qing dynasty of China. King Bodawpaya conquered Arakan in 1784–85, and tens of thousands of refugees fled into British Bengal. Later campaigns brought Manipur and Assam under Burmese control.

Those conquests brought Burma face to face with the British Empire in India. The First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824–26 was long and costly for both sides; by the Treaty of Yandabo Burma gave up Assam, Manipur, Arakan and Tenasserim and paid a large indemnity. In the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852, Britain annexed Lower Burma, including Pegu and the port of Rangoon. King Mindon, who reigned from 1853 to 1878, tried to modernise what remained, founding Mandalay as his capital in 1857 and convening a great Buddhist council. His successor Thibaw faced growing British fears of French influence from French Indochina, and in November 1885 a British force took Mandalay in the Third Anglo-Burmese War. Thibaw was exiled to India, and on 1 January 1886 Burma was annexed.

Burma was governed as a province of British India. The British abolished the monarchy, sidelined the Buddhist hierarchy and ruled the hill peoples, including the Shan, Kachin, Chin and Karen, separately from the Burman lowlands, often through their own chiefs, while recruiting minority soldiers for the colonial army. Guerrilla resistance in Upper Burma took years to suppress. The Irrawaddy delta was cleared for rice, and by the early twentieth century Burma was the world's largest rice exporter. Indian labourers, officials and moneylenders arrived in large numbers, and Yangon, then Rangoon, became a majority-Indian city. When world rice prices collapsed in the Depression, many Burmese farmers lost their land to Indian Chettiar moneylenders, and anti-Indian riots broke out in 1930 and 1938.

Nationalism grew through Buddhist associations, the university strike of 1920 and the peasant rebellion of Saya San in 1930–32. In 1937 Burma was separated from India with its own legislature. Young radicals of the Dobama Asiayone, who called themselves Thakin, or master, led the student movement, and among them was Aung San.

Aung San and the Thirty Comrades trained secretly with the Japanese, and their Burma Independence Army entered the country with the forces of the Empire of Japan in 1942, which drove the British back to India. Burma became one of the hardest-fought theatres of World War II. Japan granted nominal independence under Ba Maw in 1943, but Japanese rule proved harsh, and in March 1945 Aung San's army turned against them as British and Indian forces under William Slim reconquered the country. Many Karen and Kachin had fought for the Allies, deepening ethnic divisions.

Aung San's Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League negotiated independence with the Labour government of Clement Attlee. At Panglong in February 1947 he agreed with Shan, Kachin and Chin leaders on a federal union. On 19 July 1947, Aung San and most of his cabinet were assassinated by gunmen sent by the rival politician U Saw. Burma became independent on 4 January 1948, outside the Commonwealth, with U Nu as prime minister.

The new state was at once engulfed by rebellion: two communist parties, Karen nationalists who rose in 1949, and other ethnic armies. Remnant Chinese Nationalist troops occupied parts of the Shan States after 1949. U Nu held the government together, and the army commander Ne Win ran a caretaker government in 1958–60. On 2 March 1962, as the Shan and others pressed for greater federal autonomy, Ne Win seized power. His Revolutionary Council and later the Burma Socialist Programme Party pursued the Burmese Way to Socialism, nationalising businesses, expelling hundreds of thousands of Indians, and closing the country to the outside world through the Cold War. Once among the richest countries in Southeast Asia, Burma became one of the poorest.

A sudden demonetisation in 1987 wiped out savings, and in 1988 student-led protests spread across the country, peaking on 8 August. The army crushed this 8888 Uprising, killing thousands, and a new junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council, took power. It renamed the country Myanmar in 1989. Aung San's daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, emerged as leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD), which won the 1990 election by a landslide, but the military ignored the result and kept her under house arrest for most of the next two decades; she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. The junta signed ceasefires with many ethnic armies while fighting others, moved the capital to the new city of Naypyidaw in 2005–06, and suppressed monk-led protests in 2007. When Cyclone Nargis struck the delta in May 2008, more than 130,000 people died or went missing, and the regime at first obstructed foreign aid.

A constitution approved in a flawed referendum in 2008 reserved a quarter of parliamentary seats for the army. After elections in 2010, a nominally civilian government under the former general Thein Sein released Suu Kyi and political prisoners, eased censorship and opened the economy. In 2015 the NLD won a decisive victory, and in 2016 Suu Kyi became state counsellor, the de facto head of government, though the army kept control of security.

The Rohingya, a mostly Muslim people of northern Rakhine State, had suffered discrimination for decades. Successive governments have regarded them as illegal migrants from Bengal, while the Rohingya maintain that they are a people long native to Arakan. The 1982 Citizenship Law left most of them stateless. Military operations drove some 200,000 into Bangladesh in 1978 and about 250,000 more in 1991–92, and communal violence in 2012 confined some 140,000 to camps. In August 2017, after attacks on police posts by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, the army launched what it called clearance operations. Soldiers, joined by local mobs, burned hundreds of villages and killed thousands of people, with one study estimating at least 25,000 deaths, and more than 700,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh, where the camps around Cox's Bazar became the largest refugee settlement in the world. A UN fact-finding mission concluded in 2018 that senior generals should be investigated and prosecuted for genocide, and in 2019 the Gambia brought a genocide case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice, where Suu Kyi personally defended her country. Myanmar's governments have denied genocide, describing the operations as a response to terrorism. In 2024 the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court applied for an arrest warrant against the army chief, Min Aung Hlaing.

The NLD won the November 2020 election by an even larger margin. On 1 February 2021, the day the new parliament was to meet, the army arrested Suu Kyi, President Win Myint and other leaders, claiming without evidence that the vote had been fraudulent, and Min Aung Hlaing took power. Mass protests and a civil disobedience movement followed, and security forces killed hundreds of demonstrators. Suu Kyi was sentenced in closed trials to many years in prison, and in July 2022 the junta executed four pro-democracy activists, the country's first executions in decades. Elected politicians formed a National Unity Government in exile, and armed People's Defence Forces took up arms alongside long-established ethnic armies.

In October 2023 an alliance of ethnic armies in northern Shan State launched Operation 1027 and captured towns and border crossings with China; in August 2024 the city of Lashio fell, and in December the Arakan Army took the military's western command headquarters in Rakhine. The army responded with air strikes on villages, mass displacement and, from 2024, conscription; millions have been displaced. The Arakan Army itself has been accused of abuses against Rohingya. A powerful earthquake on 28 March 2025 devastated central Myanmar. With Chinese pressure on some rebel groups, the army regained ground in northern Shan in 2025. It held elections in phases between December 2025 and January 2026, from which the NLD had been dissolved and in which many areas could not vote; the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party was declared the winner, and in April 2026 parliament elected Min Aung Hlaing president. Fighting has continued across much of the country.