Kingdom of Mrauk U

The Kingdom of Mrauk U, also called the Kingdom of Arakan, ruled the Arakan coastal plain on the eastern shore of the Bay of Bengal from 1429 until 1785. From its capital at Mrauk U it governed what is now Rakhine State in Myanmar and, for long periods, Chittagong in today's Bangladesh. A Buddhist kingdom with deep ties to Muslim Bengal, it became a major sea power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before it was conquered by Burma.

Cut off from the Irrawaddy valley by the Arakan Mountains, Arakan developed largely on its own. Its kings sometimes paid tribute to Pagan, but the southern coast stayed mostly outside Pagan's control. The royal seat moved over the centuries between Dhanyawadi, Vesali, Pyinsa, Parein and Hkrit, settling at Launggyet in 1237. In the early fifteenth century King Narameikhla was driven out by Burmese forces and fled to the court of the Bengal Sultanate, while Ava and Pegu fought over his kingdom.

After some twenty-four years in exile, Narameikhla regained the throne around 1429–1430 with an army supplied by Bengal, and soon built a new capital at Mrauk U. In return he ceded territory and accepted the sultan's overlordship. For about a century the Buddhist kings of Arakan used Islamic titles alongside their own, accepted Bengali coinage, issued coins with Persian as well as Arakanese inscriptions and gave Bengali Muslims places at court.

Arakan ended its subordination to Bengal in 1531, when Minbin came to the throne. He strengthened Mrauk U, built temples such as the Shitthaung, and took advantage of turmoil in Bengal to control Chittagong, where an inscription of 1542 attests Arakanese rule. When the Burmese king Tabinshwehti of Toungoo invaded in 1544–1547, he reached Mrauk U but withdrew, judging the city too strongly defended. A second Toungoo attack came in 1580–1581, and it too failed.

The kingdom's navy, which relied heavily on Portuguese mercenaries, dominated much of the coast. Arakanese and Portuguese raiders seized captives in Bengal and sold them as slaves; among those taken was the Bengali poet Alaol, who later rose to prominence at the Arakanese court. Under Min Razagyi (1593–1612) the kingdom reached its greatest extent: in 1599 an Arakanese force, with Portuguese help, took Syriam and joined in the sack of Pegu, carrying off treasure, bronze statues and a white elephant. For a few years, roughly 1599 to 1603, Arakan controlled the whole coastline between the Sundarbans and the Gulf of Martaban, until the Portuguese commander Filipe de Brito e Nicote turned on his patron and kept Syriam. Mrauk U was a cosmopolitan city of temples, mosques and libraries, visited by Portuguese, Dutch and other traders; the Augustinian friar Sebastião Manrique, who lived there in the 1630s, described the coronation of King Thiri Thudhamma.

In 1638 Thiri Thudhamma died suddenly and the throne passed to the governor of Launggyet, who ruled as Narapati; the historian Jacques Leider describes this as a coup. A punitive raid on Chittagong in the 1640s carried tens of thousands of weavers to Arakan, many of whom died in a famine in 1645. In 1660 the fugitive Mughal prince Shah Shuja took refuge in Arakan; after a quarrel over his treasure, his family was killed, according to varying accounts, while his own fate is uncertain. In 1666 Mughal forces sent by Aurangzeb captured Chittagong after a short siege, ending Arakan's hold on the region.

The kingdom lingered, weakened, for another century. In 1785 the Konbaung king Bodawpaya invaded and annexed Arakan, and the revered Mahamuni Buddha image, now in Mandalay, was taken to Burma. As many as 35,000 people later fled to British-ruled Chittagong, by 1799.

Our maps for 1492, 1500, 1650 and 1783 draw this kingdom under the label "Arakan"; the state itself lasted from 1429 to 1785.