Pyu city-states

The Pyu city-states were a group of walled cities in the dry zone of central and upper Myanmar, flourishing from about the second century BCE until the ninth century CE, with Pyu communities surviving into the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Built by the Tibeto-Burman-speaking Pyu, the earliest people of Burma known from written records, they introduced Buddhism, writing, coinage and city planning that shaped the later Burmese kingdoms. Three of the cities, Halin, Beikthano and Sri Ksetra, are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The central Irrawaddy valley had long been farmed: bronze working and rice growing appear by about 1500 BCE, and iron-working villages by 500 BCE. In about the second century BCE the Pyu began moving south into the valley from present-day Yunnan along the Taping and Shweli rivers. Some scholars reconstruct their earlier homeland as far north as the region of Qinghai Lake. They settled the valley's three great irrigated regions: the Mu River valley, the Kyaukse plains and the Minbu area, around the confluence of the Irrawaddy and the Chindwin.

Archaeologists have found twelve walled cities, five of them large, together with smaller open settlements. Beikthano, named after the Hindu god Vishnu, is the oldest excavated, with remains dated between about 200 BCE and 100 CE inside rectangular walls of about 300 hectares. Halin in the Mu valley, whose wooden gates have been radiocarbon dated to around 70 CE, covered 664 hectares and was known for salt production. Sri Ksetra, near modern Pyay, became the leading Pyu city by the seventh or eighth century. Circular and more than 13 kilometres around, it was larger than later Pagan or Mandalay. Chinese records of the Tang period list 18 Pyu states, nine of them walled.

At Sri Ksetra kings took Indian-style titles ending in Varman, and at least two dynasties ruled there; the first is credited with starting a calendar on 22 March 638 that later became the Burmese calendar, still in use. The Pyu economy rested on irrigated rice farming and on trade, for their land lay on routes linking China and India. Their silver coins, dating from the fifth century, served as a model for much of the coinage of mainland Southeast Asia. In 800–802 Sri Ksetra sent an embassy with 35 musicians to the court of the Tang dynasty.

By the fourth century most Pyu had adopted Buddhism, chiefly the Theravada tradition, which probably came from the Andhra region of south-east India, alongside Mahayana and Hindu cults. Older customs persisted: the Pyu cremated their dead and placed the ashes in urns, sometimes thousands together on burial terraces at Sri Ksetra. They wrote their tonal language in a script derived from Indian Brahmi, possibly the ancestor of the Burmese script. Tall cylindrical stupas at Sri Ksetra and its temple plans became prototypes for the monuments of Pagan. The Pyu were contemporaries of Funan, Dvaravati and Srivijaya, early states that came before the classical kingdoms of Southeast Asia.

From the mid-eighth century the kingdom of Nanzhao, based in Yunnan, raided the upper Irrawaddy. Chinese sources record that in 832 Nanzhao forces overran Pyu country and carried 3,000 prisoners away from Halin, though radiocarbon dates show people still living there until about 870. The raids weakened the Pyu and opened the way for Burman (Mranma) settlers, who moved in gradually. The chronicles date the founding of Pagan to 849, but the earliest radiocarbon dates from its walls point to about 980 and 1020.

Burman rulers took over leadership of the region by the late tenth century and created the Pagan Kingdom in the mid-eleventh century, adopting Pyu histories and legends as their own. The Pyu language was still written in the late twelfth century, but by the thirteenth the Pyu had merged into the Burman population.

Our 800 map draws this area under the label "Pyu state"; the main era of the Pyu cities ended in the ninth century.