Nanzhao plunders the Pyu kingdom

The New Book of Tang says briefly that in the sixth year of the Dahe era (832) Nanzhao plundered 3,000 of the people of Piao and moved them to Zhedong; the Man shu, written about thirty years later by the Tang official Fan Chuo, adds that the captives were made to provide for themselves and that their descendants still lived there. Neither text names the city. George Coedès placed the raid at the Pyu capital Halin and called it the beginning of the Pyu decline; some accounts identify the kingdom attacked with Sri Ksetra near Prome. Radiocarbon dates show that Halin was still inhabited until about 870, and no Pyu site shows signs of a violent end: the raids weakened the Pyu rather than destroying them. In 835 Nanzhao also attacked Michen, a dependency of the Pyu, and carried off two or three thousand people.

Only a generation earlier the Pyu had been at the height of their prestige: in 802 their king sent an embassy that presented Pyu music at the Tang court, and Chinese accounts describe a capital with twelve gates, more than a hundred Buddhist monasteries and a people who abhorred killing. In the following centuries Burmans coming down into the valley took over the Pyu lands; the kings of Pagan later claimed descent from Pyu rulers, and by the 13th century the Pyu had merged into the Burmese.