Anawrahta builds the Pagan Empire

The Burmese chronicles disagree widely about the dates of Pagan’s early kings; historians follow the Zatadawbon Yazawin, considered the most accurate for the Pagan period, which gives Anawrahta a reign from 1044 to 1077, and Anawrahta is the first king of Pagan whose deeds can be checked against stone inscriptions. According to the chronicles he was the son of a deposed king who lived as a monk, and he won the throne by killing King Sokkate in single combat. At his accession Pagan was a small principality. Coedès counted two achievements as his most remarkable: the irrigation of the plain of Kyaukse, east of the capital, which became the granary of Upper Burma, and the conversion of the country to Theravada Buddhism.

The best-known episode of his reign comes from the chronicles. A monk from Thaton, Shin Arahan, converted him to Theravada Buddhism about 1056; when King Manuha (Makuta in Coedès) of Thaton refused to give him the scriptures of the Pali canon, Anawrahta took the city in 1057 after a three-month siege and carried off the scriptures, monks, artisans and the captive king, whose Mon learning, art and script then shaped the culture of Pagan. George Coedès largely followed this account, but Michael Aung-Thwin (2005) has argued that the role of Thaton is a legend formed after the Pagan period and that Lower Burma then had no strong state of its own. What is certain is that Pagan extended its power to the south: votive tablets bearing Anawrahta’s name have been found from the mouths of the Irrawaddy to Mong Mit in the north.

Anawrahta also extended his authority to northern Arakan, while the chronicles’ tales of a campaign towards Cambodia, of which the Khmer sources show no trace, and of a journey to Dali, capital of the Dali kingdom that had succeeded Nanzhao, in quest of a tooth relic belong to his legend. About 1059 he began the Shwezigon pagoda, completed under Kyansittha. His fame reached Sri Lanka: King Vijayabahu I asked him for monks and scriptures to restore the Buddhist order there — in 1071, according to Coedès, who adds that the Burmese envoys brought back a replica of the Tooth Relic, enshrined in the Shwezigon (other accounts name the Lawkananda pagoda). Anawrahta died in 1077, according to tradition in a hunting accident, leaving a realm from Bhamo to the Gulf of Martaban that his dynasty ruled until the Mongol invasions of the late 13th century.