Tibeto-Burman cities irrigated Myanmar for a millennium
From about the second century BC to the mid-eleventh century, Pyu city-states dotted Upper Myanmar's irrigated basins. Walled centers such as Beikthano, Halin, and Sri Ksetra sat on China–India overland routes, importing Buddhism and Brahmic writing. Ninth-century Nanzhao raids broke them; Pagan later absorbed the survivors.
Major sites cluster in the Mu Valley, Kyaukse plains, and Minbu near the Irrawaddy–Chindwin confluence; surveys count twelve walled cities and smaller unwalled towns. Settlements paired walls with water tanks and canals, a sign of sophisticated local irrigation. Beikthano, named for Vishnu, yields material from roughly 200 BC to 100 CE inside a rectangle of walls about 3 km by 1 km and six metres thick. Cremation halls and, at Sri Ksetra, burial terraces holding hundreds or thousands of urns reveal elaborate death ritual. Pyu settlers likely moved from the Qinghai Lake region via Yunnan's Taping and Shweli corridors.
They were the first in Southeast Asia to bend Brahmic script to a tonal language, inventing tone marks; stone inscriptions date from the third to sixth centuries CE. Indian trade carried Buddhism and political models, and the Pyu calendar, built on the Buddhist one, became Burma's. Tang chronicles date Nanzhao raids from 754 or 760, with further strikes in 800–802 and 808–809.
The worst came in 832, when Nanzhao warriors carried 3,000 prisoners away from Halin. Yet radiocarbon dates show people still living there until about 870, and no Pyu site shows clear signs of violent destruction, so the raids probably weakened rather than erased the cities while Burmans drifted in gradually. Chronicles have the Burmans founding Pagan in 849, but its oldest dated walls point to about 980 and the main circuit to around 1020.
Pagan's kings later claimed descent from Sri Ksetra rulers reaching back to 850 BCE, a pedigree most scholars reject. Pyu speech lingered until the late twelfth century; by the thirteenth its speakers had become Burman.
Source: Pyu city-states
