Anawrahta turned a dry Burmese backwater into rice country and an empire
Verifiable Burmese history starts with one king. In 1044 a prince named Min Saw took the throne of Pagan, a small realm in central Burma's parched dry zone. Within two decades his canals had made it a granary, and his armies had forged the first empire uniting the Irrawaddy valley.
The road to the throne came straight out of legend. Min Saw's father, himself a usurper, was pushed into a monastery by two stepsons around 1021. The boy grew up at their court, loyal enough, until 1044, when he rebelled at Mount Popa and challenged King Sokkate to single combat on horseback. Chronicles say he killed Sokkate at Myinkaba on 11 August. He offered the crown to his monk father, who declined, and was enthroned that December as Anawrahta, a Burmese form of the Sanskrit name Aniruddha.
His starting territory ran barely 200 miles north to south. He began with administration, grading every town and village by the levy it could supply, then with water. He restored Meiktila Lake and built weirs and canals on the Panlaung and Zawgyi rivers, an irrigation network still in use in Upper Burma. The Kyaukse district became known as the rice country, and whoever held it would decide who ruled the north for centuries.
From the mid-1050s he expanded. Shan chiefs in the eastern hills paid tribute, and a royal order of February 1061 set up 43 forts along the foothills. In 1057 his armies, led by four famous commanders, took the southern city of Thaton after a three-month siege. Tradition says the quarrel was over a copy of the Buddhist scriptures; historians see a move to check the advancing Khmer Empire. Whether Thaton's captives really shaped Pagan's culture is now disputed by Michael Aung-Thwin.
Anawrahta had embraced Theravada Buddhism, and by blocking the Mahayana Khmer he gave that school, then fading across the region, a safe base. Its later flowering in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia owed much to him. He died in 1077, and the system he built guided Pagan's kings until 1287.
Source: Anawrahta
