A wet nurse's son who built Southeast Asia's largest empire ever
In 1534 a young Burmese officer named Ye Htut was caught in a secret romance with the king's half-sister, a crime counted as treason. Instead of executing him, King Tabinshwehti let the couple marry and gave him a princely title. The man later known as Bayinnaung repaid that mercy with extraordinary loyalty, and eventually an empire.
The two men had grown up side by side. Born on 16 January 1516, Ye Htut moved into the palace at Toungoo when his mother became wet nurse to the infant prince Tabinshwehti. The boys trained together in horsemanship, elephant riding and military strategy, and he became the prince's right-hand man. His ancestry is murky: an official chronicle written in 1724 gave him royal forebears, while oral tradition says his father climbed toddy palms, then one of the humblest jobs in Burmese society.
When Tabinshwehti took the throne at 14 in 1530, his childhood friend rose with him. Their early campaigns against the wealthy southern kingdom of Hanthawaddy, begun in 1534, failed against its fortified defences, but by 1541 they had conquered it, gaining access to foreign firearms and sea trade. Named chief minister in 1539, Bayinnaung won many of the key battles that made Toungoo the largest Burmese state since the fall of Pagan in 1287.
He became king himself on 30 April 1550 and assembled the largest empire in Southeast Asian history, reaching across much of present-day Myanmar as well as Lan Na, Lan Xang, Manipur and Ayutthaya. In Thailand he is still remembered as Conqueror of the Ten Directions. His most lasting reform brought the Shan States, conquered between 1557 and 1563, into the lowland administrative system by curbing their hereditary rulers, ending centuries of raids into Upper Burma.
The empire itself proved fragile, because its vassal kings owed loyalty to him personally rather than to any institution. After he died on 10 October 1581, Ava and Ayutthaya rebelled within about two years, and by 1599 every vassal state had broken away.
Source: Bayinnaung
