Burmese

The Burmese, or Bamar, are the Tibeto-Burman people of the Irrawaddy valley, whose ancestors moved south from the Yunnan-Tibet borderlands between the seventh and ninth centuries into the Pyu city-states. They built Pagan, which Anawrahta made the first Irrawaddy empire in the 1050s; his conquest of Mon Thaton in 1057 brought Theravada Buddhism and the Mon script, ancestor of the Burmese alphabet.

Mongol invasions ended Pagan in 1287, and in 1337 the Bamar heartland was divided between rival kingdoms, soon merged into Ava, founded in 1364. The long Ava period wore itself out in wars with the Mon and Shan, until the Toungoo dynasty of 1510 reunited the country; Bayinnaung, reigning from 1551, built Southeast Asia's largest empire yet.

After the empire's collapse around 1599 the Restored Toungoo kings rebuilt a smaller realm from Ava, until a Mon rebellion overthrew them in 1752. Alaungpaya then founded the Konbaung dynasty, crushed the Mon in 1757 and sacked Ayutthaya in 1767; the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824 to 1826 stripped away Arakan and Assam.