Mon

The Mon are among mainland Southeast Asia's oldest settled peoples, Austroasiatic rice farmers who built its earliest Indianized Buddhist civilizations, Dvaravati and Thaton. They first received Theravada Buddhism from Sri Lanka, and their Pallava-derived Mon script, attested from the sixth century, became the basis of the Burmese and Shan scripts.

In 1057 Pagan's Anawrahta conquered Thaton and carried its monks, craftsmen and letters into the Burmese heartland. After Pagan fell in 1287, the Mon leader Wareru of Martaban founded Hanthawaddy at Pegu; by 1337 it held the Irrawaddy delta and Tenasserim coast. Razadarit held Ava at bay from 1384 to 1421; Shin Sawbu and Dhammazedi made Pegu a wealthy center of Buddhist scholarship and trade.

In 1539 Toungoo's Tabinshwehti sacked Pegu and in 1541 destroyed Martaban; Mon refugees fled to Ayutthaya, whose court employed their nobles. The Mon restored Hanthawaddy in 1740, but Alaungpaya crushed it in 1757 with great slaughter, and after the failed rising of 1814 many survivors migrated into Siam.