6th–11th century

The only major Burmese art known to scholars is based upon Indian and Sri Lankan Buddhist art. In the period preceding Anawrahta’s decree there had been three major historical eras in Burma, the first two of which produced Indianized art known to scholars only fragmentarily: the rule of the Mon kingdom of the lower Irrawaddy (9th–11th century), the contemporaneous dominion of the Pyu people in central and Upper Burma, and the subsequent decisive incursion of Burmese people from the northeast (11th century).

The earliest concrete evidence of Indian culture in Burma is a Buddhist inscription from Pyè (Prome) dated c. 500 ce. This and later inscriptions from the same area were cut probably in the western Mon kingdom, which followed Theravada Buddhism and was confederated with the Theravada Buddhist eastern Dvaravati city-states (see below Thailand and Laos) in southern Thailand and part of Cambodia (6th–12th century ce).

During this same period in Upper Burma, the people called Pyu, speaking a Tibeto-Burman language and perhaps originating in Central Asia, built cities whose magnificence was known to contemporary compilers of the Chinese Tang dynasty history. In the 8th century one city was recorded as being some 50-odd miles (80 km) in circumference, containing 100 Buddhist monasteries lavishly painted and decorated with gold and silver. The Pyu were in direct contact with northeast India, where various forms of Mahayana Buddhism, which embraced philosophies and rituals unacceptable to the Theravada, flourished; their Ari priesthood was later proscribed by Anawrahta. Their capital city, Shri Kshetra (modern Hmawza, near Pyè), which was once larger than even Pagan or Mandalay, was partly excavated. Three huge Buddhist stupas—one 150 feet (about 46 metres) high—survive there. They illustrate the pattern from which all later Burmese stupas were developed. Enshrining revered relics of Buddhist saints, they consist of tall solid brick cylinders mounted on shallow circular stepped plinths and crowned by what was probably a tapering bell-like pinnacle. Other excavated halls, one on a square plinth with four entrance doors, follow Indian examples. A few Hindu fragments survive as well.

The Pyu were conquered by a neighbouring kingdom, probably before 900 ce. During the following century their terrain and cities were infiltrated by the Burmese people. These people were of common ancestry with the Thai and northern Vietnamese and were probably on the move under pressure of the Chinese colonization of their home terrain around the Gulf of Tonkin. They were converted to Buddhism by the Pyu and later by the western Mon, but they never completely abandoned their own original cult of nature spirits, known today as the nats. The nats are a mixed collection of spirits that act supernaturally, each according to its character. They were worshipped with orgiastic ceremonies and trance rites of spiritual possession. Certain mountaintops were sacred to them. Even in the 21st century the nats exerted a powerful influence on the lives of the ordinary people. Every village had its own nat house—a fragile pavilion built into a tree after the pattern of the tribal house, and adorned with shreds of coloured cloth, glass, and other offerings. The Buddhist temple in Burma is conceived essentially as an enormous nat house, a section of the domain of the spiritual located upon earth. And, since the Buddha was adopted as the last and greatest of the nats, the same symbols of supernatural splendour that adorn the nats adorn the Buddha’s images, and a nat-like spirituality attaches to the ubiquitous monks in whom the presence of Buddhism is experienced as an everyday reality.

11th century to the present

When King Anawrahta ascended to the throne, he captured the Mon city Thaton in Lower Burma and carried off its royal family, many skilled craftspeople, and most of the Theravada monks to his own northern city of Pagan. The king recognized the superior culture of the Mon captives; he established their main form of Buddhism by decree and gave them the task of organizing and civilizing the new united Burmese kingdom and producing for it a Buddhist art. Under Anawrahta’s successor, links with the Buddhist homeland were forged. Embassies were sent to Bodh Gaya, in Indian Bihar, and the Mahabodhi temple there—marking the spot where the Buddha achieved enlightenment—was restored with Burmese money and somewhat in Burmese taste. A smaller copy, with its large rectangular block crowned by the characteristic pyramidal storied tower, was built at Anawrahta’s Pagan. It is there that the greatest achievements of western Mon art—a splendid profusion of architecture and decorative work—are probably to be found. After 1287, when Burma was sacked and garrisoned by the Mongols, new construction at Pagan was virtually abandoned.

In Pagan (founded c. 849), architecture is the dominant art. Except for the big brick icons, mostly ruined, sculpture and painting play a subordinate role. Pagan contains the largest surviving group of buildings in brick and plaster of the many thousands that once stood in various parts of Southeast Asia. The remains at the site are a variety of religious buildings in varying states of preservation. The inscriptions they bear indicate that royal devotees often turned their palaces over for religious use, so it is likely that palace and monastic architecture were very close in style. A few standing structures belong to the period before Anawrahta. Some were inspired by Mahayana Buddhism and one—the Nat Hlaung Gyaung (c. 931)—by Hinduism. Flanking the Sarabha Gate is a pair of small nat shrines with pointed open windows, which may be the earliest of their kind in Burma.

The library, built during Anawrahta’s reign to house the books of one of the Buddhist monasteries, is one of the most important buildings in Pagan. It is rectangular with a series of five sloping stone roofs crowned by a rectangular tower finial. The concave contours of the roofs are characteristic of much Burmese architecture. The eaves and corners of all the tiers are adorned with the typical Pagan flame ornament, or antefix.

There are other buildings of the same general type among the ruins of Pagan. By far the most numerous and important, however, are the buildings—called cetiyas—that combine the attributes of stupa and shrine. These have a history and a line of evolution of their own, which can be traced from the Pyu stupa to the huge structural temple. The typical stupa, derived from the early medieval Indian form, is a tall structure consisting of a solid dome set on a tiered square plinth (often with miniature stupas at the corners), around which the faithful may perambulate. The dome is surmounted by a harmika, which resembles the small railed enclosure found on the oldest Indian stupas. In Burmese stupas, however, the harmika becomes a decorated cubical die, above which is a circular pointed spire. In memory of its distant origin in India, the spire is horizontally flanged (rimmed) with moldings in a series of honorific umbrellas of decreasing size. In later practice, harmika and umbrella spire become a single architectural unit. The Burmese stupa dome, based on the tall cylindrical Pyu prototype, has a spreading concave foot resembling a bell rim. The Lokananda and Shwesandaw at Pagan are two well-known examples. Because they were later coated with plaster, the finely detailed brick carving characteristic of early Pagan architecture was obscured. Such carving is beautifully exemplified in the Seinnyet temple at Myinpagan (11th century).

Anawrahta’s type of cetiya followed the general form of the early Pyu stupa. The main point of evolution was in the progressive elaboration of the terraced plinths on which the dome stands. The plinths became virtually sacred mountains, with a series of staircases running from terrace to terrace up each of the four sides. Perhaps inspired by vanished work in contemporary late 11th-century India, the Burmese began to open up the interior of the terraced base of the stupas with wide corridors and porticos, converting it into a roofed temple. The cylinder of the stupa dome was carried down through this temple space to its floor. Four large Buddha icons were added to the lower part of the dome, facing the four directions. Once this conception had evolved, it was possible to create around the central stupa a broad circuit of roofed enclosures, which from the outside would still suggest the traditional pattern of the stupa standing on its raised terraces, while the interior could be used for ceremonial rites, as in a true temple. Sculpture and painting, decorating the internal halls, corridors, and doorways, recounted the life of the Buddha and presented the example of his previous virtuous incarnations. The most famous example of this type of cetiya is the great Ananda temple at Pagan (dedicated 1090). It is still in use, unlike most of the old temples there, and so is kept in repair; it is painted a blazing white with lime stucco, which obscured the finer detail of its old architecture. Its plan is square, with a broad four-pillared porch hall added to all four doors in the four faces of the square. Its tower is a curvilinear pyramid resembling eastern Indian Hindu temple towers, and its enormous brick mass is pierced with two circuits of vaulted corridors. The sloping curved terrace roofs have an elegant overall concave profile and flame antefixes along all the eaves.

As time went on, Burmese brick and stucco architecture developed principally through the stiffening of masses into rectangular blocks and through the elaboration of its ornament. The 13th-century Gawdawpalin temple at Pagan, for example, consists of a rectangular hall with a large closed entrance porch, The hall is surmounted by a tall but narrow second story whose decoration repeats that of the lower story. The whole building is crowned by a four-faced tower with a curved profile. Multiple moldings and decorative motifs are used as outlining elements and the doors are framed in elaborate upward-flaring hooded porches.

Until the Mongol conquest in 1287, much excellent work seems to have been done at Pagan. It is, however, impossible to form an adequate idea of the older styles of temple architecture at other sites in Burma, such as Yangon or Mandalay. Whereas most of the temples of Pagan were abandoned early on, so that even though ruined they show their original characteristics, temples in modern cities were repeatedly and drastically restored. Old stupas may have as many as eight successive casings of brick and stucco, temple walls and doors were constantly torn down and rebuilt, and stucco surfaces may be renewed almost annually. At the big stupa sites huge numbers of pagodas were constantly falling into decay, and new ones were built at great speed. Among them are variants, whose evolution cannot at be traced, on the basic pattern of the long tapering bell, with a variety of transverse moldings, standing perhaps on a recessed plinth. Many were covered quickly with stucco ornament. Ornate flaring porches and flame finials were added to gates, wall ends, and eaves corners. A tapering slenderness is the outstanding characteristic of all the different types.

The monastic architecture—patterned on the hall, with its elaborate doors—that surrounds the great stupa sites of Yangon and Mandalay is mainly in wood, built by simple pillar and architrave construction. The roofs are steeply gabled, with multiple gables riding over each other on immense carved pillars in the larger halls. The angles between pillar and architrave and the edges of roof gables, tiers, and terraces are filled with cartouches (scroll-shaped ornaments) of pierced work, often lacquered and gilt; thus, the whole building may be decorated in repetitive curlicues. All this ornament has an otherworldly or spiritual significance. Throughout Burma similar buildings can be found, but, while many have been listed, they have yet to be surveyed. There may well be a substantial Chinese influence in the construction of some of the wooden halls and pavilions.

Pagan contains the largest corpus of mural paintings found in Southeast Asia. Although the prime purpose of murals was didactic, decorative elements and the placement of sculptured Buddha images blend in architectural terms to define a space. Reasonably well-preserved examples of mural painting based on Theravadan texts include the Myinkaba Kubyauk-gyi, Loka-hteik-pan, Nagayon, and Wetkyi-in Kubyauk-gyi. A few temples with murals that testify to Mahayana and Vajrayana influences—e.g., Abe-ya-dana-hpaya, Nanda-ma-nya-hpaya, and Tha-man-hpaya—are evidence that supports a picture of syncretism with the varying sects coexisting throughout the period.

Large numbers of high-fired earthenware, lead-glazed Jataka plaques and tiles for the period also follow Indian artistic conventions. An impressive series of plaques depicting some 550 Jataka tales can be found on the Ananda temple built by Kyanzittha. Each plaque portrays a core event or episode in the story with the legend written in Mon, or Old Burmese, identifying both the scene and Jataka number.

Pagan Buddha and religious images—like the mural paintings of the 11th century—were guided by the canons established in the 8th–12th century art of Pala in eastern India. At its peak, the Pala style evinces a boldness of form and profusion of ornamental detail. Pagan Buddha images in bronze are widely considered the masterpieces of Burmese art. The bhumisparsha (earth-witness or earth-touching) mudra, symbolizing the moment of enlightenment, becomes the pervasive iconographic attribute of images during the period. The colossal Buddha images enshrined in the temples were usually built of brick and finished in stucco, gilded, and ornamented. Such work was still carried out in the Mandalay area in the 21st century and exported throughout the region. About the 17th century a new style of representing the Buddha emerged. Referred to as the Mandalay style, it was often rendered in marble, and its form continues to dominate.

From the 14th to the 19th century, despite Burma’s complex dynastic history, the king and his court provided the main source of patronage for royal and religious architecture. From about 1700 to 1850 Burma excelled in decorative court arts. These are usually ornate and elaborate—a characteristic that continued into the 21st century. Among the greatest artistic achievements, lacquerware in particular was highly prized in the West; decorative gold and silver wares were a testament to the opulence of the courts; and Burmese woodcarving was highly praised for its technical skill, freedom, and spatial ordering.

In architecture, the multitiered spirelike roofs (pyathat) that replicate the Buddhist cosmos were reserved for monasteries, palaces, and royal barges. By the early 17th century, intricate wood carved pediments and pilasters of doorways also came to be adorned with pyathat and ornate foliage (kanok) carving. The 19th-century wooden Shwenandaw monastery in Mandalay reveals a wide range of Burmese motifs and ornamentation, many of which may date to the 18th century. The carved wooden screens, panels, and brackets used inside temple halls are often decorated with carved depictions of the last 10 Jatakas. The importance attached to imposing gilded sadaik (manuscript chests and cabinets), found in monastery libraries and pagodas and used to store sacred Buddhist texts, testifies to the excellence of the sculptors’ artistry. The gilt gesso (paste used for making reliefs) facings of those chests carry the schematic style of relief sculpture.

Wood carvings for devotional use include Buddha images and figures from Buddhist lore, such as the Buddha’s disciples, Sariputta and Moggallana. From Buddhist cosmology mythical kinnara and kinnari creatures, possessing male or female human faces and torsos and the legs and wings of a bird, continued to be widely popular. Nat propitiation forms an integral part of Burmese culture. Seen as nature spirits, mythological guardians, or humans who have died unnatural deaths, the depiction of nat images in wood is widespread. Although nat figures are carved to be placed mainly in the pagoda precinct, a number of nats and guardian figures are found in the home. Frequently depicted is Mahagiri, who holds a fan to keep at bay the flames in which he eventually perishes. Pegu Maw Daw is the human mother, a queen who wears a buffalo headdress in memory of the buffalo who raised her son. These figures are a testimony to the enduring popularity of folklore and legends among the Burmese people.

During the Alaungpaya dynasty (1752–1885) the techniques of European painting were established among the court atelier, including the use of linear perspective, chiaroscuro, and sfumato (the application of paint with an indistinct outline). The tradition of folding books, called parabaiks, appears to date from the 15th century, possibly earlier. Examples from the 19th century include illustrations depicting Buddhist themes, splendid court ceremonies, and scenes of everyday life. Noted court painters of the 19th century—Hsaya Chone, Hsaya Myo, and Hsaya Saw—turned to watercolour and took Burmese aristocratic life as their subject. It is probable that Western art made its impact by way of illustrations in British books and magazines as well as through Indian artists trained by British instructors.

In the 1920s the artists U Ba Nyan and U Ba Zaw studied Western-style oil paintingin London, influencing a generation on their return in the 1930s. Throughout the 20th century, however, such artists as Saya Saung, U Ngwe Gaing, U Ba Kyi, U San Win, and U Saw Maung were trained in the master-student tradition, which stretches back to the Pagan period. Their subjects, like most of the country’s contemporary artists, include religious life, landscapes populated with pagodas, and portraits of the large monastic community. In the early 1990s Min Wae Aung’s depictions of Buddhist clergy in formation became popular in the West.

Interesting regional types of Burmese art are those of the Shan and Karen peoples, who live in the relatively remote northern hills. These areas have often produced extremely beautiful types of domestic and religious architecture, made of wood, on stone bases. They are a simpler and more austere version of the ancient pattern that underlies the halls and pavilions of southern temple buildings, with their steep gabled roofs. The peoples of the north also produce a variety of decorative arts. Notable among them are the textiles, which are characterized by banding, checkering, and triangular counterchanging of brilliant colours set off against black. The woven shoulder bags, particularly, are well known in the West.