Myanmar
Myanmar, officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar and also referred to as Burma, is a country in northwest Southeast Asia. It is the largest country by area in Mainland Southeast Asia and has a population of about 55 million. It is bordered by India and Bangladesh to the northwest, China to the northeast, Laos and Thailand to the east and southeast, and the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal to the south and southwest. The country's capital city is Naypyidaw, while its largest city is Yangon.
Early civilisations in the area included the Tibeto-Burman-speaking Pyu city-states in Upper Myanmar and the Mon kingdoms in Lower Myanmar. In the 9th century, the Bamar people entered the upper Irrawaddy valley, and following the establishment of the Pagan Kingdom in the 1050s, the Burmese language and culture and Theravada Buddhism slowly became dominant in the country. The Pagan Kingdom fell to Mongol invasions, and several warring states emerged. In the 16th century, reunified by the Taungoo dynasty, the country became the largest empire in the history of Southeast Asia for a short period. The early 19th-century Konbaung dynasty ruled over an area that included modern Myanmar and briefly controlled Assam, the Lushai Hills, and Manipur as well. The British East India Company seized control of the administration of Myanmar after three Anglo-Burmese Wars in the 19th century, and the country became a British colony. After a brief Japanese occupation, Myanmar was reconquered by the Allies. On 4 January 1948, Myanmar declared independence under the terms of the Burma Independence Act 1947.
Myanmar's post-independence history has been checkered by continuous unrest and conflict. A coup d'état in 1962 resulted in a military dictatorship under the Burma Socialist Programme Party. On 8 August 1988, the 8888 Uprising resulted in a transition to a multi-party system two years later, but the country's post-uprising military junta, led by members of the Tatmadaw, refused to cede power and continued to rule the country directly until 2011, when the junta was officially dissolved following the 2010 general election. A nominally civilian government was installed and longtime political prisoners like Aung San Suu Kyi were released, but the military retained power over key government operations. The 2015 Myanmar general election led to improved foreign relations and eased economic sanctions, although the country's treatment of its ethnic minorities, particularly the Rohingya genocide, continued to be a source of international tension and consternation.
Following the 2020 Myanmar general election, in which Aung San Suu Kyi's party won a clear majority in both houses, the Tatmadaw again seized power in a 2021 coup d'état, which led to the rule of the National Defence and Security Council and its new military junta, the State Administration Council. The coup, which was widely condemned by the international community, led to continuous ongoing widespread protests in Myanmar and has been marked by violent political repression by the military, as well as the outbreak of a civil war. The military again arrested Aung San Suu Kyi in order to remove her from public life, and charged her with crimes ranging from corruption to violation of COVID-19 protocols; all of the charges against her are "politically motivated" according to independent observers. The SAC imposed a state of emergency from 2021 to 2025, after which it transferred power back to the NDSC.
Myanmar is a member of the East Asia Summit, Non-Aligned Movement, ASEAN, and BIMSTEC, but it is not a member of the Commonwealth of Nations despite once being part of the British Empire. Myanmar is a Dialogue Partner of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The country is very rich in natural resources, such as jade, gems, oil, natural gas, teak and other minerals, as well as endowed with renewable energy, having the highest solar power potential compared to other countries of the Great Mekong Subregion. However, Myanmar has long suffered from instability, factional violence, corruption, poor infrastructure, as well as a long history of colonial exploitation with little regard to human development. In 2013, its GDP stood at US$56.7 billion and its GDP at US$221.5 billion. The income gap in Myanmar is among the widest in the world, as a large proportion of the economy is controlled by cronies of the military junta. Myanmar is one of the least developed countries in the world.
The country remains riven by ethnic strife among its myriad ethnic groups and has one of the world's longest-running ongoing civil wars. The United Nations and several other organisations have reported consistent and systemic human rights violations in the country. Since 2021, more than 600,000 people have been displaced across Myanmar due to the civil war post-coup, with more than three million people in dire need of humanitarian assistance. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there are over 1.3 million people counted as refugees and asylum seekers, and 3.5 million people displaced internally as of December 2024.
Etymology
The name of the country has been a matter of dispute and disagreement, particularly in the early 21st century, focusing mainly on the political legitimacy of those using Myanmar versus Burma. Both names derive from the earlier Burmese Mranma or Mramma, an ethnonym for the majority Burman ethnic group, of uncertain etymology. The terms are also popularly thought to derive from Sanskrit Brahma Desha, 'land of Brahma'.In 1989, the military government officially changed the English names of places, dating back to Burma's colonial period or earlier, to romanized versions of their official Burmese names, including that of the country itself: Burma became Myanmar. The renaming remains a contested issue. Many political and ethnic opposition groups and countries continue to use Burma because they do not recognise the legitimacy or authority of the military government.
The country's official full name is "Republic of the Union of Myanmar". Countries that do not officially recognise that name use the long form "Union of Burma" instead. In English, the country is popularly known as either Burma or Myanmar. In Burmese, the pronunciation depends on the register used and is either ' or '.
Official United States foreign policy retains Burma as the country's name although the State Department's website lists the country as Burma . The United Nations uses Myanmar, as does the ASEAN and as do Australia, Russia, Germany, China, India, Bangladesh, Norway, Japan, Switzerland, Canada and Ukraine. Most English-speaking international news media refer to the country by the name Myanmar, including the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, Reuters, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation /Radio Australia. Myanmar is known by a name deriving from Burma in Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Greek. French-language media consistently use Birmanie.
There are at least nine different pronunciations of the English name Myanmar, and no single one is standard. Pronunciations with two syllables are found most often in major British and American dictionaries. Dictionaries—such as Collins—and other sources also report pronunciations with three syllables.
As John Wells explains, the English spellings of both Myanmar and Burma assume a non-rhotic variety of English, in which the letter r before a consonant or finally serves merely to indicate a long vowel:. So the pronunciation of the last syllable of Myanmar as by some speakers in the UK and most speakers in North America is in fact a spelling pronunciation based on a misunderstanding of non-rhotic spelling conventions. However, Burma is pronounced by rhotic speakers of English due to a phonotactic constraint, as occurs only before in those accents.
History
Prehistory
Archaeological evidence shows that Homo erectus lived in the region now known as Myanmar as early as 750,000 years ago, with no more erectus finds after 75,000 years ago. The first evidence of Homo sapiens is dated to about 25,000 BP with discoveries of stone tools in central Myanmar. Evidence of Neolithic age domestication of plants and animals and the use of polished stone tools dating to sometime between 10,000 and 6,000 BCE has been discovered in the form of cave paintings in Padah-Lin Caves.The Bronze Age arrived when people in the region were turning copper into bronze, growing rice and domesticating poultry and pigs; they were among the first people in the world to do so. Human remains and artefacts from this era were discovered in Monywa District in the Sagaing Region. The Iron Age began around 500 BCE with the emergence of iron-working settlements in an area south of present-day Mandalay. Evidence also shows the presence of rice-growing settlements of large villages and small towns that traded with their surroundings as far as China between 500 BCE and 200 CE. Iron Age Burmese cultures also had influences from outside sources such as India and Thailand, as seen in their funerary practices concerning child burials. This indicates some form of communication between groups in Myanmar and other places, possibly through trade.
Early city-states
Around the 2nd century BCE the first-known city-states emerged in central Myanmar. These city-states were founded as part of the southward migration by the Tibeto-Burman-speaking Pyu people from their urheimat in the Tibetan Plateau to Mainland Southeast Asia, the earliest inhabitants of Myanmar of whom records are extant, from present-day Yunnan province of China. The Pyu culture was heavily influenced by trade with India, importing Buddhism as well as other cultural, architectural and political concepts, which would have an enduring influence on later Burmese culture and political organisation.By the 9th century, several city-states had sprouted across the land: the Pyu in the central dry zone, Mon along the southern coastline and Arakanese along the western littoral. The balance was upset when the Pyu came under repeated attacks from Nanzhao between the 750s and the 830s. In the mid-to-late 9th century the Bamar people founded a small settlement at Bagan. It was one of several competing city-states until the late 10th century, when it grew in authority and grandeur.