Shan, Mon & the Southeast

The Mon were the earliest known civilisation of the south. Their kingdom centred on Thaton was conquered by Anawrahta of Bagan in 1057, and the Mon script became the model for written Burmese. On the plateau, Shan (Tai) peoples, present by the 10th century, formed dozens of principalities ruled by hereditary princes, the saopha or sawbwa, who paid tribute to Burmese kings but ran their own courts.

After the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824–26 Britain took Tanintharyi (Tenasserim), and Mawlamyine, then Moulmein, served as the capital of British Burma until Rangoon replaced it in 1852; it grew rich on teak and rice exports. The Shan and Karenni states were administered separately from Burma proper, and the princes kept their thrones. In the Second World War Japan built the Thailand–Burma railway with prisoner and conscripted labour, ending at Thanbyuzayat in Mon State.

The Shan princes signed the Panglong Agreement at a town on the plateau in 1947 and gave up their powers in 1959; the last prince of Hsipaw disappeared after the 1962 coup. The Karen National Union took up arms in 1949, beginning one of the world's longest insurgencies, and Shan, Karenni, Mon, Wa and Kokang armies fought the state for decades, funded in part by the opium of the Golden Triangle. Since the 2021 coup the southeast has been one of the main theatres of the war, with ethnic armies and new resistance forces taking territory from the military.

This is the most ethnically varied part of the country. The Shan are Theravada Buddhists with their own script and language close to Thai, and their monasteries and festivals, such as the hot-air balloon festival at Taunggyi in November, have a character all their own. Around Inle live the Intha, known for leg-rowing and lake farming, and the Pa-O and Danu in the hills; the Phaung Daw Oo festival takes the lake's sacred Buddha images around the villages by barge each autumn.

Kayah State is home to the Karenni peoples, among them the Kayan, whose women traditionally wear brass coils around the neck. The Karen of Kayin State are Buddhist, Christian and animist, and celebrate the Karen New Year, a national holiday, with don and bamboo dances. The Mon keep their language, their national day and a strong sense of being the older civilisation of the region.

The coast has its own peoples: Dawei speaks a distinctive dialect of Burmese, and the Moken of the Mergui archipelago are sea nomads who traditionally lived on boats. English literature also passed through: Kipling's "Mandalay" begins by the old Moulmein pagoda, and Orwell served as a police officer in the town.

Taunggyi, the Shan capital, has several hundred thousand people; Mawlamyine, the largest city of the southeast, is the fourth-largest in the country. Lashio and Kengtung in Shan, Loikaw in Kayah, Hpa-An in Kayin and Dawei, Myeik and Kawthaung in Tanintharyi are the other main towns.

The Shan plateau farms tea, rice, garlic, oranges and the tomatoes of Inle's floating gardens, and trades heavily with China and Thailand; the Golden Triangle around Tachileik remains a hub of opium and methamphetamine production. Mon State grows rubber and fruit, Tanintharyi lives from fishing, rubber, palm oil and the offshore gas piped to Thailand, and the Thai border towns host casinos and online scam compounds run with trafficked labour. Many Mon, Karen and Shan work in Thailand, and their remittances support whole villages.

Since 2021 much of Kayah and Kayin has been emptied by fighting, with the displaced sheltering in forests, camps and across the Thai border. In the towns still held by the army, daily life runs under curfews, blackouts and checkpoints.

Shan food is the best known of the region's cuisines: Shan khauk swe, rice noodles in a light broth or dressed with a sauce of tomato and minced pork or chicken, topped with pickled mustard greens; to hpu, the yellow tofu made from chickpea flour, eaten fresh, fried or warm as a porridge; and htamin jin, rice kneaded with tomato and fish into balls and dressed with fried onion oil. Inle's tomatoes appear in salads, and the Red Mountain Estate winery stands near the lake.

The Mon and Karen south eats more fish, with sour curries and fermented fish pastes, and Mawlamyine is known across the country for its food, while Mon State's hill orchards supply fruit. Tanintharyi's coast adds dried fish, dried prawns and shrimp paste from Myeik, and cashews from the Dawei region.

Across the region the Shan teashop and the Mon market stall share the national staples — mohinga, tea-leaf salad and sweet milk tea — with local twists.

On the Shan plateau, Inle Lake is the centre: leg-rowing fishermen, stilt villages, floating gardens, the Phaung Daw Oo Pagoda and the ruined stupas of Indein, with the town of Nyaungshwe on its northern shore. Kalaw, a former British hill station, is the base for the trek of two or three days through hill villages to the lake, and the caves of Pindaya hold thousands of Buddha images. In the north, Hsipaw, once the seat of a powerful Shan princely state, has walks to Shan villages; Kengtung lies far to the east, and Loikaw in Kayah has the Taung Kwe Pagoda on its rock outcrops.

Mon State's great sight is Kyaiktiyo, the Golden Rock, a gilded boulder balanced on a cliff edge at the top of a mountain of about 1,100 metres, reached from the village of Kinpun. Mawlamyine has colonial streets, the hilltop Kyaikthanlan Pagoda and nearby the huge reclining Buddha of Win Sein Taw Ya and the Thanbyuzayat war cemetery.

Hpa-An, in Kayin State, sits among karst peaks on the Thanlwin: Mount Zwegabin, the Kawgun and Saddan caves full of Buddha images, and the Kyauk Kalat pagoda. Far south, the Tanintharyi coast has the beaches of the Dawei peninsula, and the Mergui archipelago, reached from Kawthaung, has hundreds of islands, the Lampi marine national park and Moken villages.