History · Myanmar

Myanmar: The Kingdom, the Junta, and the War

The Bagan temple plain and the Konbaung kings — British conquest, a fractured independence, half a century of military rule, a brief opening, the Rohingya expulsion, and a country now at war with its own army

By Worldlore Editorial · 30 September 2026

Hundreds of brick temples and stupas of varying sizes rising from a hazy plain at sunrise
The plain of Bagan, where the Burmese kingdom built some 10,000 temples and stupas between the 11th and 13th centuries. Around 2,200 survive. (Vyacheslav Argenberg / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0)

A large, divided country

Myanmar is the biggest country in mainland Southeast Asia, ringed by hills that belong to ethnic minorities — Shan, Karen, Kachin, Rakhine, Chin and others — around a Bamar-majority heartland in the Irrawaddy valley. It has been at war with itself, in one form or another, almost continuously since independence in 1948. The army has ruled for most of that time, and since a 2021 coup the country has fallen into its widest conflict yet.

A short history

  1. c. 1044–1287

    The Kingdom of Bagan

    The first unification of the Irrawaddy valley; Theravada Buddhism.

  2. 1550–1581

    Bayinnaung

    The Toungoo dynasty builds a vast Southeast Asian empire.

  3. 1752–1885

    The Konbaung dynasty

    Burma's last royal house.

  4. 1824–1885

    Three Anglo-Burmese wars

    Britain annexes Burma piece by piece.

  5. 1948

    Independence

    Burma leaves the British Empire; civil wars begin at once.

  6. 1962

    Ne Win's coup

    The "Burmese Way to Socialism" and decades of isolation.

  7. 1988

    The uprising

    A pro-democracy revolt is crushed; the junta reorganises.

  8. 1990

    Ignored election

    The NLD wins a landslide; the army keeps power.

  9. 2011–2021

    The opening

    Reforms, elections, and then the Rohingya expulsion.

  10. 2021

    The coup

    The military seizes power; a nationwide war follows.

Kingdoms

The dry central zone held the Pyu city-states and Mon kingdoms before the Bamar migrated in and founded Bagan, which under King Anawrahta first unified the Irrawaddy valley and made Theravada Buddhism the state religion. Bagan fell after Mongol invasions, and centuries of division followed until the Toungoo and then the Konbaung dynasties reunified the country. Konbaung expansion — the sack of the Thai capital in 1767, the conquest of Arakan in 1784 — brought Burma up against British India.

The end of the kingdom

A photograph of King Thibaw and Queen Supayalat of Burma in royal dress
King Thibaw and Queen Supayalat, the last Burmese monarchs. After the Third Anglo-Burmese War of 1885, Britain exiled them to India and annexed the whole country. (Wikimedia Commons)
The tiered golden spire and red wooden halls of the reconstructed Mandalay Palace
Mandalay Palace, the last royal capital. Britain ruled Burma as a province of India until 1937 and turned the Irrawaddy delta into the world's largest rice exporter, drawing a huge Indian labour and merchant population. (Vyacheslav Argenberg / Wikimedia Commons)

Independence, and its wars

Aung San and the "Thirty Comrades" trained under Japan and led an army into Burma with the Japanese invasion of 1941–42, then switched to the Allies in 1945. Aung San negotiated the 1947 Panglong Agreement, promising the hill peoples a federal union with autonomy — but he and most of his cabinet were assassinated months later. Burma became independent on 4 January 1948, and communist and Karen insurgencies broke out almost immediately and never fully ended.

A black-and-white photograph of a young man in a belted military tunic seated at a desk, pen in hand over a sheet of paper, a telephone beside him
Aung San, photographed at a desk by Klaas van Buiten of the Anefo agency on 22 January 1947 — the year he negotiated the Panglong Agreement and was assassinated. (Klaas van Buiten, Anefo / Nationaal Archief / Wikimedia Commons)

Military rule

In 1962 General Ne Win seized power and imposed the "Burmese Way to Socialism" — a xenophobic one-party state that nationalised everything, drove out more than 300,000 people of Indian descent, sealed the country off, and turned the former rice bowl of Asia into one of the world's poorest countries. A 1982 law stripped the Rohingya of citizenship.

A nationwide uprising in 1988 was crushed with thousands of deaths. The reorganised junta renamed the country Myanmar and, unexpectedly, held elections in 1990 — which the National League for Democracy, led by Aung San's daughter Aung San Suu Kyi, won overwhelmingly. The generals ignored the result and held Suu Kyi under house arrest for most of the next two decades.

The opening, and the Rohingya

From 2011 the military handed power to a nominally civilian government under a constitution it had written, reserving a quarter of parliament and key ministries to itself. Reforms followed — political prisoners freed, censorship eased, sanctions lifted — and the NLD won the 2015 election.

Aung San Suu Kyi speaking at a podium, 2013
Aung San Suu Kyi, once a global human-rights icon. In 2019 she defended the military against genocide charges at the International Court of Justice. (Claude Truong-Ngoc / Wikimedia Commons)

In 2016–17 the military carried out "clearance operations" against the Rohingya in Rakhine State — burning villages, mass killings and rape — that drove more than 700,000 people into Bangladesh. The UN called it ethnic cleansing carried out with "genocidal intent".

A vast hillside covered in the bamboo-and-tarpaulin shelters of a Rohingya refugee camp
Kutupalong, near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh — the world's largest refugee camp, home to more than 650,000 Rohingya. A genocide case against Myanmar is before the International Court of Justice. (John Owens / VOA / Wikimedia Commons)

The coup, and the war

The NLD won an even bigger landslide in 2020. On 1 February 2021 the military staged a coup, detained Suu Kyi and the civilian leadership, and met mass nonviolent protest with lethal force.

A crowd of protesters in Yangon raising the three-finger salute in February 2021
Anti-coup protesters in Yangon, February 2021. The resistance later militarised, and since 2023 the junta has lost control of much of the country's border regions, though it has retaken some ground since. (သူထွန်း / Wikimedia Commons)

The protests gave way to armed resistance — local defence forces, a parallel government, and alliances with the established ethnic armed organisations. The junta holds the central cities, relying on airstrikes and conscription, and is accused of widespread atrocities, while the economy has collapsed and millions are displaced. A major earthquake near Mandalay in March 2025 killed thousands in the middle of the war. The military held an election in phases between December 2025 and January 2026, won overwhelmingly by the army-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party and widely seen as a way to legitimise continued military rule; the fighting has not stopped.

What Myanmar carries

Myanmar's core problem was set at independence: a Bamar-dominated state that never delivered the federal autonomy promised at Panglong, and a military that came to see itself as the only guarantor of unity. Half a century of army rule impoverished the country, isolated it, and — in the treatment of the Rohingya — carried out an atrocity that discredited even the democratic movement's most famous figure. The 2021 coup broke the last compromise, and the war it started is still being fought.

Explore the destination