From Ava to Mandalay: Toward Charting the Development of Burmese Yazawin Traditions

Since the emergence of modern historiography of Burma (Myanmar), Burmese yazawin, or chronicles of kings, have been key scholarly sources. The most well-known of these chronicles are considered reliable after circa 1500 and provide a timeline of events for almost all research on precolonial Myanmar history. Despite this, we still have a quite vague understanding of textual genealogy and conditions in which these sources were produced, the foundations upon which they were constructed and the messages they carried.

This article analyzes the corpus of Burmese yazawins and those narrative sources linked to yazawins that were instrumental in their compilation. It addresses the issues of typology and genealogy of yazawins, as well as the reconstruction of their development in terms of scope, structure, and conceptual focus. It challenges some historiographic stereotypes with regard to yazawins as a whole and the nature of individual sources in particular, and identifies a number of distinct yazawin traditions. The role of elites of royal cities of Ava, Taungngu, and Pagan in the production of yazawins is explored. Development of yazawin traditions is analyzed both as a kind of established textual activity with its own dynamics and as a function of changes in the organization of power and textual culture. Finally, the author suggests a number of tasks to be addressed in future research. All in all, the paper is conceived as a contribution towards the textology and hermeneutics of Burmese narrative sources and history of ideas in Myanmar in general.