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Description

The kingdom of Pagan was in turmoil. Its king, Nyaung-u Sawrahan, had just been overthrown in a coup. The usurper was a man called Kunhsaw Kyaunghpyu, who had ridden into the capital city of Bagan with an army of followers behind him. Wearing a royal ring and hairpin and bearing a sword and lance said to be gifted him by the gods, he rode up to the palace and demanded the throne. He was, after all, said to be the son of the king that Nyaung-u had usurped decades before. According to legend, Nyaung-u began his life as a humble cucumber farmer. When King Tannet was out hunting and stopped to quench his thirst with a cucumber from the farmer's field, Nyaung-u slew him for the theft. Tannet's chief queen decided to accept Nyaung-u as king in order to avoid a disruptive fight for succession, but another one of his wives fled from the palace, pregnant with the dead king's son. That son would grow up to be Kunhsaw, and he was here to reclaim what he believed was rightfully his. Historians think that Kunhsaw may have been a descendant of the long-dead Tannet rather than his son, but either way, his claim to power resided in that family line.

The aging king Nyaung-u had three wives. They were a trio of sisters known to history only by the titles they held in his court: Taung Pyinthe, Queen of the Southern Palace; Ale Pyinthe, Queen of the Central Palace; and Myauk Pyinthe, Queen of the Northern Palace. As the eldest of the three, Taung Pyinthe was Nyaung-u's chief queen. The Southern Palace where she lived symbolized fertility. The chief queen played an essential role in the political structure of the Pagan Kingdom by legitimizing the dynastic succession - for only a son of a chief queen could inherit the throne. As usurpers, neither Nyaung-u nor Kunhsaw fulfilled this criteria. Nyaung-u had relied on Tannet's queen to accept him as king, and now Kunhsaw faced a similar dilemma. There was an extra complication in his case, though: At the time he overthrew Nyaung-u, two of the queens were pregnant. Taung Pyinthe was nine months along, while her sister Ale Pyinthe was six months. Their youngest sister, Myauk Pyinthe, was only ten years old.

How exactly Kunhsaw went about deposing King Nyaung-u is lost to history. The Glass Palace Chronicle, an account of Burmese history compiled in the 19th century based on earlier, mostly lost chronicles, is determined to paint Kunhsaw in the most favourable light possible. The chroniclers write that Kunhsaw didn't even realise he was challenging Nyaung-u for the throne, but had been led to the palace and gifted with signs of royal power by the Buddhist heavenly ruler Śakra. When the elderly Nyaung-u saw Kunhsaw approaching with a band of adoring hangers-on, he angrily demanded, "Who dares enter while I live?" All of a sudden, a stone statue next to the palace door came to life and pushed Nyaung-u down the stairs, killing him instantly. In this version of the story, Kunhsaw is left guiltless of the crime of regicide. The same statue was said to kill those who questioned Nyaung-u's usurpation some decades earlier, bludgeoning dissidents at the command of the chief queen.

With such a fanciful account of the death of Nyaung-u recorded in The Glass Palace Chronicle, it's hard for historians to know what really happened. What we do know is that upon the king's death, Kunhsaw married each of his three wives. Like Nyaung-u before him, he relied on the queens' acceptance to legitimize his reign. Since he had no other connection to a chief queen, he needed Taung Pyinthe in particular to accept him as her new husband. How must she have felt, ready to give birth at any moment to the son of a slain king? Nyaung-u was at least forty years older than she was. She may have felt little grief at his passing, but it still left her in a potentially dangerous position. Her own child, if a son, would want to inherit the throne, but if she married Kunhsaw and subsequently bore him a son, it could cause a war between the brothers. And what of her sister's child, to be born only a few months after hers? Ale Pyinthe may not have been a chief queen, but if her child was a boy, it would further compromise the dynastic stability that it was Taung Pyinthe's duty to protect.

At the time of Kunhsaw's coup, the kingdom of Pagan was growing in power. Situated on the mighty Irrawaddy River, its capital was the city of Bagan. Its rulers engineered incredible feats of irrigation that enabled them to develop a rich agricultural base for their power. Pagan followed the religion of Ari Buddhism, a syncretic form of Buddhism unique to Myanmar. This branch of the Mahayana tradition combined tantric Buddhist teachings with worship of Indigenous spirits such as nats and nāgas. The monks of the sect held great sway in the government. Until the mid-10th century, Bagan had been only one of a number of city-states vying for power. But by the year 1000, it had won the fight for supremacy and was extending its control over the region beyond the city's borders. Whoever became king at the palace in Bagan would be a powerful player on the political stage of Southeast Asia.

The exact nature of the deliberations that Taung Pyinthe must have had with her dead husband's advisors and with her sister queens goes unmentioned in the history books. The Glass Palace Chronicle was compiled at a time when the 19th century court of King Bagyidaw was concerned about the influence of his chief queen, Nanmadaw Me Nu, over politics, and this may have led the compilers to omit details about decisions chief queens like Taung Pyinthe had to make in the past. It's more likely, though, that such details simply did not survive in the historical record, since this period of the Pagan Kingdom is shrouded in myth. On the one hand, Taung Pyinthe may have felt like she had little choice about whether or not to accept Kunhsaw. He had just killed her husband and was at the gate of the palace with an army ready to support him, claiming to be sanctioned by Śakra himself. While Kunhsaw's own mother had fled, pregnant, to avoid remarriage to an usurper, she hadn't been a chief queen. So much responsibility rested with Taung Pyinthe that it may have been practically impossible for her to abandon her post, regardless of her feelings towards Kunhsaw.

On the other hand, we know from The Glass Palace Chronicle that according to legend, Tannet's chief queen was the most important force behind the acceptance of Nyaung-u as a king. Even if Taung Pyinthe may not have had much choice in whether or not to accept him, he was so dependent on her cooperation that she may have been able to make certain demands of him in exchange for her compliance. We know that when her son Kyiso was born, Kunhsaw adopted him and raised him as his own, as he did with Aly Pyinthe's son Sokkate, born three months later. It is easy to imagine that Taung Pyinthe negotiated on behalf of herself and her sister for Kunhsaw to keep their sons in the line of succession. And since what mattered most to the dynasty was that the heir was the son of a chief queen, rather than the current reigning king, Kunhsaw may have found this an acceptable compromise. He took all three sisters as his queens and was crowned alongside his new chief queen, Taung Pyinthe.

As far as we know, Kunhsaw kept to his promise and raised the boys as his own, with Kyiso as his heir. He presided over such momentous events as the first envoy from the Pagan Kingdom to the court of the Song Emperor in China. It's possible that Taung Pyinthe and Ale Pynithe passed away shortly after their sons were born, for they are not known to have had any more children. Instead, it was their youngest sister, Myauk Pyinthe, who bore Kunhsaw a son when she was twenty-four years old. By that time, Kunhsaw had raised her to be his chief queen. Their son was called Anawrahta - a name that would go down in history.

The new prince posed an immediate threat to his teenage half-brothers' claims to the throne. Once they were adults, Kyiso and Sokkate took action to secure their power. They sponsored the building of a new monastery and invited their stepfather to come and see it. When he arrived, they forced him to become a monk and abdicate. Kyiso became king and reigned unchallenged for seventeen years. During that time, Myauk Pyinthe and Anawrahta lived with Kunhsaw at his monastery, and Anawrahta attended his brother's court as a favoured prince. But when Kyiso was killed in a hunting accident and Sokkate succeeded him, the relationship between the brothers began to sour. There were some who suspected that Kyiso's death had not really been an accident, but rather orchestrated by his power-hungry brother.

While it was acceptable for a king to be succeeded by his brother, Sokkate was the son of Ale Pyinthe, who had never been a chief queen. Where Kyiso had reigned without question, Sokkate was left vulnerable to rebellion. In order to deal with this problem, he decided to take his aunt Myauk Pyinthe as queen. Because Kunhsaw had raised her to chief queen, marrying her would legitimize his reign. When Anawrahta learned what his brother meant to do, he was filled with rage. He demanded that his father give him the heavenly accoutrements Śakra had given him to overthrow Nyaung-u. He gathered an army of supporters and challenged his brother to a duel for the throne. Sokkate accepted, laughing at his brother's youth with the accusation that Anawrahta's lips were still wet with his mother's milk. But when Anawrahta deflected his attack with Śakra's lance, he realised that he had made a fatal mistake. Anawrahta killed him with a single piercing blow.

When she heard what had happened, Myauk Pyinthe is said to have let out a sharp cry. She let her breast-cloth fall to the ground and wailed aloud. Why did she mourn the death of Sokkate? Was she remembering his mother, her elder sister Ale Pyinthe? Or was she worried for her son's soul now that he had killed his own brother? Anawrahta was certainly ridden with guilt, promising Śakra in a dream that he would build temples across the kingdom and dedicate them to his brother so that Sokkate's soul could share in his auspicious karma. A pagoda was also built at the spot where Myauk Pyinthe's breast-cloth had fallen to the ground. Was this, too, a penitential act? Perhaps she felt culpable in the death of her nephew. It's even possible that Anawrahta had challenged Sokkate because she refused to marry him, exercising her right as a former chief queen to reject a potential suitor and calling upon her son to back her up. Since the chronicles do not record anything about her motivations, we are left only to speculate.

Anawrahta went on to become the first internationally renowned king of Pagan, expanding it through brutal conquests into an empire that covered much of modern-day Myanmar. He spearheaded impressive irrigation projects as well as religious reform, rejecting the Ari monks in order to embrace the stricter discipline of Theraveda Buddhism. As for Myauk Pyinthe, her last recorded act is her mournful cry at the death of Sokkate. The pagoda built at her behest and the fame of her son are the two legacies she left behind. The story of her and her three sisters ended as Taung Pyinthe may have feared all those years ago, with their sons killing each other in order to claim the throne. It was a tumultuous time in Burmese history, with rival princes clashing violently over an increasingly valuable throne. Anawrahta and his father Kunhsaw are both remembered as legendary kings, the son held up as an ideal Buddhist monarch and the father memorialized as a nat spirit. The role of the women in their lives in helping to determine the future of the Pagan Empire has often been overlooked.

The chronicles that recount this period are a mix of fact and fable. The stories told of the three sisters and their sons are full of drama and romanticism, so it is hard to say with any certainty what life was like for these women. I have drawn them conferring in a courtyard of the Southern Palace, where Taung Pyinthe has summoned her sisters to her side in this time of political crisis. Kunhsaw awaits her answer upon his horse at the palace gate, looming over the broken body of Nyaung-u. In spite of what the chronicles say, it is unlikely their husband was killed by an animated statue, leaving them to decide whether to accept his killer as the new king. The sun beats down on them as they sit on their gilded pedestals, trying to stay comfortable with unborn princes kicking impatiently at their stomachs. While Taung Pyinthe and Ale Pyinthe debate the best course of action, their sister is too young for them to include in the discussion. At first, Myauk Pyinthe plays obliviously with a palace cat. Then she catches bits of the conversation and realises with shock that the king is dead. As a child now, she has little say in deciding her own fate. But decades down the line, when she is faced with a choice about whether to accept an ambitious young king, will she think back to this conversation her sisters had in her youth? For her sisters had a decision to make that day that would change the course of Burmese history forever.

I have been working on this picture FOREVER! It was so hard to draw. It feels so good to finish it. These three sister queens have been on my list to draw since early on in the project. After all those years, it's exciting to share their story. There's more about the role of women in the Pagan court that I wish I could have fit in, but there was so much of this story to tell. Women could hold a lot of important positions in the government. One fun fact that didn't make it in is that the role of wet-nurse to a prince was a highly esteemed position. The wet nurse for Anawrahta's chief queen was rewarded by being made governor of an entire province when the boy she'd nursed became king! I bet Taung Pyinthe, on the verge of giving birth, wished she could think about who to pick for her wet nurse instead of dealing with the death and usurpation of her husband!

As far as I can tell, Bagan is how you spell the name of the city, while Pagan is the conventional spelling for the kingdom. This general period of Burmese history is referred to with both names since Bagan was the main city producing art in the period. I tried my best to keep the names straight! I also learned that Myanmar is traditionally the high-register name of the country, while Burma is what it's called in everyday speech in the Burmese language. I used them both in writing this description, though I read here that during Anawrahta's time, the kingdom was called Pugarama. That same article has an image of the palace, king and concubines as depicted in a mural from Pathothamya temple, which was a helpful model for this picture.

Thank you to SachiiA for help with the perspective and norree for encouragement to develop the background into something more visually interesting. (And thank you Sacha for telling me about Posca pens - this is their debut in the series!) I ended up finding out that the Bagan Golden Palace is a recreation of what Anawrahta's palace might have looked like. I found some sources that said it's unlikely to closely resemble an actual 11th century palace, but I couldn't find out any more detail than that, so I just did my best to combine aspects of that palace's architecture with images from art of the period. I really struggled with how to interpret some of the hairstyles depicted on the murals and relief sculptures, but I did my best! It was fun to include a Burmese cat in the picture too. I read that there are depictions of cats in art from the Pagan period, but alas, I never found an image! So I just based this cat on the modern Burmese breed. One unrealistic aspect of my picture is that the queens would have had a few servants each fanning them at all times, but I couldn't work that into the composition.

Bagan is a city full of temples from the Pagan period, and it was incredible to learn more about. It's a UNESCO World Heritage site, and I'd love to see it myself one day.

Learn more on the website: womenof1000ad.weebly.com/taung…

Others in the series include...

The Rice Keepers of Yamashiro (Japan)
The Riders of Holda (Germany)
The Initiate of Schroda (South Africa)
The Traveller of Moxos (Bolivia)
The Maize Farmer of the Illinois River Valley (Illinois)
Prana (Cambodia)
The Woman in the Window (Uzbekistan)
Siba' bint Isaac (Egypt)
The Healer of Chełmno (Poland)

The Stargazers of 'Yero (Argentina)

Description

The kingdom of Pagan was in turmoil. Its king, Nyaung-u Sawrahan, had just been overthrown in a coup. The usurper was a man called Kunhsaw Kyaunghpyu, who had ridden into the capital city of Bagan with an army of followers behind him. Wearing a royal ring and hairpin and bearing a sword and lance said to be gifted him by the gods, he rode up to the palace and demanded the throne. He was, after all, said to be the son of the king that Nyaung-u had usurped decades before. According to legend, Nyaung-u began his life as a humble cucumber farmer. When King Tannet was out hunting and stopped to quench his thirst with a cucumber from the farmer's field, Nyaung-u slew him for the theft. Tannet's chief queen decided to accept Nyaung-u as king in order to avoid a disruptive fight for succession, but another one of his wives fled from the palace, pregnant with the dead king's son. That son would grow up to be Kunhsaw, and he was here to reclaim what he believed was rightfully his. Historians think that Kunhsaw may have been a descendant of the long-dead Tannet rather than his son, but either way, his claim to power resided in that family line.

The aging king Nyaung-u had three wives. They were a trio of sisters known to history only by the titles they held in his court: Taung Pyinthe, Queen of the Southern Palace; Ale Pyinthe, Queen of the Central Palace; and Myauk Pyinthe, Queen of the Northern Palace. As the eldest of the three, Taung Pyinthe was Nyaung-u's chief queen. The Southern Palace where she lived symbolized fertility. The chief queen played an essential role in the political structure of the Pagan Kingdom by legitimizing the dynastic succession - for only a son of a chief queen could inherit the throne. As usurpers, neither Nyaung-u nor Kunhsaw fulfilled this criteria. Nyaung-u had relied on Tannet's queen to accept him as king, and now Kunhsaw faced a similar dilemma. There was an extra complication in his case, though: At the time he overthrew Nyaung-u, two of the queens were pregnant. Taung Pyinthe was nine months along, while her sister Ale Pyinthe was six months. Their youngest sister, Myauk Pyinthe, was only ten years old.

How exactly Kunhsaw went about deposing King Nyaung-u is lost to history. The Glass Palace Chronicle, an account of Burmese history compiled in the 19th century based on earlier, mostly lost chronicles, is determined to paint Kunhsaw in the most favourable light possible. The chroniclers write that Kunhsaw didn't even realise he was challenging Nyaung-u for the throne, but had been led to the palace and gifted with signs of royal power by the Buddhist heavenly ruler Śakra. When the elderly Nyaung-u saw Kunhsaw approaching with a band of adoring hangers-on, he angrily demanded, "Who dares enter while I live?" All of a sudden, a stone statue next to the palace door came to life and pushed Nyaung-u down the stairs, killing him instantly. In this version of the story, Kunhsaw is left guiltless of the crime of regicide. The same statue was said to kill those who questioned Nyaung-u's usurpation some decades earlier, bludgeoning dissidents at the command of the chief queen.

With such a fanciful account of the death of Nyaung-u recorded in The Glass Palace Chronicle, it's hard for historians to know what really happened. What we do know is that upon the king's death, Kunhsaw married each of his three wives. Like Nyaung-u before him, he relied on the queens' acceptance to legitimize his reign. Since he had no other connection to a chief queen, he needed Taung Pyinthe in particular to accept him as her new husband. How must she have felt, ready to give birth at any moment to the son of a slain king? Nyaung-u was at least forty years older than she was. She may have felt little grief at his passing, but it still left her in a potentially dangerous position. Her own child, if a son, would want to inherit the throne, but if she married Kunhsaw and subsequently bore him a son, it could cause a war between the brothers. And what of her sister's child, to be born only a few months after hers? Ale Pyinthe may not have been a chief queen, but if her child was a boy, it would further compromise the dynastic stability that it was Taung Pyinthe's duty to protect.

At the time of Kunhsaw's coup, the kingdom of Pagan was growing in power. Situated on the mighty Irrawaddy River, its capital was the city of Bagan. Its rulers engineered incredible feats of irrigation that enabled them to develop a rich agricultural base for their power. Pagan followed the religion of Ari Buddhism, a syncretic form of Buddhism unique to Myanmar. This branch of the Mahayana tradition combined tantric Buddhist teachings with worship of Indigenous spirits such as nats and nāgas. The monks of the sect held great sway in the government. Until the mid-10th century, Bagan had been only one of a number of city-states vying for power. But by the year 1000, it had won the fight for supremacy and was extending its control over the region beyond the city's borders. Whoever became king at the palace in Bagan would be a powerful player on the political stage of Southeast Asia.

The exact nature of the deliberations that Taung Pyinthe must have had with her dead husband's advisors and with her sister queens goes unmentioned in the history books. The Glass Palace Chronicle was compiled at a time when the 19th century court of King Bagyidaw was concerned about the influence of his chief queen, Nanmadaw Me Nu, over politics, and this may have led the compilers to omit details about decisions chief queens like Taung Pyinthe had to make in the past. It's more likely, though, that such details simply did not survive in the historical record, since this period of the Pagan Kingdom is shrouded in myth. On the one hand, Taung Pyinthe may have felt like she had little choice about whether or not to accept Kunhsaw. He had just killed her husband and was at the gate of the palace with an army ready to support him, claiming to be sanctioned by Śakra himself. While Kunhsaw's own mother had fled, pregnant, to avoid remarriage to an usurper, she hadn't been a chief queen. So much responsibility rested with Taung Pyinthe that it may have been practically impossible for her to abandon her post, regardless of her feelings towards Kunhsaw.

On the other hand, we know from The Glass Palace Chronicle that according to legend, Tannet's chief queen was the most important force behind the acceptance of Nyaung-u as a king. Even if Taung Pyinthe may not have had much choice in whether or not to accept him, he was so dependent on her cooperation that she may have been able to make certain demands of him in exchange for her compliance. We know that when her son Kyiso was born, Kunhsaw adopted him and raised him as his own, as he did with Aly Pyinthe's son Sokkate, born three months later. It is easy to imagine that Taung Pyinthe negotiated on behalf of herself and her sister for Kunhsaw to keep their sons in the line of succession. And since what mattered most to the dynasty was that the heir was the son of a chief queen, rather than the current reigning king, Kunhsaw may have found this an acceptable compromise. He took all three sisters as his queens and was crowned alongside his new chief queen, Taung Pyinthe.

As far as we know, Kunhsaw kept to his promise and raised the boys as his own, with Kyiso as his heir. He presided over such momentous events as the first envoy from the Pagan Kingdom to the court of the Song Emperor in China. It's possible that Taung Pyinthe and Ale Pynithe passed away shortly after their sons were born, for they are not known to have had any more children. Instead, it was their youngest sister, Myauk Pyinthe, who bore Kunhsaw a son when she was twenty-four years old. By that time, Kunhsaw had raised her to be his chief queen. Their son was called Anawrahta - a name that would go down in history.

The new prince posed an immediate threat to his teenage half-brothers' claims to the throne. Once they were adults, Kyiso and Sokkate took action to secure their power. They sponsored the building of a new monastery and invited their stepfather to come and see it. When he arrived, they forced him to become a monk and abdicate. Kyiso became king and reigned unchallenged for seventeen years. During that time, Myauk Pyinthe and Anawrahta lived with Kunhsaw at his monastery, and Anawrahta attended his brother's court as a favoured prince. But when Kyiso was killed in a hunting accident and Sokkate succeeded him, the relationship between the brothers began to sour. There were some who suspected that Kyiso's death had not really been an accident, but rather orchestrated by his power-hungry brother.

While it was acceptable for a king to be succeeded by his brother, Sokkate was the son of Ale Pyinthe, who had never been a chief queen. Where Kyiso had reigned without question, Sokkate was left vulnerable to rebellion. In order to deal with this problem, he decided to take his aunt Myauk Pyinthe as queen. Because Kunhsaw had raised her to chief queen, marrying her would legitimize his reign. When Anawrahta learned what his brother meant to do, he was filled with rage. He demanded that his father give him the heavenly accoutrements Śakra had given him to overthrow Nyaung-u. He gathered an army of supporters and challenged his brother to a duel for the throne. Sokkate accepted, laughing at his brother's youth with the accusation that Anawrahta's lips were still wet with his mother's milk. But when Anawrahta deflected his attack with Śakra's lance, he realised that he had made a fatal mistake. Anawrahta killed him with a single piercing blow.

When she heard what had happened, Myauk Pyinthe is said to have let out a sharp cry. She let her breast-cloth fall to the ground and wailed aloud. Why did she mourn the death of Sokkate? Was she remembering his mother, her elder sister Ale Pyinthe? Or was she worried for her son's soul now that he had killed his own brother? Anawrahta was certainly ridden with guilt, promising Śakra in a dream that he would build temples across the kingdom and dedicate them to his brother so that Sokkate's soul could share in his auspicious karma. A pagoda was also built at the spot where Myauk Pyinthe's breast-cloth had fallen to the ground. Was this, too, a penitential act? Perhaps she felt culpable in the death of her nephew. It's even possible that Anawrahta had challenged Sokkate because she refused to marry him, exercising her right as a former chief queen to reject a potential suitor and calling upon her son to back her up. Since the chronicles do not record anything about her motivations, we are left only to speculate.

Anawrahta went on to become the first internationally renowned king of Pagan, expanding it through brutal conquests into an empire that covered much of modern-day Myanmar. He spearheaded impressive irrigation projects as well as religious reform, rejecting the Ari monks in order to embrace the stricter discipline of Theraveda Buddhism. As for Myauk Pyinthe, her last recorded act is her mournful cry at the death of Sokkate. The pagoda built at her behest and the fame of her son are the two legacies she left behind. The story of her and her three sisters ended as Taung Pyinthe may have feared all those years ago, with their sons killing each other in order to claim the throne. It was a tumultuous time in Burmese history, with rival princes clashing violently over an increasingly valuable throne. Anawrahta and his father Kunhsaw are both remembered as legendary kings, the son held up as an ideal Buddhist monarch and the father memorialized as a nat spirit. The role of the women in their lives in helping to determine the future of the Pagan Empire has often been overlooked.

The chronicles that recount this period are a mix of fact and fable. The stories told of the three sisters and their sons are full of drama and romanticism, so it is hard to say with any certainty what life was like for these women. I have drawn them conferring in a courtyard of the Southern Palace, where Taung Pyinthe has summoned her sisters to her side in this time of political crisis. Kunhsaw awaits her answer upon his horse at the palace gate, looming over the broken body of Nyaung-u. In spite of what the chronicles say, it is unlikely their husband was killed by an animated statue, leaving them to decide whether to accept his killer as the new king. The sun beats down on them as they sit on their gilded pedestals, trying to stay comfortable with unborn princes kicking impatiently at their stomachs. While Taung Pyinthe and Ale Pyinthe debate the best course of action, their sister is too young for them to include in the discussion. At first, Myauk Pyinthe plays obliviously with a palace cat. Then she catches bits of the conversation and realises with shock that the king is dead. As a child now, she has little say in deciding her own fate. But decades down the line, when she is faced with a choice about whether to accept an ambitious young king, will she think back to this conversation her sisters had in her youth? For her sisters had a decision to make that day that would change the course of Burmese history forever.

I have been working on this picture FOREVER! It was so hard to draw. It feels so good to finish it. These three sister queens have been on my list to draw since early on in the project. After all those years, it's exciting to share their story. There's more about the role of women in the Pagan court that I wish I could have fit in, but there was so much of this story to tell. Women could hold a lot of important positions in the government. One fun fact that didn't make it in is that the role of wet-nurse to a prince was a highly esteemed position. The wet nurse for Anawrahta's chief queen was rewarded by being made governor of an entire province when the boy she'd nursed became king! I bet Taung Pyinthe, on the verge of giving birth, wished she could think about who to pick for her wet nurse instead of dealing with the death and usurpation of her husband!

As far as I can tell, Bagan is how you spell the name of the city, while Pagan is the conventional spelling for the kingdom. This general period of Burmese history is referred to with both names since Bagan was the main city producing art in the period. I tried my best to keep the names straight! I also learned that Myanmar is traditionally the high-register name of the country, while Burma is what it's called in everyday speech in the Burmese language. I used them both in writing this description, though I read here that during Anawrahta's time, the kingdom was called Pugarama. That same article has an image of the palace, king and concubines as depicted in a mural from Pathothamya temple, which was a helpful model for this picture.

Thank you to SachiiA for help with the perspective and norree for encouragement to develop the background into something more visually interesting. (And thank you Sacha for telling me about Posca pens - this is their debut in the series!) I ended up finding out that the Bagan Golden Palace is a recreation of what Anawrahta's palace might have looked like. I found some sources that said it's unlikely to closely resemble an actual 11th century palace, but I couldn't find out any more detail than that, so I just did my best to combine aspects of that palace's architecture with images from art of the period. I really struggled with how to interpret some of the hairstyles depicted on the murals and relief sculptures, but I did my best! It was fun to include a Burmese cat in the picture too. I read that there are depictions of cats in art from the Pagan period, but alas, I never found an image! So I just based this cat on the modern Burmese breed. One unrealistic aspect of my picture is that the queens would have had a few servants each fanning them at all times, but I couldn't work that into the composition.

Bagan is a city full of temples from the Pagan period, and it was incredible to learn more about. It's a UNESCO World Heritage site, and I'd love to see it myself one day.

Learn more on the website: womenof1000ad.weebly.com/taung…

Others in the series include...

The Rice Keepers of Yamashiro (Japan)
The Riders of Holda (Germany)
The Initiate of Schroda (South Africa)
The Traveller of Moxos (Bolivia)
The Maize Farmer of the Illinois River Valley (Illinois)
Prana (Cambodia)
The Woman in the Window (Uzbekistan)
Siba' bint Isaac (Egypt)
The Healer of Chełmno (Poland)

The Stargazers of 'Yero (Argentina)