Myanmar

The Bagan kingdom, from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, unified the Irrawaddy valley and made it a stronghold of Theravada Buddhism, raising thousands of temples on the Bagan plain before falling to the Mongols. Later Burmese dynasties, the Toungoo and the Konbaung, expanded aggressively — the Konbaung sacked the Thai capital Ayutthaya in 1767 — until three wars with Britain ended Burmese independence, and the country was annexed as a province of British India by 1886.

Japan occupied Burma in the Second World War; the independence leader Aung San, who had first allied with Japan, switched to the Allies. He was assassinated in 1947, months before independence in 1948. A fragile democracy, beset from the start by ethnic insurgencies, was ended by General Ne Win's 1962 coup, which began decades of military rule, isolation, and economic decline.

A 1988 uprising was crushed with thousands of deaths; the military ignored the 1990 election won by Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy and kept her under house arrest for years. A cautious opening from 2011 freed prisoners, eased censorship, and brought a tourism boom, and the NLD governed after 2015 — but in 2016–17 the military drove some 740,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh in what UN investigators called ethnic cleansing. In February 2021 the military seized power again, detained Suu Kyi, and met mass protest with lethal force. The resistance took up arms, and Myanmar has been in a fragmented civil war since, with the military losing ground across the borderlands while holding the central lowlands and cities.

Theravada Buddhism saturates daily life for the Bamar majority and many others: the gilded pagoda, the monk on the morning alms round, the shinbyu ceremony when a boy briefly enters the monastery, and constant small acts of merit-making. Older nat spirit worship runs alongside it, centred on Mount Popa. People of all ages wear the longyi sarong, and many wear thanaka, a pale paste ground from bark, on their cheeks.

Astrology and numerology weigh on personal and even state decisions — the move of the capital and past currency changes were tied to auspicious numbers. Traditional arts include marionette theatre, the arched saung harp, and Bagan lacquerware, and the teashop is the country's essential social institution, over cups of sweet, strong milk tea.

Myanmar is also deeply diverse and deeply divided: a patchwork of ethnic nationalities with their own languages, dress, and Christian or Muslim as well as Buddhist faith, and a long history of the centre's domination of the periphery, of which the exclusion and expulsion of the Rohingya is the starkest example.

Before 2021, Myanmar was a poor country cautiously opening up. Since the coup the reversal has been severe: around half the population is near or below the poverty line, more than three million people are displaced within the country, and health and education have collapsed in many areas after teachers and doctors joined a civil-disobedience strike and were purged.

Rolling blackouts, fuel queues, cash shortages, censorship, and surveillance are now part of ordinary life, and young people leave in large numbers — to Thailand, to resistance-held areas, or abroad — to escape conscription. The parts of the economy that still function include delta rice farming, jade and ruby mining in the north (which funds armed groups), offshore gas piped to Thailand and China, garment factories, and a large border economy of drugs and online scams; Myanmar is again the world's biggest opium producer.

A major earthquake near Mandalay and Sagaing in March 2025 killed thousands and deepened a humanitarian emergency the authorities have limited capacity, and limited will, to address.

Burmese cooking is milder and more oil-forward than its neighbours', with sour and fermented notes all its own. The national breakfast is mohinga, rice vermicelli in a fish and banana-stem broth. Laphet thoke, a salad of fermented tea leaves with fried beans, nuts, and garlic, is unique to Myanmar and eaten at any time.

A main meal is built around one or more curries (hin) of pork, chicken, or fish cooked slowly in oil with turmeric, served with rice, a light soup, and a spread of relishes — including pungent ngapi fermented-fish dips — with fried snacks and raw and blanched vegetables to dip. Shan food, from the eastern hills, adds its own noodle dishes and a tofu made from chickpeas.

Indian and Chinese influences are strong in the cities: samosas, biryani, flatbreads, and stir-fries. Sweets tend to be based on sticky rice, coconut, and palm jaggery, and the teashop milk tea is the social lubricant of the country.

Yangon holds the Shwedagon Pagoda, a vast gilded stupa topped with jewels and the spiritual centre of the country, along with one of Asia's best-preserved British-colonial downtowns. Bagan, a World Heritage Site, is the singular sight: a plain scattered with more than two thousand brick temples and stupas from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, once toured by e-bike and hot-air balloon.

Mandalay, the last royal capital, has its hill, palace, and the Mahamuni image, with the teak U Bein bridge and the monastery towns of Sagaing and Inwa nearby. Inle Lake in Shan State is known for its leg-rowing fishermen, floating gardens, stilt villages, and lotus-fibre weaving, and for treks in from the hill town of Kalaw.

Elsewhere are the balancing gilded boulder of Golden Rock at Kyaiktiyo, the upmarket beach at Ngapali, the karst country and caves around Hpa-an, and the remote temple field of Mrauk U in Rakhine. Almost all of these are currently affected by the conflict, and much of the country is closed to travel.