Myanmar

A country of many peoples that has been at war with parts of itself since the week it became independent. Bagan's temple plain was built by a kingdom that unified the Irrawaddy valley in the eleventh century, and later Burman dynasties conquered outward far enough to alarm British India. Three wars between 1824 and 1885 annexed the country to India, and Britain then governed the Burman lowlands directly and the hill peoples - Shan, Karen, Kachin, Chin - separately, recruiting them into the army and leaving the Burman majority underrepresented in it. Aung San negotiated independence and a federal promise at Panglong and was assassinated in July 1947, six months before it arrived. Karen insurgency began in 1949 and various ethnic conflicts have continued ever since, among the longest-running civil wars in the world. Ne Win's coup in 1962 began fifty years of military rule and the Burmese Way to Socialism, which impoverished a country that had been the world's largest rice exporter. Risings in 1988 and 2007 were crushed. Aung San Suu Kyi's party won in 2015 and she then defended the army at The Hague over the expulsion of the Rohingya. A coup in 2021 restarted the war. The country has about fifty-four million people and over a hundred recognised ethnic groups. The capital was moved from Yangon to a newly built inland city, Naypyidaw, in 2005. Bagan holds thousands of temples across a plain by the Irrawaddy. Jade and rubies from the north are among the world's finest and fund armed groups. The country's name and that of its largest city are both contested.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history