ABSTRACT
The Glass Palace Chronicle is a nineteenth-century Burmese historical record designed to aggregate and adjudicate among numerous existing court chronicles to create a definitive version of the royal past. The first section of the chronicle is a history of the origins of Buddhism and of the various Buddhist kings of India, suggesting the ways in which the Burmese rulers saw themselves as a continuation of this lineage. The later sections shift to the Burmese royal house itself, and trace the growth of the first Burmese kingdom and its succession of rulers. This excerpt is a description of the reign of King Narathihapati, the last king of the Pagan Empire, when the Burmese polity was centered upon the plains of Pagan in central Burma along the Irrawaddy River. As such, King Narathihapati represented the end of the line for the Pagan Empire, and his story in the Glass Palace Chronicle culminates this historical record of the early Burman empires.
