Anawratha or Anoratha or Anouraddha or Aniruddha () is a Burmese king , founder of the first unified Burmese kingdom, with Pagan for capital (reign of 1044 to 1077).

Biography

According to the Chronic of the crystal Palate , it was wire of a usurper, Kunhsaw Kyaunghpyu, which had seized the throne to the detriment of the king Nyaung-U Sawrahan (931-964), before being in its turn reversed by wire of this last Kyisaw (986-992) and Sokkate (992-1017), which obliged it to become bonze. Arrived at the adulthood, Anawrahta defied Sokkate in singular combat and killed it. He proposed with his father to take again his throne, but this one refused.

Anawrahta was thus made crown king in 1044. It carried out a pilgrimage with Ceylon. Under the influence of a monk come from Thaton, it was detached from the Bouddhisme mahāyāna of its predecessors and converts with the theravāda. It then made the request for liturgical texts in Pâli with the king my of Thaton. In front of its refusal, it launched against him a forwarding: Thaton was taken, plundered and shaven in 1057, as well as the old capital Pyu, Thayekhettaya. Anawrahta was from now on Master of the basin of the Irrawaddy. It returned in Pagan with important spoils of relics and manuscripts, and a great number of well-read men, artists and craftsmen of the destroyed cities. Those were going to enable him to launch in Pagan a schedule construction to the measurement of its new power.

Anawrahta attacked also the Royaume of Nanzhao, in the Yunnan, to seize a relic of the Bouddha (a tooth). It is to shelter this relic that he undertook in 1059 the construction of the Pagode Shwezigon (completed by his/her son Kyanzittha before 1113). This forwarding also enabled him to obtain the tender of the Shan S and he married a princess shan, Sao Monhla. Lastly, in 1071, it succeeds in making come from Sri Lanka a complete specimen of the Tipitaka: Pagan took the relai thus Thaton like regional capital of Buddhism.