page_title: Nanda Bayin
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Nanda Bayin / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Restored Taungoo Dynasty
context_page_description: Nanda Bayin, was king of Toungoo Dynasty of Burma from 1581 to 1599. He presided over the collapse of Toungoo Empire, the largest empire in the history of Southeast Asia.
  The eldest son of King Bayinnaung was one of the principal commanders in his father's military campaigns that expanded and defended the empire. As king, Nanda faced the impossible task of keeping his father's "improbable domain" together. He never gained the full support of his father's chosen vassal rulers, who governed what used to be sovereign kingdoms just a few decades earlier. Within the first three years of his reign, both Upper Burma and Siam revolted. Though he could never raise more than a third of his father's troop levels, Nanda could not come to terms with a smaller empire. Between 1584 and 1593, he launched five disastrous invasions of Siam, which increasingly weakened his hold everywhere else. From 1593 onward, it was he who was on the defensive, unable to stop a Siamese invasion that seized the entire Tenasserim coast in 1594–95, or prevent the rest of the vassals from breaking away in 1597. In 1599, Nanda surrendered to the joint forces of Toungoo and Arakan, and was taken prisoner to Toungoo.
context_section_description: Nanda by all accounts was an energetic monarch, who from his youth upward, had served in the armed forces and still led them in person. There is no reason to suppose that he was not "above the average of Burmese kings." But unlike no other Burmese kings, he inherited the largest empire in the history of the region, which historians call an "impossible legacy," "improbable domain," "absurdly overextended" empire. His mistake was to hold on to this empire without an administrative system, and without the support of the vassal rulers.
  Nanda's failures showed several following generations of Burmese monarchs about the perils of over-extension, and the need to establish a more centralized administration in place of hereditary chieftainships. The 17th century Toungoo kings rebuilt the fallen empire by the mid-1620s but they deliberately refrained from invading Siam and Lan Xang. The restored empire was a "realistic and organic unit,... which did not extend in any direction to a point where Burma's supply lines were more extended than those of her nearest lowland rival." The Restored Toungoo kings also instituted an administrative system that replaced hereditary chieftainships with appointed governorships in the entire Irrawaddy valley, and greatly reduced the hereditary rights of Shan chiefs.
caption: Restored Toungoo Empire c. 1650, a "realistic and organic unit" that "walked on two legs".[93]
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