page_title: Burmese chronicles
section_title: Hmannan Yazawin
hierarchical_section_title: Burmese chronicles / National chronicles / Hmannan Yazawin
caption_attribution_description: English: 2003 edition of Hmannan Yazawin (the Glass Palace Chronicle)
context_page_description: The royal chronicles of Myanmar are detailed and continuous chronicles of the monarchy of Myanmar. The chronicles were written on different media such as parabaik paper, palm leaf, and stone; they were composed in different literary styles such as prose, verse, and chronograms. Palm-leaf manuscripts written in prose are those that are commonly referred to as the chronicles. Other royal records include administrative treatises and precedents, legal treatises and precedents, and censuses.
  The chronicle tradition was maintained in the country's four historical polities: Upper Burma, Lower Burma, Arakan and the Shan states. The majority of the chronicles did not survive the country's numerous wars as well as the test of time. The most complete extant chronicles are those of Upper Burma-based dynasties, with the earliest extant chronicle dating from the 1280s and the first standard national chronicle from the 1720s.
  The subject matter of the chronicles is mainly about the monarchs, and the chronicles provide little information about the general situation of the kingdom.
context_section_description: Hmannan Yazawin, known in English as the "Glass Palace Chronicle", was compiled by the Royal Historical Commission in 1829–1832. The chronicle covers events right up to 1821, right before the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–1826). The commission consulted several existing chronicles and local histories (thamaings) and the inscriptions collected by Bodawpaya, as well as eigyins, poetry describing epics of kings and mawguns, panegyric poems. Although the compilers disputed some of the earlier accounts, they by and large retained the accounts of Maha Yazawin and Yazawin Thit. The most important development was Hmannan's disposal of the hitherto prevalent pre-Buddhist origin story of Burmese monarchy, and linkage of the monarchy to the clan of the Buddha and the first king of Buddhist mythology, Maha Sammata. (The head of the Royal Historical Commission, Monywe Sayadaw, also wrote a similar chronicle to Hmannan called Maha Yazawin Kyaw ("Great Celebrated Chronicle") in 1831. The learned monk had been writing the chronicle prior to his appointment, and completed his own chronicle because he did not agree with some of the points in Hmannan.)
  The second part of Hmannan, also called the Second Chronicle, was written in 1867–1869 by another committee of scholars. It covers the events up to 1854, including the first two Anglo-Burmese wars. The Second Chronicle's account of the two wars, according to historian Htin Aung, was "written with the objectivity of a true historian, and the great national defeats were described faithfully in detail." The posthumous names of "Bodawpaya" ("Royal Lord Grandfather") and "Bagyidawpaya" ("Royal Lord Paternal Uncle") were introduced in this chronicle; the kings respectively were grandfather and paternal uncle to King Mindon who had commissioned the chronicle.
  The third instalment came in 1905, nearly twenty years after the end of Burmese monarchy, and was written by Maung Maung Tin, who had a distinguished career in the British administration. Tin updated the chronicle to 1885, to the fall of the monarchy, relying mainly on the court records obtained from several members of the royal library and also on the papers seized by the British and kept in libraries. (Almost all the records of the Konbaung Dynasty had gone up in flames as drunken British soldiers burned down the royal library soon after King Thibaw's surrender in 1885.) Tin updated the chronicle in 1921, and included the death of King Thibaw in 1916 as a postscript.
caption: 2003 three volume reprint of Hmannan Yazawin
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