Battle of Ngasaunggyan (1277): Mongols Against Pagan

The Battle of Ngasaunggyan was fought in 1277 on the frontier between Yunnan, then part of Kublai Khan’s Yuan empire, and the Pagan kingdom of Burma (Myanmar). A comparatively small Yuan force defeated a much larger Pagan army supported by war elephants. It was the first open clash between the two powers and the beginning of a decade of Mongol campaigns that ended the unity of the Pagan kingdom.

Background

By the 1270s Pagan had dominated the Irrawaddy valley for more than two centuries, since the reign of Anawrahta. Its king, Narathihapate (reigned 1256-1287), ruled a wealthy but strained state, in which much land had passed to tax-free Buddhist monasteries.

To the north, the Mongols had conquered the kingdom of Dali in Yunnan in 1253-1254. After Kublai Khan founded the Yuan dynasty in 1271, the Yuan government of Yunnan sent envoys to Pagan demanding tribute and submission. Narathihapate refused. Burmese tradition holds that he executed a later mission of 1273; modern historians point out that the evidence is unclear, though the Yuan envoys certainly did not return with the submission Kublai wanted.

The frontier between the two powers was held by small Tai and other hill states. When one of them, known in Burmese sources as Kaungai, accepted Yuan protection, Pagan sent an army to punish it in 1277.

The two armies

Pagan’s army reflected the military traditions of mainland Southeast Asia. Its core was infantry levied from the irrigated rice districts, supported by cavalry and by war elephants, which carried archers and spearmen and were used to break enemy formations. Elephants were also a symbol of royal power, and Burmese kings took pride in the size of their herds.

The Yuan forces in Yunnan were a mixed frontier army. Mongol and Central Asian cavalry, skilled in mounted archery, served alongside soldiers recruited from the former kingdom of Dali and other local peoples. The garrison commanders had experience of mountain warfare from two decades of campaigns in Yunnan, but most of their horses had never faced elephants in battle.

The battle

The Yuan commanders in western Yunnan met the Pagan army at Ngasaunggyan with a much smaller force. Chinese records describe a few hundred Mongol cavalry supported by local troops; the Pagan army is said to have numbered in the tens of thousands, with several hundred elephants. All the figures come from the victors and are uncertain.

Horses unused to elephants panicked at the first charge. The Yuan troops responded by dismounting, sheltering among trees and shooting volleys of arrows at the elephants. Wounded and frightened, the animals turned and stampeded through their own lines, and the Pagan army broke. The Yuan force then pursued and inflicted heavy losses.

Marco Polo’s account

The battle is one of the few Southeast Asian events of the period described by a European. Marco Polo, who served Kublai Khan from around 1275 to 1291, tells of a battle near “Vochan”, usually identified with Yongchang (modern Baoshan in Yunnan). He credits the victory to a commander he calls Nescradin, generally taken to be Nasir al-Din, son of the Muslim governor of Yunnan, Sayyid Ajall.

Polo gives the Mongols about 12,000 horsemen against 60,000 men and 2,000 elephants carrying wooden towers full of soldiers. He describes the dismounting tactic vividly and says that the Great Khan afterwards began to use captured elephants in his own armies. Polo almost certainly heard the story at court rather than seeing it, and his numbers are generally considered exaggerated, but his outline agrees broadly with the Chinese record. His wider time in China is covered in Marco Polo in Yuan China.

Consequences

The defeat exposed Pagan’s northern frontier. Late in 1277 Nasir al-Din advanced to Kaungsin, near modern Bhamo, but withdrew because of the heat. In 1283 a larger Yuan army defeated the Pagan forces at Kaungsin again and pushed down the Irrawaddy towards Tagaung.

Narathihapate fled south to Lower Burma, earning the name Tarokpyemin, “the king who fled from the Chinese”. In 1287 he was killed at Prome (Pyay), reportedly poisoned on the orders of his son. Yuan troops pressed south the same year. Older histories say they captured Pagan; some modern historians, notably Michael Aung-Thwin, argue that they never reached the capital.

Either way, Pagan’s authority collapsed. Power in central Burma passed to the three brothers of Myinsaing, who repelled a Yuan expedition in 1300-1301, and the Yuan eventually withdrew from the Irrawaddy valley.

Sources and debates

The battle is known mainly from three kinds of source. The official history of the Yuan dynasty, the Yuan shi, compiled in the 14th century, records the campaigns from the Chinese side. Burmese royal chronicles, written down much later, preserve a Pagan perspective but often compress or rearrange events. Marco Polo’s book adds a vivid outsider’s account.

The sources disagree on names, numbers and dates, and even the spelling of the battle site varies. Historians such as Gordon Luce and Than Tun reconstructed the sequence of campaigns from the Chinese records, while Michael Aung-Thwin has questioned how far the Mongols were responsible for Pagan’s decline. He argues that internal problems, including the growth of untaxed monastic estates, had already weakened royal power before the Yuan arrived.

Timeline

• 1253-1254: Mongols conquer the kingdom of Dali in Yunnan.
• 1271-1273: Yuan envoys demand Pagan’s submission; Narathihapate refuses.
• 1277: Pagan army defeated at Ngasaunggyan.
• 1277, late in the year: Nasir al-Din advances to Kaungsin and withdraws.
• 1283-1284: Second Yuan campaign takes Kaungsin and Tagaung.
• 1287: Narathihapate killed at Prome; Yuan forces move south.
• 1301: Yuan siege of Myinsaing fails; Yuan withdrawal follows.

Why it matters

Ngasaunggyan showed that Pagan’s elephant-based army could not stop disciplined Mongol archers. It began the chain of events that broke the first unified Burmese kingdom, and through Marco Polo it became one of the earliest Southeast Asian battles known in Europe.