Conclusion

The relationship between Ava and Pegu was a symbiotic dualism: of time, space and type. Ava was not only a reformulation of something old, and Pegu, the genesis of something new, but as one was located in the agrarian Dry Zone and the other, on the commercial coasts, each was historically, materially, and in terms of general character, distinct. Whereas the Kingdom of Ava was essentially the resurrection of an old kingdom—Pagan writ small—Pegu was a new kingdom composed of new leaders, people, and cultures. Ava was a familiar, Upper Myanmar polity: the same material environment and demographic base, the same economic, social and political institutions, the same language, writing system, cosmology, and culture. Pegu, on the other hand, was a new, independent kingdom of Lower Myanmar, led by newcomers (the Mon speakers) who had migrated from what later became Thailand. Yet, because both Ava and Pegu were built on the same foundations (Pagan), both had certain common elements. They shared virtually the same religion and thought systems; similar social customs, values, and mores; familiar political and administrative principles; a common, even if contested, history; and certainly the same writing system. Whatever the dissimilarities were, they did not produce a binary situation of two irreconcilably antagonistic ethnic entities—Burman and Mon as convention has it—rather, these dissimilarities created a dualism of geo-political and cultural differences whose energy and dynamism came from the tension created precisely by those differences. In fact, Ava and Pegu’s relationship not only epitomized Southeast Asia’s “upstream-downstream” paradigm common throughout much of its history, it continues today in Naypyidaw and Yangon.