Where China Meets Pyu: The “Tharaba Gate” Bilingual Inscriptions at Pagan

via the Tea Circle, 30 July 2018: An article by independent scholar Liu Yun on an Chinese-Pyu inscription found at the Tharaba Gate.

Currently held in Pagan Archaeological Museum, the illegible Pyu inscription of an “unknown date” was found near the Tharaba gate which, located to the east of Pagan, is the only surviving gate of the old city. Sino-Burmese historians Taw Sein Ko (1916) and Chen Yi-sein (1960) argued, based on their pioneer studies of the much defaced Chinese epigraphy on the reverse side of the Pyu scripts, that the bilingual stone dates back to the late 13th century when the Mongol campaigns of the Pagan Kingdom were launched by ambitious Kublai Khan (r. 1271-1294) and a subsequent fragile tributary relationship was established. Strikingly different from the traditional way of writing vertically from top to bottom, the Chinese texts at Pagan run horizontally from left to right, in a Burmanized way.

Source: Where China Meets Pyu: The “Tharaba Gate” Bilingual Inscriptions at Pagan – Tea Circle