600-842 CE
The Pyu were a Tibeto-Burman people who built walled city-states in the dry zone of central Burma, sustained by irrigated rice agriculture and enriched by their position on the trade routes connecting India, China, and Southeast Asia.
The Pyu were among the earliest urban peoples of mainland Southeast Asia, Tibeto-Burman speakers who established a string of walled city-states along the Irrawaddy river valley and the dry zone of what is now central Myanmar. Chinese sources mention them as early as the second century CE, describing a Buddhist people who wore cotton, lived in walled cities, and settled disputes peacefully whenever possible. By the seventh century, Sri Ksetra, their largest city, was one of the great urban centers of Southeast Asia, its massive brick walls enclosing an area larger than the contemporary cities of the region.
The Pyu were middlemen by geography and temperament. Their territory sat between the Indian cultural sphere to the west and the Chinese sphere to the north and east, with the maritime trade networks of the Bay of Bengal accessible through the Irrawaddy delta. They absorbed Indian religions, scripts, and artistic conventions while maintaining their own language and customs.
The dry zone of central Burma receives less rainfall than the surrounding regions, and Pyu agriculture depended on irrigation. Canal systems diverted water from the Irrawaddy and its tributaries to rice paddies that produced the surplus needed to support urban populations. A farmer opening a sluice gate on an irrigation canal at the start of the planting season, watching water spread across the prepared paddy, was operating infrastructure that had been maintained for generations. The system was communal: villages shared water according to agreed schedules, and the management of irrigation was likely one of the functions that gave Pyu city rulers their authority.
The cities themselves were distinctive. Circular or oval walls of fired brick enclosed areas that included not just houses and temples but also orchards, gardens, and open land. The urban plan suggests a population that valued space and greenery, not the dense packing of a commercial city. Burial practices included placing cremated remains in small terracotta urns, sometimes decorated with Buddhist imagery. A potter shaping an urn for a neighbor's ashes, pressing lotus motifs into the wet clay, produced an object that was both funerary vessel and statement of faith.
Chinese accounts describe the Pyu as unusually peaceful, a characterization that may reflect genuine cultural preference or simply the perspective of an empire that measured peoples by their military threat. The Pyu city-states seem to have coexisted without the chronic inter-city warfare that characterized other regions. Walls were defensive rather than offensive infrastructure, and the cities' spacing along the Irrawaddy suggests territorial arrangements that avoided direct competition.
This relative peace ended violently. In 832, the Nanzhao kingdom from Yunnan invaded, sacked the Pyu cities, and reportedly carried off thousands of captives. The destruction of Sri Ksetra and the other major settlements effectively ended Pyu civilization as a political force. The Pyu did not disappear entirely; they were absorbed into the Burman population that would build the kingdom of Pagan in the following centuries. But the city-states were gone, and with them the urban tradition that had made the Pyu distinctive.
The Pyu were Buddhists, practicing both Theravada and Mahayana traditions alongside older local beliefs. Stupas and monasteries have been excavated at every major Pyu site, and the abundance of votive tablets, small stamped clay images bearing Buddhist texts, suggests a population for which Buddhist practice was routine rather than elite. A woman pressing a votive tablet in a mold at her doorstep, leaving it to dry in the sun before placing it at the base of a neighborhood stupa, performed a daily devotion that required no priest and no literacy.
Pyu society appears to have been organized around the city and its surrounding agricultural territory. The relationship between cities was more confederation than hierarchy, with no single city dominating the others for extended periods. Indian cultural influence was strong in religion, art, and writing, but the Pyu adapted rather than copied. Their script derived from Indian models but was used to write their own language. Their Buddhist art followed Indian iconographic conventions but developed a local style recognizable in the rounded faces and simplified drapery of Pyu Buddha images.
The Pyu occupied a critical node in the overland trade routes connecting India and China. Goods moved through the Irrawaddy corridor: Indian textiles, beads, and Buddhist artifacts heading east, Chinese silk heading west. A Chinese embassy visited the Pyu court in 802 and recorded a kingdom of prosperous cities, elaborate Buddhist ritual, and musical traditions performed by orchestras of considerable sophistication. The Pyu sent a musical troupe to the Tang court, where their performances were noted in Chinese records.
After the Nanzhao destruction, Pyu cultural elements survived in the successor states of the region. Pagan, the great Burman kingdom that rose in the eleventh century, built on foundations that were partly Pyu: the irrigation systems, the Buddhist traditions, the brick construction techniques, and the urban planning that made Pagan's temple plain possible all had Pyu antecedents. The Pyu language faded, their script was forgotten, and their cities became overgrown ruins. But the civilization they had built along the Irrawaddy was not erased so much as absorbed into what came after.
, you may spend
faith cubes instead of an equal number of required 
, after adding any number of action cubes to the bag, transfer 1 used action cube from your player mat to your player zone
for each meadow hex in your 
In the game, the Pyu are peaceful irrigators who grow rich through commerce. Three starting trade transactions give you the fastest market access at the table, and using them aggressively in the opening rounds builds an economic lead that mirrors the Pyu cities' wealth as middlemen between India and China. Meadow provinces feed you passively like the irrigated rice paddies of the Irrawaddy valley. Faith cubes stretch your resource budget further by substituting for food or wood when recruiting, freeing actual resources for construction and production. Focus everything on economic development in Age I and let the market work for you.
Yes. The ability grants 3 trade transactions directly, independent of how many Markets you have.
No. Each transaction must involve a different product. You cannot buy or sell the same product twice in a single trade action.
You recover a spent action cube, moving it from your player mat back to your available supply. This effectively gives you an extra action this round.
Yes. You gain 1 food for each meadow hex in your provinces during the achievement phase, regardless of whether peasants are present.
Yes. Faith cubes substitute for any required resource cost when recruiting, including wood for Archers or stone for other units.