Pyu City-states - Demography

Demography

The city-states were mainly populated by the Tibeto-Burman-speaking Pyu people, who like their cousins Burmans are believed to have migrated from present-day north central China, reconstructed as modern Qinghai and Gansu provinces via Yunnan. Extensive external trade attracted sizable communities of Indians and the Mon, especially in the south. In the north, trickles of Burmans may have entered the Pyu realm from Yunnan as early as the 7th century. (Modern scholarship however holds that Burmans did not arrive in large numbers until mid-to-late 9th century, and perhaps as late as the 10th century, according to radiocarbon dating of Pagan's walls.)

The size of population of the Pyu realm was probably a few hundred thousand, given that the 17th and 18th century Burma (about the size of present-day Myanmar) only had about 2 million people.