Sagaing (Burmese: စစ်ကိုင်းမြို့; MLCTS: cac kuing: mrui., pronounced [zəɡáɪɰ̃ mjo̰]) is the capital of the Sagaing Region of Myanmar. It is located on the Irrawaddy River, 20 km (12 mi) to the south-west of Mandalay on the opposite bank of the river. Sagaing, with its numerous Buddhist monasteries, is an important religious and monastic centre. The pagodas and monasteries crowd the numerous hills along the ridge running parallel to the river. The central pagoda, Soon U Ponya Shin Pagoda, is connected by a set of covered staircases that run up the 240 m (790 ft) hill.
Sagaing
စစ်ကိုင်းမြို့ Jayapura | |
|---|---|
Capital Town | |
 The Yadanabon Bridge on the Irrawaddy | |
  Sagaing Location in Myanmar | |
| Coordinates: 21°52′56″N 95°58′43″E / 21.88222°N 95.97861°E | |
| Country |  Myanmar |
| Region |  Sagaing Region |
| Region | Sagaing District |
| Region | Sagaing Township |
| Population (2023)[1] | 83,949 |
| • Religions | |
| Time zone | UTC+6.30 (MMT) |
Today, with about 70,000 inhabitants, the city is part of Mandalay metropolitan area, home to more than 1,022,000 inhabitants as of 2011. It is a frequent tourist destination for day trippers, usually as part of the "three former capitals" itinerary alongside Amarapura and Innwa.
The city is home to five institutions of higher learning: the Sagaing Institute of Education, Sagaing Education College, Sagaing Technological University, Sagaing University of Co-operative and Management, and Sagaing University. The latter was established on 11 February 2012; it is located in Pakatoe Quarter, Sagaing Township, with an area of 121.55 ha (300.35 acres).
Name
editThe classical name of Sagaing is Zeyapura (ဇေယျာပူရ; Pali: Jayapura), which literally translates to "city of victory."[2]
History
editSagaing was the capital of Sagaing Kingdom (1315–1364), one of the minor kingdoms that rose up after the fall of Pagan dynasty, where one of Thihathu's sons, Athinkhaya, established himself.[3]: 227 During the Ava period (1364–1555), the city was the common fief of the crown prince or senior princes. During the reign of King Naungdawgyi, Sagaing briefly became the royal capital between 1760 and 1763.
On 8 August 1988, Sagaing was the site of mass public protests in support of the 8888 Uprising, which were brutally crushed by a massacre in which around 300 civilians were killed by local police forces.[4]
As the epicentre of the 7.7-magnitude 2025 Sagaing earthquake, the city suffered loss of life as well as extensive damage to its buildings and infrastructure alongside neighbouring Mandalay. The Ava Bridge, one of two road-rail bridges connecting Sagaing to Mandalay, has partially collapsed.[5] Tthe city's fire station also collapsed, hampering relief efforts and trapping many.[6] More than 100 bodies were recovered from the rubble of destroyed builings and 90 percent of structures were destroyed.[7][8] An estimated 40 or 50 Muslim worshippers in the city died across three collapsed mosques.[9] Out of the five mosques in Sagaing, four collapsed due to the earthquake.[10] The Min Street Mosque is feared to have collapsed with over 100 people inside. Several monastic schools and a nunnery in the city were also damaged, likely killing people in the hundreds and trapping over 900 monks across four schools.[11]
Demographics
editIn 2014, the city had 81,432 people within its city limits. The broader Sagaing Township had 307,194 people.[12] In 2019, the city's population dropped to 79,944 people[13] before returning to 83,939 people in 2023. However, the broader Sagaing township area had fallen in population to 295,195 people.[1]
Climate
editLocated in the rain shadow of the Arakan Mountains, Sagaing has a borderline hot semi-arid climate (Köppen BSh) just short of a tropical savanna climate (Aw). The city receives less than a third of the rainfall that Chittagong has at a similar latitude on the Bay of Bengal. Unlike most monsoonal semi-arid climates, the rainy season is relatively long at around five to six months, while variability and extreme monthly and daily rainfalls are much lower than usual with this type of climate.[14]
| Climate data for Sagaing (1991–2020) | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Year |
| Record high °C (°F) | 34.5 (94.1) |
37.7 (99.9) |
42.0 (107.6) |
45.5 (113.9) |
45.2 (113.4) |
40.5 (104.9) |
40.0 (104.0) |
38.4 (101.1) |
38.8 (101.8) |
38.0 (100.4) |
37.0 (98.6) |
36.5 (97.7) |
45.5 (113.9) |
| Mean daily maximum °C (°F) | 29.5 (85.1) |
32.6 (90.7) |
36.4 (97.5) |
38.3 (100.9) |
36.0 (96.8) |
34.4 (93.9) |
33.7 (92.7) |
33.0 (91.4) |
33.2 (91.8) |
32.8 (91.0) |
31.4 (88.5) |
29.2 (84.6) |
33.4 (92.1) |
| Daily mean °C (°F) | 22.0 (71.6) |
24.5 (76.1) |
28.6 (83.5) |
31.4 (88.5) |
30.9 (87.6) |
30.3 (86.5) |
29.9 (85.8) |
29.5 (85.1) |
29.4 (84.9) |
28.5 (83.3) |
25.9 (78.6) |
22.6 (72.7) |
27.8 (82.0) |
| Mean daily minimum °C (°F) | 14.5 (58.1) |
16.5 (61.7) |
20.8 (69.4) |
24.6 (76.3) |
25.8 (78.4) |
26.2 (79.2) |
26.2 (79.2) |
25.9 (78.6) |
25.5 (77.9) |
24.2 (75.6) |
20.4 (68.7) |
16.0 (60.8) |
22.2 (72.0) |
| Record low °C (°F) | 10.7 (51.3) |
11.0 (51.8) |
13.5 (56.3) |
18.7 (65.7) |
19.3 (66.7) |
20.5 (68.9) |
20.0 (68.0) |
20.5 (68.9) |
19.2 (66.6) |
16.7 (62.1) |
14.0 (57.2) |
12.3 (54.1) |
10.7 (51.3) |
| Average precipitation mm (inches) | 5.0 (0.20) |
3.5 (0.14) |
5.4 (0.21) |
40.6 (1.60) |
148.6 (5.85) |
82.1 (3.23) |
66.2 (2.61) |
126.2 (4.97) |
158.9 (6.26) |
134.3 (5.29) |
28.4 (1.12) |
4.8 (0.19) |
804.0 (31.65) |
| Average precipitation days (≥ 1.0 mm) | 0.6 | 0.4 | 0.6 | 3.2 | 9.5 | 6.8 | 5.9 | 9.3 | 11.0 | 8.5 | 2.6 | 0.7 | 59.0 |
| Source 1: World Meteorological Organization[15] | |||||||||||||
| Source 2: Meteomanz(record since 2014)[16] | |||||||||||||
People
edit- Sithu Kyawhtin, King of Ava (1552–1555)
- Zhu Youlang, Prince of Gui, last Ming Dynasty claimant to China, lived in exile at Sagaing in 1661
- Maurice Collis, author of Trials in Burma, district commissioner of the Sagaing district in 1928
- Tom Mitford, brother of the Mitford Sisters, was killed while serving with the Devonshire Regiment at Sagaing in 1945.
- Zaw Hlaing Thein, politician
Places of interest
editThe Kaunghmudaw Pagoda (Burmese: ကောင်းမှုတော် ဘုရား [káʊɴ m̥ṵ dɔ̀ pʰəjá]; Yaza Mani Sula Kaunghmudaw (ရာဇမဏိစူဠာ ကောင်းမှုတော်); Pali: Rājamaṇicūḷā) is a large pagoda on the northwestern outskirts of Sagaing.
Images
edit-
Sagaing Hill -
Irrawaddy River from Sagaing Hill, Sagaing -
Pagodas -
Buddhist monks -
Viewpoint at Sagaing Hill -
Pagodas dotting Sagaing's landscape -
U Min Thonze cave -
Sone Oo Pone Nya Shin Pagoda, Sagaing Hill -
U Min Thonze Pagoda -
The Ava and Yadanabon bridges, connecting Sagaing and Mandalay -
Panoramic view from top of Sagaing Hill
See also
editReferences
edit- ^ a b General Administration Department (March 2023). Sagaing Myone Daethasaingyarachatlatmya စစ်ကိုင်းမြို့နယ် ဒေသဆိုင်ရာအချက်လက်များ [Sagaing Township Regional Information] (PDF) (Report). Retrieved 2 April 2025.
- ^ Hardiman, John Percy (1901). Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States. Superintendent, Government Printing, Burma.
- ^ Coedès, George (1968). Walter F. Vella (ed.). The Indianized States of south-east Asia. trans.Susan Brown Cowing. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-0368-1.
- ^ Irrawaddy article 1997 Archived 2010-10-04 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Mehrotra, Vani (28 March 2025). "Under-Construction Skyscraper In Bangkok Collapses After 7.7-Magnitude Earthquake Hits Myanmar". CNN-News18. Retrieved 28 March 2025.
- ^ "စစ်ကိုင်းတစ်မြို့လုံး ၈၀ ရာခိုင်နှုန်း ပြိုကျပျက်စီးပြီး လတ်တလောသေဆုံးသူ စာရင်း ၅၀ နီးပါး အတည်ပြုနိုင်ကာ ထိခိုက်သေဆုံးသူ ရာချီ ရှိနိုင်ကာ ကယ်ဆယ်ရေးလုပ်မည့်သူမရှိ၊ မီးသတ်ဌာနတစ်ခုလုံး ပြိုကျပျက်စီးနေ" [80% of entire Sagaing town collapsed, death toll currently at 50 with hundreds more casualties expected as no rescue efforts, one fire station collapsed trapping fire department.]. Khit Thit Media (in Burmese). 29 March 2025. Retrieved 29 March 2025.
- ^ "Myanmar earthquake leaves Sagaing in ruins as death toll surpasses 100". Myanmar Now. 2 April 2025. Retrieved 2 April 2025.
- ^ "စစ်ကိုင်း ပြိုကျဗလီ ၃ ခုထဲမှ ၅၄ ဦး အလောင်းတွေ့၊ မူကြိုကလေးများ ပိတ်မိနေဆဲ". Democratic Voice of Burma (in Burmese). 30 March 2025. Retrieved 30 March 2025.
- ^ "အင်အားပြင်း ငလျင်ကြောင့် စစ်ကိုင်းမြို့တွင် သေဆုံးသူ ၂၀၀ ကျော် ရှိလာပြီး ပိတ်မိနေသူများစွာ ကျန်ရှိနေ" [Powerful earthquake kills over 200 in Sagaing, many trapped]. Weekly Eleven. 30 March 2025. Retrieved 30 March 2025.
- ^ "မန္တလေးမှာ ဗလီ ၃၀ထက်မနည်း ပြိုကျပျက်စီးပြီး လူသေဆုံးမှုများ". LuduNwayOo. 28 March 2025. Retrieved 28 March 2025.
- ^ "ငလျင်ဒဏ်ကြောင့် သေဆုံးသူ ၁၆၀၀ ကျော်အနက် မန္တလေးတိုင်းတွင် အများဆုံးဖြစ်နေ" [Earthquake damage increases death toll past 1600, Mandalay Region most hit]. Myanmar Now (in Burmese). 30 March 2025.
- ^ Department of Population (October 2017). The 2014 Myanmar Population and Housing Census, Sagaing Township Report (PDF) (Report). MIMU. Retrieved 2 April 2025.
- ^ Myanmar Information Management Unit (September 2019). Sagaing Myone Daethasaingyarachatlatmya စစ်ကိုင်းမြို့နယ် ဒေသဆိုင်ရာအချက်လက်များ [Sagaing Township Regional Information] (PDF) (Report). MIMU. Retrieved 2 April 2025.
- ^ See Camberlin, Pierre (2010). "More variable tropical climates have a slower demographic growth" (PDF). Climate Research. 41: 157–167. Bibcode:2010ClRes..41..157C. doi:10.3354/cr00856.
- ^ "World Meteorological Organization Climate Normals for 1991–2020". World Meteorological Organization. Retrieved 16 October 2023.
- ^ "NAJAF - Weather data by month". meteomanz. Retrieved 28 June 2024.
