DatarrX/my-era-konbaung

Eras of Myanmar Literature: Konbaung Era (ကုန်းဘောင်ခေတ် စာပေ)

This repository hosts a curated corpus of classical poetry, royal odes, epistles, and literary works from the Konbaung Era (ကုန်းဘောင်ခေတ်), forming the sixth chronological volume of the Eras of Myanmar Literature collection.

It is maintained as an open-access linguistic and literary resource under the DatarrX Foundation, curated by Khant Sint Heinn (Kalix Louis).

This release contains the currently available collection of curated records. The dataset is not yet a final or exhaustive collection, and additional literary works and historical texts are planned for future updates. The existing records have been curated and analyzed, with an emphasis on maintaining data quality and historical relevance.

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The Historical & Literary Significance of Konbaung

Spanning from 1752 to 1885 CE, the Konbaung Dynasty was the final royal era of Myanmar—an age marked by imperial expansion, courtly refinement, and an extraordinary flourishing of vernacular literature and performing arts.

In the history of Myanmar literature, the Konbaung Era represents the zenith of classical verse and poetic diversity:

• Expansion of Poetic Forms: Moving beyond earlier epigraphic prose and classical Pyo epics, Konbaung poets mastered intricate lyrical and musical genres, including Taydat (တေးထပ်), Laygyo (လေးချိုး), Lwangyin (လွမ်းချင်း), Patpyo (ပတ်ပျိုး), Bawle (ဘောလယ်), and Yagan (ရကန်).
• Literary Luminaries: The era produced some of Myanmar's most celebrated literary figures—such as Sale U Ponnya, Achoktan Saya Pe, Hlaing Hteik Khaung Tin, U Kyin U, and Ledi Sayadaw—whose works blended courtly elegance, Buddhist philosophy, wit, and everyday vernacular realism.

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Orthographic Note: Print Standardization (modernized vs. diplomatic)

Unlike the stone inscriptions of the Bagan and Pinya periods—which survive verbatim on stone stelae—Konbaung literature was originally inscribed onto perishable palm-leaf manuscripts (Pe-sa, ပေစာ) and folding books (Parabaik, ပုရပိုက်).

When these manuscripts were compiled, edited, and typeset into printed anthologies during the mid-to-late 20th century (particularly around the 1970s), editorial committees standardized their archaic manuscript spellings to conform with modern Burmese print orthography for contemporary readability.

To preserve scholarly transparency for computational linguists, every record in this dataset is explicitly tagged under the orthography field:

• modernized (232 records / 99.6%): Authentic Konbaung-era lexicon, prosody, and syntax transmitted through 20th-century standardized print editions.
• diplomatic (1 record / 0.4%): Epigraphic stone inscription text preserved with its original unedited orthography.

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Corpus Overview & Visual Analytics

This dataset compiles 233 verified literary works (4,538 lines, ~129.5K characters) across 25 distinct literary genres, with 99.6% attributed authorship and 100% genre classification.

Literary Genre Breakdown

Distribution of literary genres across all 233 works in the corpus:

Genre	Works	Percentage
Taydat (တေးထပ်)	86	36.9%
Laygyo (လေးချိုး & လေးချိုးကြီး)	43	18.5%
Lwangyin (လွမ်းချင်း)	35	15.0%
Dwaygyo (ဒွေးချိုး)	13	5.6%
Lutar (လူးတား)	12	5.2%
Myittaza (မေတ္တာစာ)	5	2.1%
Other Classical Forms (18 Genres)	39	16.7%
Total	233	100%

Top 10 Prolific Authors in the Corpus

Rank	Author	Number of Works	Share of Corpus
1	Sale U Ponnya	49	21.0%
2	Saya Pe	24	10.3%
3	U Kyee	14	6.0%
3	U Min	14	6.0%
5	U Yar	13	5.6%
6	U Mg Kalay	12	5.2%
7	U Paw Oo	11	4.7%
7	Maha Atula	11	4.7%
9	Hlaing Hteik Khaung Tin	10	4.3%
10	Ledi Sayadaw	9	3.9%

Data Schema

Each line in train.jsonl follows a clean JSON structure:

Field	Type	Description
name	string	စာမူခေါင်းစဉ် (Title of the literary work)
author	string (nullable)	စာဆိုရှင် (Attributed poet or author — 99.6% coverage)
genre	string	စာပေအမျိုးအစား (Poetic or prose form — 100% coverage)
orthography	string	စာလုံးပေါင်းသတ်ပုံစနစ် (modernized or diplomatic)
text	string	စာမူစာသား (Verified text with original stanza and line breaks)

The collection will be expanded gradually as additional literary works and historical records are identified, curated, and prepared for inclusion.

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About the Project & Series

The Eras of Myanmar Literature initiative seeks to systematically collect, preserve, and digitize the textual heritage of Myanmar across its major historical epochs:

1. Bagan Era (ပုဂံခေတ်) — DatarrX/my-era-bagan
2. Pinya Era (ပင်းယခေတ်) — DatarrX/my-era-pinya
3. Inwa Era (အင်းဝခေတ်) — DatarrX/my-era-inwa
4. Taungoo Era (တောင်ငူခေတ်) — DatarrX/my-era-taungoo
5. Nyaungyan Era (ညောင်ရမ်းခေတ်) — DatarrX/my-era-nyaungyan
6. Konbaung Era (ကုန်းဘောင်ခေတ်) — [This Dataset]

By converting fragile, scattered historical literature into standard JSONL datasets, the project aims to bridge classical humanities scholarship with computational linguistics, natural language processing, and open AI research.

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Attribution & License

Curated and released by Khant Sint Heinn (Kalix Louis) under the DatarrX Foundation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share, adapt, and build upon this dataset for academic, historical, or technical purposes, provided appropriate attribution is given.

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DatarrX's Official Website

• https://datarrx.org/