Between 1548 and 1569 the Toungoo kings Tabinshwehti and Bayinnaung conquered the Shan states, Lan Na, Lan Xang and Siam, and made deportation a standard instrument of rule: skilled artisans, monks, soldiers and whole village populations were marched to the capital at Pegu, where they supplied labour and manpower for the next campaign, and defeated royal families were resettled at the Burmese court. Ayutthaya was taken in 1564 and again in August 1569, when the Siamese royal house and a large part of the city's population were carried north. The empire could not hold together after Bayinnaung's death in 1581: Siam broke away under Naresuan, and in 1599 Pegu itself was sacked by an Arakanese and Toungoo coalition and its own population dispersed, an inversion of what it had done to others. Everything known about the numbers comes from chronicle traditions written for later courts, Burmese and Thai, which differ from each other and use figures for effect. The atlas already covers the later phase of these wars, including the 1767 sack of Ayutthaya, in its entry on deportation warfare between Burma and Siam in 1759-1828.
The Toungoo kings of Burma conquered the Tai states and Siam and carried their populations back to Pegu as labour and soldiers
No defensible denominator exists. Mainland Southeast Asia has no sixteenth-century census; population estimates for Siam, Lan Na and Lan Xang derive from later fiscal registers, European travellers' guesses and modern back-projection, and published figures for the region around 1600 differ by a factor of two or more between Lieberman, Reid and Thai national historiography. Deportation counts in the Burmese and Thai chronicles are themselves formulaic.
No usable toll. Chronicles describe heavy mortality in the sieges of Ayutthaya and Vientiane and among deportees on the marches to Pegu, and famine in Siam after 1569, but the numbers given are literary conventions rather than counts.
Burmese, Thai and Lan Na chronicles describe the mass removal of captured populations to Pegu for labour and military service.
Thailand, Myanmar