The Tai kings of Laos and Siam led their courts in learning Pali from the Mon, whom they had conquered, and Sanskrit from the Khmer, whom they harassed nevertheless, seized with national pride and influenced by the Burmese example, they developed their own vernacular literature.

In the new Burmese kingdom of Ava (flourished after 1364), the Shan kings were proud of their Burmese Buddhist culture, and they appointed the new writers into royal service, with the result that courtiers became writers also. In Vietnam and Java literary activity centred on the courts but in Burma the first writers were the monks and, later, the laymen educated in their monasteries. The reasons behind the development of each were the same: a feeling of nationalistic pride at the final defeat of Kublai Khan’s invasions, the desire of the people to find solace in literature amidst change and struggles for power, and the lack of wealth and patronage to channel artistic expression into building temples and tombs. But in the 14th–15th centuries, vernacular literatures suddenly emerged in Burma and Java, and a “national” literature appeared in Vietnam. 1049–1300) have survived because the texts were copied and recopied by monks and students.

There are no examples of Chinese literature written in Vietnam while it was under Chinese rule (111 BC–AD 939) there are only scattered examples of Sanskrit inscriptions written in Cambodia and Indonesia yet most of the literary works produced at the court of Pagan in Burma (flourished c. From the point of view of its “classical” literatures, Southeast Asia can be divided into three major regions: (1) the Sanskrit region of Cambodia and Indonesia (2) the region of Burma where Pali, a dialect related to Sanskrit, was used as a literary and religious language and (3) the Chinese region of Vietnam.

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