Myanmar is overwhelmingly Theravada Buddhist, around 88 percent per Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, with Christian and Muslim minorities each around 4 percent and a smaller Hindu population. Buddhism reached the region by the early centuries CE and became deeply established under the Pagan Kingdom from the eleventh century, whose capital produced thousands of temples and stupas across the Bagan plain, among the greatest concentrations of Buddhist religious architecture anywhere; the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, said to enshrine relics of four past Buddhas, remains the country's most venerated shrine.
The Buddhist sangha has held enormous social and political influence historically, including leading roles in anti-colonial movements against British rule and, more recently, in the 2007 Saffron Revolution protests against military rule. Christianity took hold chiefly among ethnic minorities in the hill regions, including the Kachin, Chin and Karen, converted substantially through nineteenth and twentieth century American Baptist and other Protestant missions, while a Muslim population including the Rohingya, concentrated in Rakhine State along the Bangladesh border, and other longstanding Muslim communities descend variously from South Asian migration under British rule and older trade-era settlement.