Just south of Thaton, the mountain range opens up and there is a valley 20 km long offering passage to Hpa-an and eventually over the Three Pagodas Pass to central Thailand.

Historically, laterite was widely used as a building material in southern Myanmar, and today, it is also mined extensively for iron in the area north of Thaton.

[5]: 205–6 Silting has resulted in the coastline moving 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) away from Thaton, which is now a sleepy town on the rail line from Bago to Mawlamyine (Moulmein).

(Even among scholars who are proponents of the idea that Thaton was a major capital at this time period, the 1067 inscription is also rejected for the same reasons, and they say it could be no earlier than the 1500s.

The walls aren't perfectly rectangular, though — the northeast and southeast corners each have a few rounded segments that serve to "draw water off from streams flowing down from peaks on the escarpment".

[10]: 200 [note 1] The lower layers of Thaton's city walls contain numerous fingermarked bricks,[5]: 222  which according to Elizabeth Moore are characteristic of first-millennium architectural remains over a wide area including not just Myanmar but also parts of India and Thailand.

[10]: 204 Another relief[note 3] found at Thaton is a 1.2 m-tall depiction of Shiva sitting down, with his bull Nandi shown below his right leg and a "buffalo demon" below his left knee.

[5]: 222  The Kalyani sema are each over a meter tall and carved with panels depicting of the life of Gautama Buddha and floral designs at the top.

[4]: 82  According to Moore and San Win, repeated renovations and additions to pilgrimage sites has made detecting first-millennium remains "extremely difficult".

Anawrahta's southward expansion is well-documented in contemporary inscriptions, with about 28 votive tablets recording his activity as far south as Mergui.

[4]: 111–2, 149, 304 The earliest text to mention something like the conquest of Thaton is the Zambu Kungya, written by Wun Zin Min Yaza, who served as a minister under the Ava-period kings Mingyi Swasawke and Mingaung I in the late 1300s and early 1400s.

Instead, they refer to two completely separate things: in one part, the Pali version of the inscription says simply that Anawrahta "took a community of monks together with the Tipiṭaka and established the religion in Arimaddanapura, otherwise called Pugāma", without saying where the monks or texts came from; in another part, the inscriptions refer to the decline of Thaton during the reign of a king Manohor, without mentioning any sort of conquest.

[4]: 113–5, 124 Aung-Thwin interprets the Kalyani Inscriptions as a way of legitimizing Dhammazedi's religious reform to more closely follow what he saw as a more "orthodox" form of Theravada Buddhism of the Mahavihara tradition.

Thus, the story of Thaton's decline under Manohor was meant to "illustrate what happened when Buddhist kings allowed the religion to decay".

[4]: 115, 117, 151 The Jinakālamālī, written in Pali in the early 1500s by an author from Chiang Mai, is the first work to mention Anawrahta's conquest of Manohara's kingdom.

In any case, U Kala's version proved influential: it was used as a source for both the Yazawin Thit and especially the Hmannan Maha Yazawindawgyi, which "depended heavily on his work".

[4]: 136–7, 142–4, 150, 152 The Yazawin Thit, written by Twinthin Taikwun Maha Sithu in the late 1700s, introduces a couple of details not found in previous or contemporary sources.

[12] Thaton is home to the U Pho Thi Library, which houses an extensive collection of palm-leaf manuscripts, at the Saddhammajotikārāma Monastery.