Given the chaos, the governor of Yunnan ignored the imperial orders of evacuation. The Mongol army commanded by Prince Ye-sin Timour, a grandson of the emperor, marched south toward Pagan. According to mainstream traditional (colonial-era) scholarship, the Mongol army ignored the imperial orders to evacuate; fought its way down to Pagan with the loss of 7000 men; occupied the city; and sent out detachments to receive homage, one of which reached south of Prome. But not all colonial period scholars agreed with the assessment as none of the contemporary Mongol/Chinese records specifically mentioned the conquest of Pagan or the temporary completeness of the conquest. Recent research shows that the Mongol forces most probably never reached Pagan. They were held at bay by the Burmese defenses led by commanders Athinkhaya, Yazathingyan and Thihathu, and probably never got closer than 160 km north of Pagan. (An inscription dated 16 February 1293 by the three brothers claimed that they defeated the Mongol army.) Even if the Mongols did reach Pagan, the damage they inflicted was probably minimal. At any rate, the Mongol army suffered heavy casualties, and retreated north to Tagaung. They remained there as the treaty was now void. Aftermath The disintegration of the Pagan Empire was now complete. But the Mongols refused to fill in the power vacuum they had created. They would send no more expeditions to restore order. The emperor apparently had no interest in committing troops that would be required to pacify the fragmented country. Indeed, his real aim all along may have been "to keep the entire region of Southeast Asia broken and fragmented." It would be another two years until one of Narathihapate's sons, Kyawswa, emerged as king of Pagan in May 1289. But the new "king" controlled just a small area around the capital, and had no real army. The real power in central Burma now rested with the three commander brothers. The uneasy arrangement would persist until 1297. The Mongols continued to occupy northern Burma to Tagaung as the province of Zhengmian (Cheng-Mien) but ended the fictional central Burma province of Mianzhong on 18 August 1290. Meanwhile, the power struggle in central Burma continued with the three brothers blatantly consolidating support. To check their rising power, Kyawswa submitted to the Mongols in January 1297, and was recognized by the Yuan emperor Temür Khan as King of Pagan on 20 March 1297. The emperor also