WITH a land area of more than 676,000 square kilometres, Myanmar shares over 6,000 kilometres of land border with five states: Bangladesh, India, China, Laos and Thailand. It has a coastline stretching over 2,200 kilometres. There are mountain ranges in the northwest, north, west and east and in the central region, with two major rivers - the Ayeyarwady and the Thanlwin - running from north to south. Until the early 1990s, the border region had been war zones where drug-traffickers, warlords and insurgent groups challenged the government.
At the end of 2006, Myanmar's estimated population was about 56 million. The urban population was nearly 25 per cent of the total in the year of the last census, 1983. It is now believed to be around 39 per cent.
Myanmar is a multi-cultural, multi-racial and multi-religious society. Officially, there are 135 sub-national (ethnic) groups within eight major ethnic communities. The 1983 Census recorded that the Chinese made up 0.7 per cent and the Indians (including Bangladeshis and Pakistanis) around 3 per cent of the total population. The current distribution of the native ethnic groups is believed to be not much different from that in 2000, but there have been unofficial reports of large numbers of migrants entering from Yunnan since the 1990s. This could have more than doubled the Chinese population.
(source: Southeast Asia in a new era)
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