The Bawdwin Mine, a Pb–Zn–(Cu–Ag–Ni) deposit sited in the northern Shan States, is probably the most famous historical mine in Myanmar. One of several world-class mineral deposits within the country, it has seen near-continuous mining since the early 1400s to the present for a range of commodities including: silver, lead, zinc, copper and nickel. Originally exploited as a silver deposit (Bawdwin is derived from baw , the Shan word for silver and literally means ‘ silver mine ’), it was redeveloped in the early twentieth century as a dominantly lead–zinc producer, making it one of the largest producing lead mines in the world before the Second World War. The geology was first described early in the twentieth century and its nature and origin have been much debated since, but its genesis has remained enigmatic. In this paper we review both published and unpublished reports on work carried out at Bawdwin during the last century, and propose a new geological model based on these reports. Following a more recent classification scheme for volcanogenic massive sulphide (VMS) deposits, we assign Bawdwin to the siliciclastic–felsic VMS-type. Bawdwin was first exploited in the early fifteenth century by the Chinese. It has been estimated that from 1412 until the late 1800s 10 million ounces of silver were extracted from primitive mining operations (United Nations 1966); this continued until c. 1868, when the owners and operators fled on account of the Pantay–Taiping rebellions in Yunnan (Brinckmann & Hinze 1981). Between 1868 and 1885, the Burmese kings Mindon Min and Thibaw made ultimately unsuccessful attempts to revive mining and smelting at the site (BGR 1976). In the early 1900s Martin (1916), who claimed to be the first Westerner to visit Bawdwin in 1900, recognized economic value in the slag heaps left from the earlier Chinese …