On the Road to Mandalay
On our way to the Bagan airport early Monday morning we counted at least eleven large monochromatic hot air balloons preparing to ascend for a bird’s eye view of the pagodas. We too ascended but for a view of Mandalay, which we reached after less than an hour’s flight. We met our new guide, Chit Sun Oo, and driver, Tun Tun, and drove directly to Maha Gandhayon Kyaung, a large monastery complex in Amarapura, one of the former capitals of Myanmar, and now a township of Mandalay. We watched in fascination as a double file of a goodly number of the fifteen hundred resident monks and novices filed past us on their way to lunch. Each carried a large black alms bowl, and this was their last meal of the day. Chit Chit explained that essentially all Buddhist boys enter a teaching monastery by age 10 or 12, first wearing the pre- novice white robe, and then the standard dark red garment. They typically remain for at least two years, some much longer, and others remain for life.
Leaving the monastery we next drove to nearby Taungthaman Lake to see the famous U Bein Bridge. The nearly mile-long crossing, built around 1850 from wood salvaged from a royal palace, is believed to be the oldest and longest teakwood bridge in the world. Many of its over one thousand original teakwood pilings still stand, but while presumably safe, the bridge felt rickety and swayed perceptibly as we walked across the narrow planking. While obviously an important historical relic, the local scenery was particularly memorable: fishermen with large triangular nets, large flocks of ducks accompanied by “shepherds” in long low boats, a farmer plowing the adjacent peanut field with two massive white oxen. (It was very difficult to select just one picture to capture all of this.)
After yet another delicious lunch of the no longer quite-so-exotic-seeming local cuisine, we visited Bagaya Kyaung an elaborately carved teakwood monastery built in 1834 and located across the street from the impressive gate of Yadanabon University.
Next we visited the Mahamuni Pagoda, where for about a dollar, a man (women can only watch from behind a barrier) can buy a small square of gold leaf and apply it to the huge Buddha. A photo display showed a completely bare statue in 1935 and the subsequent gradual accumulation of gold.
Perhaps the most extraordinary sight of the day was in the Kuthodaw Pagoda, what is said to be the “World’s Largest Book”. This is actually an orthogonally arranged collection of 729 nearly- identical whitewashed stone stupas each about the size of a one car garage. Inside each of them was a three by five foot marble tablet densely-inscribed with a portion of the Buddhist Tapitaka. When first unveiled, it took 2400 monks to recite the text, which comprised the first written record of the whole work. The pagoda was plundered by the British looters and took decades to restore.
Mandalay is bordered to the West by the Irrawaddy, the country’s longest river, which we first encountered a week ago in Yangon and much earlier in Kipling and the “Road to Mandalay” with Lon Chaney. We spent a couple of pleasant hours Wednesday on the water aboard the craft shown below, captained by the friendly guy helping Laura walk the plank. The long pole handled by his first mate was for fending off when docking next to other boats and to help unsteady passengers.
Traveling several miles upstream, we put in on the opposite bank at the village of Mingun, which is known, among other attractions, for having the world’s largest hanging bell and for the Pa Hto Taw Gyi pagoda, intended to be the world’s largest. (The bell’s foundrymen were executed to ensure that another one could never be made.) The huge pagoda was constructed in the seventeen-nineties by King Bodawpaya to house a tooth of the Buddha. The kingdom fell on hard times, and although built by slave labor, it was never finished to the planned five hundred foot height. Since then several massive earthquakes have all but destroyed the pagoda. Despite gaping cracks in the walls, the 162’ tall base of the pagoda is still an impressive presence, as was the king, who is said to have had 122 children. When we arrived, a fleet of gaily decorated ox carts were arrayed in front of the pagoda, and a red carpet led up from the dusty street. Even Chit Chit , as our guide prefers to be called, was surprised to see them. It turned out that the authorities had put on a show to entertain the wife of a visiting Thai general. Rank does have it privileges.
On the return leg we relaxed with peanuts and beer and enjoyed watching the river traffic that ranged from canoe-sized one-man craft to sizable barges, one with piles of thick bamboo stalks laid athwartship creating a load as wide as the boat was long. All these vessels were driven by one or two propellers on the ends of long shafts extending horizontally from the transoms.
After lunch we stopped by the King Galon Gold Leaf shop, which supplies the gilding for many of Mandalay’s pagodas. The leaf-making process begins with a tiny pellet of gold that is wrapped in a harden leather packet, fixed to a beach-ball sized stone with cords, and rapidly hand-pounded with a heavy mallet for about half an hour to create a very thin foil. A group of young women workers then remove the flattened piece from its packet and carefully divide it into up to about sixty smaller sections, each one much wider than the original lump. This process is then repeated several times more to produce the incredibly thin leaf. We bought a small 4” disk for 5,000 Kyat, about 5 USD, and now have to decide on which Buddha to apply it. Looking at a city map of Mandalay, we were struck by the size of the large, perfectly-square block of land that we learned was the location of the country’s last royal palace. Surrounded by about five miles of 200-plus-foot-wide moat, shown below, and tall, thick brick walls, the enclosure was stripped and plundered by the British in 1885, and later essentially obliterated by Allied bombing in WWII. Today much of the area is occupied by the military and is off-limits to the public, but the royal palace itself was reconstructed in the 1990’s. While historians cringe at what was built by the military architects, at least 52 hapless citizens were not ceremoniously buried under the gateposts, at least as far as anyone knows, as was done originally. Nevertheless, the reconstructed royal palace still gave us a strong sense of its former magnificence, not unlike Beijing’s Forbidden City.
Our last stop of the day was 790 feet above the city at Mandalay Hill. We skipped the “meritorious ascent” of the 1,729-step sacred stairway, but barefooted got to the shrine on top by escalator. Despite the thin smoky haze, which has ubiquitous in Myanmar, the view of the city below and the surrounding land was magnificent.
Early the next morning we drove out of Mandalay to Inwa, yet another of Myanmar’s many imperial capitals, this one dating from the fourteenth century. It was sacked and rebuilt numerous times and following a series of major earthquakes was finally abandoned in 1839. The highway was good, the outskirt of Mandalay soon thinned to a few roadside ramshackles, and after driving for only an hour or so we were out in the country. The road abruptly dead- ended at the Myint Ngai River, which flowed much swifter than the broad Irrawaddy. We scrambled down a steep muddy bank to board a small ferry, where we were the only passengers. On the other side, through a gauntlet of vendors – all comely young women — we came to a kind of equine taxi stand. Chit Chit selected one from the fifty or so waiting there and we set off down a narrow dirt road behind a briskly trotting ten year old pony, whose name we learned was something like, “Tra Tra”. (Repeated short syllable names are popular over here.)
Although there was little of Inwa’s former magnificence remaining, the several pagodas we saw were splendid and the ancient city center was still encircled by a wide moat, albeit filled-in, and surrounded by banana groves and rice paddies, such as this one with its great white egrets.
Burmese horse carts were not known for their shock absorbers and the ride along the sometimes tri-tracked lane was truly bone rattling. We were glad to reach the Bagaya Monastery, an exquisitely carved teak structure built in 1593 and still an active Buddhist teaching center. These monks were intent on their studies and completely unaware of us.
Moving on, we visited the no longer active Maha Aung Mye Bon Zan Monastery, shown below, whose name matches its architectural complexity, with a maze of dark tunnels in its base that provided a cool refuge for the monks during the searing summer months.
It was getting toward noon when we re-crossed the Myint Ngai on the same ferry and drove on to the area of Sagaing, where we had a nice Burmese lunch and then visited the U Min Thonze Pagoda, which had largest collection of Buddhas we have seen thus far.
On the way back to the hotel we walked around Kyat Sit Tan, a district thick with white marble dust, where shop after shop of stone carvers turned out Buddha statues ranging up to ten feet in height. Unfortunately, even the smallest would exceed our luggage allowance.