Mandalay

From the Heho airport to Mandalay was 152 km.  Mandalay, the up-river town on the Irrawaddy River, was immortalized in Kipling's poem Mandalay which inspired Kurt Weill's Song of Mandalay, from Brecht's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagõnny in which the men in a bar in Alaska reminisce  on the pleasures to be found on the wharves of Mandalay.  The poem was also the inspiration for Oley Speaks' popular song On the Road to Mandalay.

Mandalay is a young city, only 156 years old.  It is approximately the same size as San Francisco with around a third of its population ethnic Chinese.  It was the last capital city of the Burmese Kingdom before the British occupation and  that of the Japanese in WW II . It is still the center of Burmese culture, and the main hub of Upper Myanmar's commerical, educational, and health enterprises.

In the afternoon we visited the Shwenandaw teak monastery, the only wooden monastery to survive the allied bombings of World War II.  Its wooden carvings are wonderful.

We also visited Kuthodaw Pagoda which contains the entire Buddhist tripitaka scriptures inscribed on over 700 marble slabs. These three scriptures make up the canons of Buddhist teachings:  the Sutras, the sermons of Buddha; the Abhidharma, the interpretations of Buddha's teachings; and the Vinaya, the regulations governing monastic life and personal behavior.

The sunset viewed from Mandalay Hill, and a dinner at the Green Elephant concluded the day.