Mingun

The night had not gone well.  Recognizing I was losing the battle, I began a course of ciproflaxin a few hours after midnight  --reluctantly, because the antibiotic wipes out one's best friends, the commensal bacteria of the gut, with more or less low-risk, but unpredictable, side-effects down the road such as a ruptured Achilles tendon, to, once recovered, the chance recolonization of the gut by some pernicious bacterium such as Clostridium difficile.

I sat out a morning opportunity to visit the U Bein Bridge in Amarapura, once the capital, but now subsumed by the urban sprawl of Mandalay.  This teak bridge, over a kilometer long, spans Lake  Taungthaman, and is as interesting for the activity going on below it as for the human processions on the bridge itself.

After a good lunch, by mid-afternoon I was myself again.  Our upriver destination was the small town of Mingun, by boat.  In 1790 C.E., King Bodapawya decided to build a monumental 150 meters tall stupa for himself.  He got to 50 meters before construction stopped after his death. Pahtodawgyi Stupa, still dominating both river-  and land- scapes, is now the largest pile of bricks in the world.

Bodapawya's  grandson, Prince Bagyidaw, at 18, married Princess Hsinbyume, 14.  After she died in childbirth when the prince was 27, he built Myatheindan, a beautiful white pagoda, in her memory. Different in style from other Burmese pagodas, it was built to represent Mt. Meru, which in Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain mythologies, is the center of all physical, metaphysical and spiritual universes.  I did not get a very good picture of the pagoda, and in the slideshow below have used the beautifully composed photo of Myatheinedan by Duncan Davidson.

The Mingun Bell, weighing in at just under 91,000 kilograms, was ordered cast by King Bodapawya for his planned stupa. It was cast on the opposite side of the river, and its transport to Mingun makes an interesting story.  It is still in splendid working condition, and is rung, not by a clapper, but by striking its rim.  Nearby, some fellows were playing a local version of hackey sack.

For me, more than the above, the value was in the fun of crossing from the boat to the river bank over a putative gangplank barely wide enough for two bare feet (if they were put one in front of the other rather than side-by-side!), with a railing nothing more than a rope held by a man standing on the bank, then clambering up the bank, and walking, rather than taking a bullock cart, to the sites. I did take a cart back to the boat dock.  The cart and the deeply rutted paths contrived with each other in an attempt to pulverize my spine, two kidneys, and liver. The boat trip back to Mandalay on the Irrawaddy was a nice end to the afternoon.