Mandalay

King Mindon founded Mandalay in 1857, moving his court from Amarapura to a new grid laid out below Mandalay Hill, and the move was religious as much as administrative: a Burmese tradition held that the Buddha had foretold a great centre of the teaching at that hill in the twenty fourth century of the religion, and Mindon's chronology made his own reign the moment. He was the most conspicuous royal patron of the monastic community in the last century of Burmese independence, and in 1871 he convened the assembly Burmese Buddhism counts as the Fifth Council. Some two thousand four hundred monks are recorded as taking part in the recitation and comparison of the canon.

What distinguishes the Fifth Council from its predecessors is the medium chosen to hold its result. Mindon had the approved text incised on 729 slabs of marble, each set upright in its own small whitewashed stupa and arranged in rows in the grounds of the Kuthodaw Pagoda below the hill, so that the canon would survive the loss of palm leaf manuscripts and, as it turned out, the loss of the kingdom. British forces annexed upper Burma fourteen years later and the monarchy ended. The slabs are still standing, and the assemblage is commonly described as the largest book in the world.

The Mahamuni image is the most venerated Buddha figure in Burma and the reason many pilgrims come to Mandalay at all. Arakanese tradition holds that it was cast during the Buddha's own lifetime and that he breathed upon it, making it a likeness taken from life rather than from memory; historians place the casting far later. It was carried from Arakan to the Burmese capital in 1785 after the conquest of that kingdom, an act understood on both sides as a transfer of legitimacy and still resented in Rakhine today.

Male devotees apply gold leaf to the body of the image, which over generations has thickened into an irregular mass several centimetres deep, while the face is left clear and is washed each morning before dawn in a ceremony that draws a crowd every day of the year. Mandalay is also the centre of Burmese monastic education, with large teaching monasteries whose examinations in the Pali texts are competitive and nationally reported, and the city supplies much of the country's senior clergy. That concentration has a political edge, because nationalist monastic movements have drawn their strength from the same institutions, and the atlas records the city as a centre of organised religious politics as well as of scholarship.