Shwedagon Pagoda

When British forces took the pagoda platform in the 1820s, someone decided one of the large bronze bells there would make a good trophy. It was lowered off the hill, hauled to the riverbank and manoeuvred onto a vessel. It was too heavy. The bell went into the Yangon river and settled in the mud, and the British could not get it back up.

Local people offered to raise it, on one condition: the bell went back to the pagoda. That was agreed. Divers lashed bamboo poles underneath it, log by log, until the accumulated buoyancy of the submerged bamboo lifted the bell enough to be brought ashore. It is on the platform today, under its own small pavilion.

There is a second bell, said to have been far larger, which a Portuguese commander tried to carry off in the early seventeenth century and also lost in the river. That one has never been recovered. People still occasionally go looking for it.

Gold Measured In People

The pagoda stands on Singuttara hill in Yangon: a gilded stupa about a hundred metres tall, ringed by hundreds of smaller shrines, halls and images.

Its surface gold did not come from one ruler's decision. It accumulated. In the fifteenth century Shin Sawbu, who ruled Lower Burma, worked out how much to donate by putting herself on one pan of a scale and gold on the other — around forty kilograms, by her own body. This became a kind of unit, and the figures escalated; later rulers are recorded as giving multiples of their own weight. The gold on Shwedagon is a very long addition sum.

As for how old the whole thing is, two accounts run alongside each other. The traditional one has two merchant brothers bringing eight hairs of the Buddha here and the stupa being raised over them, which would make it roughly twenty-six centuries old. Archaeologists and historians generally place the original stupa somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries, built by the Mon. Both accounts circulate at the pagoda, and for most people visiting it there is no obligation to pick one.

What is certain is that the structure you see is a rebuild several times over. This is earthquake country. A large quake in the eighteenth century brought down the upper section, and the king of the day had it rebuilt taller, to roughly its present height. It was damaged again in 1930.

A Hill People Gather On

Shwedagon turns up repeatedly in Burma's twentieth-century political history, largely for practical reasons: it is high, everyone knows where it is, and it has a very large open platform. Student strikes were declared here. Oil workers' marches set off from here. Speeches before independence were given here. In August 1988 the crowd at the pagoda's western gate was one of the largest assemblies the country saw that year. In 2007 the monks' processions again started from this hill.

For a long stretch the platform was not only religious ground. British troops occupied the pagoda compound from 1852 until 1929 — nearly eighty years during which it functioned as a place of worship and a garrison at the same time, with soldiers quartered among the shrines.

Now

The gilding is still being added to. Visitors buy squares of gold leaf from stalls on the platform and press them onto designated images and surfaces; the higher parts of the stupa, which nobody can reach, are re-covered periodically with plates funded by larger donations. The crown at the very top, an ornamental tiered umbrella, is set with thousands of precious stones.

Around the base of the stupa are eight planetary posts. The Burmese week has eight days — Wednesday counts as two — and people go to the post matching the day they were born and pour cups of water over the image there. Early in the morning that is what the platform looks like: several hundred people, each at a different corner, each pouring their own count of water.

It is a good description of the building itself. Nobody made Shwedagon. A very large number of people each added a small amount to it, for a very long time, and it is still going on this morning.