36 SMITHSONIAN.COM | December 2019
AMANDAM
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ESmembers of his court. The variety and richness of
the images are astonishing, and attest to both the
king’s piety and ego.
With my translator and guide, Zaw Myint, a teacher
of English, I go deeper into the temple, called Shitt-
haung, and enter its heart: the ordination hall, conse-
crated for ritual ceremonies such as the upasampada,
the undertaking of an ascetic life in the manner of the
Buddha. Carvings of leering trolls loom on the lintel,
warding off evil spirits. At the far end of the room,
squeezed into an arched niche, is a ten-foot-tall seat-
ed Buddha with immense earlobes and a richly folded
tunic, all encased in gold leaf. Direct sunlight pierces
a narrow aperture, bathing the fi gure in what seems
like a divine aura; a halo painted vibrant blue, green,
red and yellow encircles the Buddha’s head.
A corridor leads into the meditation room, each
niche in the walls drilled with deep holes to elimi-
nate echoes and avoid disturbing the king’s contem-
plations. A sculpted footprint of the Buddha, as well
as friezes depicting the Hindu elephant-headed god
Ganesh and the supreme Hindu deities Rama and
Vishnu, amplify the chamber’s sanctity. “Everyone
was welcome here, but often the king came to seek
meditation alone,” says Zaw Myint.
IN A SHRINKING WORLD, the rediscovery of a re-
mote and fabled city is nothing short of miraculous.
And few abandoned civilizations have excited the
human imagination as much as Mrauk U. It was the
power and mystery of this place, tucked away in the
Burmese jungle and almost completely forgotten,
that lured a French historian, Jacques P. Leider, a
quarter-century ago, shortly after the military dic-
tatorship began to open the isolated country to the
world. The experience, he says, turned a nagging cu-
riosity into a lifetime obsession.
Now others have begun to share Leider’s fascina-
tion. Through early 2019, historians, hydrologists, ar-
chaeologists and reconstruction experts, under the
auspices of the government of Myanmar with United
Nations support, visited this city on a near-monthly
basis. Bouncing over dusty roads, crossing rice pad-
dies and climbing up disintegrating hillside trails in
the heat, the teams went searching for abandoned
glories scattered across the sleepy rural landscape.
Some experts believe that Mrauk U is as emblematic
of artistic and architectural achievement as Bagan,
the ancient Burmese capital on a plain alongside the
Irrawaddy River that contains the world’s greatest
concentration of Buddhist temples, pagodas andIn February, as
fi ghting between
the Myanmar
Army and Ara-
kan separatists
intensifi ed,
villagers living
near Mrauk U
prepared to
bury the body
of a woman who
was killed in the
crossfi re.Jacques P.
Leider (in Bang-
kok) launched
modern research
at Mrauk U 25
years ago: “You
were doing it all
starting from
scratch.”