On the terraces
of the Kothaung
temple, an
elaborate array
of miniature
stupas, or
dome-shaped
shrines, replicate
the structure’s
signature archi-
tectural feature.Seated Buddha
sculptures fl ank
a passageway
inside the ruins
of Mrauk U’s
largest temple,
Kothaung,
which sprawls a
massive 230 by
250 feet.ing a stream of diplomats, courtiers and foreign mes-
sengers bearing gifts. “The room of the bejeweled
throne is crowded, and Candrasudharma presides in
a kingly manner,” the Bengali poet Alaol wrote of the
monarch at the time of his visit in the 1660s, when
Mrauk U was at its zenith. “The noble counsellors
wear...divine clothes full of fragrances....All the
messengers wear many beautiful clothes, musk, al-
oes and sandal[s].” The Augustinian friar Sebastien
Manrique, who lived in the capital during the early
1630s, wrote of vast palace rooms “made of odorifer-
ous woods... which thus gratify the sense of smell
by their own natural fragrance. There was one room
known as ‘the House of Gold’ for being entirely orna-
mented from top to bottom in that metal.” The city,
said Alaol, “is a matchless place on earth.”
Those glory days ended in 1784, when Burmese
invaders crossed the range of hills dividing their
kingdom from Arakan and conquered Mrauk U after
several months. The soldiers marched the king and
his family, with other members of the elite, into cap-
tivity. Mrauk U was left to molder. The British, who
seized Arakan in the First Anglo-Burmese War in
1824 and ruled until 1948, had developed an interest
in Burmese archaeology during the Victorian era and
supported local restoration of the Shitthaung temple
in the late 1800s. But World War II and its aftermath
derailed those eff orts, and successive Burmese mili-
tary regimes cut off the country from the rest of theMA
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