December 2019 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 43dossier, with the goal of restoring as much of it as possible. We
want to bring it back to life.”
Just a stone’s throw away from the crumbling garrison,
rising over rice paddies stretching into the distance, lies the
largest and what many consider the most ambitious temple in
Mrauk U: Kothaung. In a gesture of fi lial one-upmanship, Man
Pa’s son and successor, Min Dikkha, who ruled the Arakan
Kingdom for three years, built the structure over six months
in 1553. He topped it with a six-story stupa and fi lled it with
90,000 sculptures and reliefs of the Buddha—10,000 more
images than the temple built by his father contains.
I climbed fi ve receding terraces fl anked by hundreds of
smaller stupas, entered the shrine, and followed ornate vault-
ed corridors crisscrossed by shafts of light and spiraling to-
ward an inner chamber. The carved faces of hideous ogres
guarded every doorway. The walls at fi rst appeared to be
covered with indecipherable inscriptions. Closer inspection
of the engravings revealed them to be tiny carvings of the
Buddha, some no larger than postage stamps, covering every
inch of the sandstone surfaces, the walls broken at regular in-
tervals by pedestals. On each platform sits a Buddha in the
classic Bhumisparsha mudra position. His right hand reach-
es over his right knee toward the ground—a gesture said to
capture the precise moment of his spiritual awakening and
his designation of the earth as witness to his enlightenment.
Though still splendid in places, Kothaung has deteriorat-
ed badly over the centuries. Unlike Shitthaung, which was
embraced by locals and restored by the Burmese military,
Kothaung disintegrated, largely forgotten, in an isolated part
of the city. Jungle growth completely covered it until 1996,
when the regime began to authorize clearing of the vegeta-
tion. Since then little restoration has been accomplished.
Much of the roofi ng has collapsed, exposing row upon row
of Buddha fi gurines to the elements. Buried under heaps
of roofi ng tiles, stones, bricks and other debris, many of
the sculptures have toppled off pedestals. Others are miss-
ing noses and ears, or have been smashed into
stumps. According to legend, the damage was
caused by lightning bolts sent down as punish-
ment to Min Dikkha for his attempt to surpass
his father’s achievement.JACQUES LEIDER BEGAN studying the history
of Arakan as a graduate student in the 1980s,
during the darkest years of the Burmese military
dictatorship. Not much was known. He was en-
tirely dependent for information on a handful of
photographs and articles, plus early 19th-century
correspondence inscribed on palm leaves, then
copied onto bound paper volumes, gathered by
an English wine trader and administrator for the
British East India Company in Arakan; those re-
cords are now stored at the Bibliothèque Natio-
nale in Paris. “The internet didn’t exist, nobody
knew how Mrauk U looked,” Leider told me over
a rice and chicken-curry dinner at the Mrauk U
Hotel, a cluster of rustic bungalows on the town’s
main road, after a long day exploring the ruins in
the heat. I had encountered him briefl y with oth-
er Unesco consultants on top of an ancient stone
fortress on the edge of Mrauk U that afternoon,
but this was our fi rst opportunity to talk one-on-
one. “It was one of the most isolated places in a
self-isolating country. I was working blind for
seven years.”
In early 1994, the cash-strapped military dicta-
torship, sensing tourism possibilities, cautiously
opened the area to foreigners. Exhilarated at the
prospect of seeing Mrauk U for himself, Leider
boarded a fl ight in Yangon at the height of the
rainy season, fl ew to Sittwe, the capital of Rakh-
ine State, and took a ferry at dawn up the Kaladan
River for six hours—the only way to travel to
Mrauk U in those days. The boat chugged through
dense morning fog, which CONTINUED ON PAGE 78