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cleared from time to time to reveal ancient pagodas
looming above the river. A bicycle rickshaw took him
to a dilapidated guesthouse, which had only candles
for illumination: The town had two hours of elec-
tricity each week and no plumbing. A plastic bottle
of drinking water was a rare commodity. “I knew all
the names of the temples, but never having been in
Mrauk U, I didn’t know where they were,” he recalls.
A one-eyed schoolteacher guided him around the ru-
ins on his bicycle, “telling me stories about temples
and kings that I’d never read about.”
Leider visited Shitthaung, the temple most revered
by local residents, and then entered the adjacent hill-
top temple, Htukkanthein, a near-windowless for-
tress built in 1571 by king Min Phalaung and topped
by a mushroom-shaped crown, or hti. “It was a myste-
rious place, linked to black magic,” he recalled. Leider
groped with a candle along mazelike corridors, at last
fi nding the ordination chamber, where he gazed upon
a golden Buddha illuminated by a beam of sunlight. It
was a perfect symbol, Leider thought, for man’s jour-
ney through darkness to enlightenment.
As he made his way out, he encountered a group
of young people playing guitars and singing Burmese
pop music, which he took as a sign of the cross-gen-
erational power of Mrauk U’s sacred sites. He left
Mrauk U with a feeling of wonder, and the satisfac-
tion of being one of the very fi rst academics to see the
place in decades. “You don’t run into 75 scholars who
have done work on this,” he told me.
Leider returned to Europe and, later, took a teach-
ing position at Chulalongkorn University in Bang-
kok, Thailand. Pursuing his doctorate on the his-
tory of Mrauk U, he revisited the city in 1996, 1997
and 1998. Back in European libraries, he combed
through the records of a Dutch surgeon, an Au-
gustinian missionary and others who had lived in
Mrauk U during its glory days, witnesses to its het-
erogeneous population.
Arakanese kings are said to have used Muslim-
inspired titles such as “shah,” and they stamped coins
with Arabic and Bengali inscriptions, suggesting a
close commercial and cultural relationship with the
sultanate across the Bay of Bengal. Moreover, Mus-
lim traders from Bengal, Indonesia and the Moluccas
lived inside the city and some established a cult of
Sufi saints—traditional protectors of seafarers.
In 1535, the great Arakan king, Man Pa, attacked
Chittagong, a prosperous port ruled by Muslim lords
for over a century, in what is now Bangladesh. After
Man Pa’s show of force there, the Muslim presence
in Mrauk U grew. Bengali poets patronized the roy-
al court, and musicians and story-tellers acted outSituated on a
hill, fortresslike
Shitthaung
temple was both
a monument to
the Buddha and
an impregna-
ble refuge in
wartime.Myanmar
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