On the morning of the third day we took a domestic flight that landed at Mandalay airport, where a private taxi driver was waiting for us.

A bit of history

The city of Mandalay, the economic and commercial capital of northern Myanmar, has a much more recent history than Yangon: it was founded by the penultimate king of Burma Mindon, who chose to build it at the foot of Mandalay hill for a prophecy.

In a few years what remained of the last Burmese kingdom after the second Anglo-Burmese war built Buddhist temples (which we will discuss later in this article) and a fortified citadel with 2 kilometers of walls and moats, completing it in 1859. The last Burmese reign of the Konbaung dynasty however lasted only 26 years, ceasing to exist towards the end of 1885, when the British annexed it to their empire during the last Anglo-Burmese war.

During British colonialism, towards the end of the 1800s, the city was connected to the rest of the domains by rail, but the first university was established only around 1920. Despite its remoteness from Yangon, Mandalay remained an important center of cultural and religious education. of Buddhism throughout the colonial period.
The city was heavily damaged during the Japanese bombing in 1942, and suffered many fires in the following decades, when all its infrastructure deteriorated due to the isolationism desired by the regime.

Thanks to new, more open policies, starting from the 1980s the city underwent rapid expansion, becoming the most important industrial and commercial center in central and northern Burma.

Exploration of the city 

The first day spent in Mandalay was nothing short of hectic, with many historic buildings to see for their particularity. Unlike Yangon and its chaotic center, Mandalay generally appeared much further away from the kind of modern city we Westerners know.

The Kuthodaw Pagoda houses the largest book in the world (by size), the Pali Buddhist Canon. Completed in 1868, it was engraved on 729 marble steles, each contained in a small white stupa. At the center of the complex stands a golden stupa, 57 meters high, similar to the Shwezigon Paya near Bagan. Each stele, measuring 1100x1520x13 cm, was carved from the marble extracted from the Zagyin hill, 50 km north of Mandalay, and transported by boat to the city. The text was written and copied by an assembly of Buddhist monks. Each stele has 80 to 100 lines of text on each side, engraved in Burmese characters. It took a scribe days to copy the text on both sides.

Obviously, during colonialism, the whole complex was looted and plundered of valuables, but thanks to continuous donations, the work was restored. The temple is very popular with the inhabitants of Mandalay, and is used as a place of cultural aggregation.

This beautiful monastery was built in 1878 entirely in Teak wood at the behest of King Thibaw Min to remember his father and at the same time use it as his personal place of meditation. The wood of the whole monastery is finely and skilfully carved by hand, and the sculptures tell stories and myths of the Buddhist religion.

Royal Palace 

The royal palace was the last residence of the kings of Burma before the final British conquest. Totally razed to the ground during the Second World War, it was rebuilt by the military regime in 1990.

Although modern materials were used due to insufficient funds altering its historical veracity, the huge complex deserves to be observed from above thanks to the watchtower, the only survivor of the bombing. Small travel note: during our visit there was a military checkpoint at the entrance worthy of a Hollywood spy-story! 

To reach Mingun we used one of the many boats moored on the right bank of the Irrawaddy, and we went up the watercourse for about ten kilometers. This is the best option to enjoy the surrounding landscape.

The immense unfinished stupa was observable from miles away, and could be seen rising from the underlying vegetation. The ruins, which form a colossal brick cube 50 meters high, are testimony to a work that would have been immense, becoming the largest Buddhist temple in the world. Commissioned by the self-centered King Bodawpaya in 1790, its partial construction was directly observable from one of his estates along the river.

Legend has it that the king slowed down the work because he received a nefarious one: at the completion of the stupa the kingdom would end or the king would die or both; in reality this prophecy could probably have been used following the infinite economic resources spent on its construction, in addition to the thousands of slaves used daily.

At his death, after 29 years of construction, only the first third was completed, and later its construction was suspended forever.The gash in the structure observable in one of the sides is the testimony of the violent earthquakes of 1839 and 2012.

Close to the unfinished one is the second heaviest bell in the world, the Mingun bell, with an enormous weight of 97 tons!

Hope the bell does not fall off while you are below taking some pictures: it took 59 years to hang it back on its supports after the 1839 earthquake!

A little further on we visited the whitewashed pagoda of Hsinbyume:this pagoda has extravagant wavy shapes that take their cue from the mythical Mount Sumeru, the mountain at the center of the Buddhist cosmos. 

Seeing the sunset on a boat was the icing on the cake of this unforgettable day.