By the middle of the nineteenth century King Mindon of Burma was ruling a kingdom that had already lost two wars to the British and most of its coastline with them. Upper Burma was what remained. He moved his capital to Mandalay, built it new, and set about the works a Buddhist king is expected to perform, of which the largest was a council.
The council itself did what Buddhist councils do: the Pali canon was recited and its text agreed. What made this one different was what happened to the agreed text. It was set down on marble. Seven hundred and twenty-nine slabs were inscribed and each was housed in its own small white stupa at the Kuthodaw Pagoda at the foot of Mandalay Hill, laid out in ranks so that the whole canon stands in a walled enclosure that a reader can walk through.
The motive was preservation of a very literal kind. Palm leaf manuscripts rot in a monsoon climate and have to be recopied every few generations; monastery libraries burn; and a king watching British power move up the Irrawaddy had reason to think that the institutions which did the recopying might not survive. Stone does not need a monastery.
He was right about the danger and the precaution worked. Mandalay fell in 1885, the Konbaung dynasty ended, and Burma became a province of British India. The slabs are still standing, still legible, and still visited, which is more than can be said for the kingdom that raised them.