The Shwedagon and the Hair Relics

The Shwedagon Pagoda stands on Singuttara Hill above Yangon, a bell shaped stupa plated in gold with a crown of gem set finials, surrounded by a terrace of shrines, planetary posts and smaller stupas that a visitor walks clockwise. Burmese tradition holds that two merchant brothers, Tapussa and Bhallika, met the Buddha shortly after his enlightenment, received eight hairs from his head, and brought them home, where they were enshrined on the hill together with relics of the three Buddhas who preceded him in this world age.

Historians date the structure in its present form to rebuilding campaigns from the fifteenth century onward, with the height raised repeatedly by royal patrons; Queen Shin Sawbu is credited with giving her own weight in gold. Worshippers pour water over the small Buddha image at the planetary post of the weekday on which they were born, a practice that ties a personal horoscope to the fixed geography of the terrace. The pagoda has also been a political place for as long as Burma has had modern politics. Aung San addressed a mass meeting on its western stairway in 1946, students gathered at its steps in the rising of 1988, and the monks who marched in September 2007 in what became known outside the country as the saffron revolution set out from it.