Shwedagon Pagoda

Shwedagon is a relic shrine, a gold reserve and the central political ground of modern Myanmar, and it has been all three for a long time.

The relic claim and the record

Burmese Theravada tradition holds that the stupa enshrines eight hairs given by the Buddha to the merchant brothers Taphussa and Bhallika, together with relics of three previous Buddhas, which would make it roughly two and a half thousand years old.

The documentary record is different. The first firm mentions are in royal chronicles of 1362 and 1363, when King Binnya U raised the stupa to about eighteen metres. Historians generally place its origins with the Mon in the medieval period.

Both should be stated, and neither collapses into the other. The relic claim is evidence of what the tradition holds; it is not evidence of what happened in the fifth century BCE.

Built by accretion of gold

The structure grew:

• Queen Shin Saw Bu, fifteenth century, took it to about forty metres and gilded it with her own weight in gold, a practice later devotees have imitated at smaller scale.
• An earthquake damaged the top in 1768; King Hsinbyushin rebuilt it to its present ninety-nine metres in 1775.

The gilding is not paint. It is plate and leaf, donated continuously, and the upper spire carries several thousand diamonds and other stones. The pagoda functions as a place where a community has stored surplus wealth in a form nobody can spend, for centuries.

Practice on the platform

Devotees walk clockwise and pour water over the planetary post corresponding to their day of birth, an eight-day week, with Wednesday split. The astrological scheme sits inside a Theravada shrine without difficulty.

Shoes come off at the foot of the stairways, and the rule is absolute.

The political ground

The British occupied the platform for most of the period between 1824 and 1929, using it as a fortification. Refusing to remove footwear was a colonial assertion, and the shoe question became a nationalist issue in its own right.

Everything since has passed through here:

• The student strikes of 1920.
• Aung San's address on independence in 1946.
• Aung San Suu Kyi's speech in 1988 to a crowd reported at half a million, the moment she became a political figure.
• The monks' processions of the 2007 Saffron Revolution.

A regime that cannot control Shwedagon does not control Yangon, and every Burmese government has understood that.

Shwedagon's gold covering is not a plating in the ordinary sense; large parts of it are periodically replaced entirely by donation.

More gold than a coat of paint

The stupa's surface is covered in gold leaf and, on its lower sections, gold plates, donated and renewed on an ongoing basis by devotees as an act of merit, a practice that means the pagoda's famous shine is maintained through continuous individual contribution rather than a single historical application. The spire is crowned with a metal umbrella-like structure, the hti, set with thousands of diamonds and other gems and topped by a single large diamond orb, replaced and re-consecrated during periodic renovations.

Rebuilt after every serious quake

The pagoda has been damaged by earthquakes repeatedly across its recorded history, with major rebuilding following incidents in the sixteenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that variously cracked or toppled its upper structure. Each rebuilding raised the stupa somewhat taller than before, so its current height of around ninety-nine metres is the outcome of accumulated reconstruction rather than a single original design.

Older than most surviving Buddhist monuments in the region

Archaeological opinion on the pagoda's founding date varies considerably, with tradition placing it well over two thousand years ago while archaeological evidence more securely supports a foundation sometime in the first millennium CE, a gap between devotional and archaeological chronology found at many long-venerated Buddhist sites.