Păgan, the finest in the country, sacrificed his own son to ensure the success of his work.
To Nawyăta, the great Buddhist king of the eleventh century, is given the credit of founding the extensive irrigation-works in what is now Kyauksè District, to the south of Mandalay. According to the legend, a victim was about to be taken for each weir, when the sister of the Shan king of Myodyi, one of Nawyăta's queens, asked whether her death would not suffice for all. So she was slain, and at every weir was placed her likeness in a wooden figure overlaid with gold-leaf.[1] The king of Myodyi himself had a tragic death. He regarded himself as the equal in rank of the great Burmese king, but when Nawyăta sent for him to render homage he sank his pride and started for Păgan rather than drag his people into war. When he reached the whirlpool in the Zawdyi River, where it enters Burma, he was so overcome with shame that he threw himself in and was drowned. The boulders called the Brother and Sister, already mentioned, are popularly identified with this unhappy pair.
The Tamans, a remnant of a people living on the Chindwin River, have in most respects adopted Burmese customs, and profess Buddhism, while retaining their own language. Their tradition is that they came from China, and this is confirmed by the use of chopsticks for food set apart for their guardian deity at an annual religious ceremony in which a pig is sacrificed. The pig is slain with a club, and its blood sprinkled on the worshippers by a priest of the cult. The Buddhist monks, as usual, keep away. In the sacrificial shed are certain objects made of bamboo which are evidently a conventional representation of human heads. The wild Nagas of the hills near by are head-hunters, and, as remarked by Sir George Scott, head-collecting is merely a form of recruiting spirits as
- ↑ For illustrations of this and other figures see my "Lady of the Weir," in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for July 1916.
