CHAPTER XX
ARCHITECTURE AND ANTIQUITIES
All that is characteristic in Burmese architecture is embodied in buildings sacred to the Buddhist religion. Except the palace at Mandalay, there were, in recent Burmese times, literally no secular buildings of beauty, grandeur, or importance. The houses of even the highest officers of State were wooden structures, raised from the ground on wooden posts, situated in the midst of a spacious win (compound or enclosure) in which around the central buildings were scattered the smaller houses of retainers. Humbler dwellings, in town or village, were of similar type and in rural parts these conditions still prevail. In towns a good many masonry houses have been built. In Mandalay, there were some of these, but not many, in Burmese times.
Pagodas. Pagodas abound all over the country. The typical Burmese pagoda is well described by the early traveller, Fitch:
They be made round like a sugar loaf; some are as high as a church, very broad beneath; some a quarter of a mile in compass; within they be all earth, done about with stone...they be all gilded aloft; and many of them from the top to the bottom; and every ten or twelve years they must be new gilded, because the rain consumeth off the gold; for they stand open abroad[1].
The description holds good in the present day. But the great majority of pagodas, elsewhere than in large towns, are not gilded but simply covered with white stucco. Every village has its pagoda; and many are built in waste places, and on the tops of hills. The supreme work of merit is the building of a pagoda; the highest unofficial title of respect, paya-taga, pagoda-builder. The more pretentious pagodas
- ↑ Hakluyt, II. 393.
