Bodawpaya's stupa
Bodawpaya, the Konbaung king who conquered Arakan and moved the capital to Amarapura, was an ambitious builder and a ruler with grand religious claims, at times presenting himself as a future buddha. In 1790 he began a stupa at Mingun that was to be the largest in the world, about 150 metres high, to enshrine a tooth relic received from China. He moved to an island near the site to supervise the work, which used thousands of labourers and prisoners of war, many of them captives from his conquest of Arakan. The project was one of several on a vast scale in his reign, including the new capital of Amarapura, founded in 1783, and large irrigation works.
The work stopped when the base had reached about fifty metres. Accounts differ on why: the burden on the kingdom, a prophecy that the kingdom would fall when the stupa was complete, and the king's death in 1819 are all given. The structure that stands is a vast cube of brick with stairways and entrances on its faces, guarded by the ruined remains of two giant lion figures facing the river. A smaller model nearby shows how it would have looked.
On 23 March 1839 a strong earthquake cracked the brick mass in great fissures, and parts of the upper face fell. The cracks give the ruin its present appearance.
The Mingun bell
Bodawpaya also had a great bronze bell cast for the stupa between 1808 and 1810. It weighs about ninety tonnes and stands nearly four metres high. It was shaken off its supports in the earthquake of 1839 and rehung in 1896 by the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company. For a long period it was described as the largest functioning bell in the world, a distinction later taken by bells cast in China in the twentieth century. Visitors can stand inside it.
The Hsinbyume pagoda
Near the stupa stands the Hsinbyume pagoda, built in 1816 by Bodawpaya's grandson, later King Bagyidaw, in memory of his wife. It is painted white and built in seven undulating terraces representing the seven mountain ranges around Mount Meru, the centre of the Buddhist universe. Mingun is reached by boat from Mandalay and is one of the most visited sites of the region.
Further reading
- Coedes, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. University of Hawaii Press, 1968
- Gombrich, Richard F. Theravada Buddhism: A Social History. Routledge, 2006
- Harvey, Peter. An Introduction to Buddhism. Cambridge University Press, 2013
See also
- Konbaung Dynasty — The Konbaung dynasty was the last royal house of Burma, founded by Alaungpaya in 1752, which reunited the country, sacked Ayutthaya, repelled Chinese invasions and expanded into Arakan, Manipur and Assam, before losing its kingdom to the British in three wars between 1824 and 1885.
- Shwedagon Pagoda — The Shwedagon is the great gilded stupa on Singuttara hill in Yangon, said by tradition to enshrine hairs of the Buddha, enlarged by the Mon queen Shin Sawbu in the fifteenth century and raised to its present height of about 99 metres in 1774.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.