Shwedagon Pagoda

The legend

According to the pagoda's tradition, two merchant brothers from the region, Tapussa and Bhallika, met the Buddha soon after his enlightenment and offered him food. In the Pali texts they are the first lay followers. The Burmese tradition adds that the Buddha gave them eight hairs from his head, and that they brought them home, where the local king enshrined them on Singuttara hill, together with relics of the three previous buddhas.

History of the stupa

Archaeologists generally date the first stupa on the hill to somewhere between the sixth and the tenth century, under the Mon peoples of lower Burma. Its recorded history begins with the Mon kingdom of Hanthawaddy in the fifteenth century. Queen Shin Sawbu, who ruled from Pegu from 1454 to 1471, enlarged the stupa, terraced the hill, and is said to have given her own weight in gold for its gilding. Her successor Dhammazedi, a former monk, set up three stone inscriptions on the hill in 1485 recording the pagoda's history, and cast a great bronze bell. The bell was carried off in 1608 by the Portuguese adventurer Filipe de Brito e Nicote, who meant to melt it for cannon, and it sank in the river, where it has never been recovered.

After an earthquake damaged the stupa, the Konbaung king Hsinbyushin rebuilt it in 1774 to its present height and gave it a new golden finial. Later kings and donors added further gold plating, jewels and bells. The crown, the hti, is set with thousands of diamonds and other stones and topped by a single large diamond.

The complex

The stupa stands on a large platform at the top of the hill, reached by four covered stairways. Around its base are dozens of smaller stupas, shrines, images and pavilions, and planetary posts at which visitors make offerings according to the day of the week on which they were born. The stupa itself is a solid bell shape of brick, covered in gold plate.

In modern history

The British occupied the hill as a military post during the wars of 1824 and 1852, and soldiers were quartered on the platform. The pagoda later became a centre of nationalist politics. Students met there during the university strikes of 1920 and 1936, and on 26 August 1988 Aung San Suu Kyi made her first major public speech to a vast crowd at its western foot. In 2007 monks marched from the Shwedagon in the protests known as the Saffron Revolution. It remains the most sacred Buddhist site in Myanmar.