Burmese Days 20: The Golden Rock of Kyaiktiyo

One of the pilgrimage sites of profound importance to Buddhists is the Kyaiktiyo Pagoda (Burmese: ကျိုက်ထီးရိုးဘုရား) in Mon State of southeast Burma. Most westerners know it as the Golden Rock because the actual pagoda is a small structure perched on the top of a granite boulder. The boulder has been covered with layers of gold leaf over hundreds of years by devotees, and it glows gold in the setting sun. According to legends, the Golden Rock itself is perched on a strand of the Buddha's hair, and indeed, the rock is said to rock very slightly. Considering that Burma is in an earthquake zone, I can't understand why it has not rolled down from its precarious perch.

The lower photograph is half of a stereo frame from Wikimedia Commons, "Kyaitteyo Pagoda, miraculously balanced by a hair of Buddha, on Kelasa hills, Burma", Date: 1900, Author:  Underwood and Underwood (in the public domain).

The rock and the pagoda are at the top of Mt. Kyaiktiyo. To reach the mountain, you drive to the town of Kin Pun Sakhan and board a lorry which has been outfitted with benchseats in the bed. Then the lorry grinds up the Golden Rock Mountain Road in caravan with other lorries. Much of the road is single-lane, so the lorries wait at sidings for other trucks going the other way. Finally, you reach the plateau area and disembark. The first impression is not very auspicious - sheds for the trucks, vendors of food and souvenirs, trash. Hmmm...

The vendors sell some strange food. Centipedes? Fish and cakes of unknown grain(?) or protein(?).

The upper reaches are accessed by steps after you pay an entry fee. Two large lions guard the entrance to Kyaiktiyo Pagoda, and from here on, you must be barefoot, which was difficult for my wife.

Families camp up on the marble platform. We met some adorable children. They look healthy, intelligent, and alert.

Monks discuss and smoke.

Models pose for photographers. This is an interesting place; like the Swedagon in Rangoon, almost a merger of religious site and country fair.

At dawn, families wait for the sun to cast on the Golden Rock.

Pilgrams donate food and lay it out neatly along the railing next to the rock. It makes quite a mess, and I am not sure if the food is for monks or if it is cleaned up and discarded daily.

Looking north, you can see that the entire mountain top is covered with restaurants and guesthouses. I think these are mostly for Burmese visitors, while Western tourists stay in a couple of hotels on the south side. We stayed at the Mountain Top Hotel, which was decent and had rooms with private bath. The setting with view to the east was sublime.

Finally the ride back downhill in the lorry, squashed in with as many people as they can fit. Truly, the Golden Rock is unique, and if you visit Burma, take a side trip to Kyaiktiyo. It takes about 4 or 5 hours to drive from Rangoon, and you need to charter a car and driver and pay for hotel and food. But just do it.

Photographs taken with a Fuji X-E1 digital camera, Nexus 4 phone, and on Tri-X film with a Leica M2 camera.

Burmese Days 19: Rangoon's Pegu Club in Tri-X film

Back during the British colonial era, Rangoon's Pegu Club was the rambling teak clubhouse where soldiers, petty and major bureaucrats, writers, journalists, and soldiers of fortune gathered, gossiped, plotted, acted snooty, despised the locals, and drank (mostly the latter). At its peak, the Pegu was one of the most famous gentlemen's clubs in Asia. This went along with Burma, in its peak, being one of the Empire's richest colonies, with immense resources of oil, timber, minerals, and agricultural products. Rudyard Kipling stayed at the Pegu, listened to the tall tales, and wrote his famous poem Mandalay here. George Orwell and drank and wrote here. In world War II, Japanese officers whored here.

From the Myanmar Times, 

"As Rudyard Kipling recalled after his one visit to Rangoon in 1889 as a young newspaperman, the club was “full of men on their way up or down”. He had time for only two stops in the city: that “beautiful winking wonder” the Shwedagon Pagoda, and the Pegu Club. Both astounded him. “‘Try the mutton,’” he was told. “‘I assure you the Club is the only place in Rangoon where you get mutton.’” But what stood out most was the morbid chatter about “battle, murder, and sudden death”. Its casual nature (“‘that jungle-fighting is the deuce and all. More ice please’”) gave him his first glimpse of the wars colonialism waged beyond its walls."

I wrote about the Pegu Club before (please click the link), but I recently scanned some more Tri-X negatives from my 2014 trip and thought the film views were more appropriate for this crumbling clubhouse. The view above is the grand entry hall (I think). A "Boy" (one of those despised brown natives, of course) would have welcomed a visitor with a cool drink. The stairs were collapsing and I did not risk climbing to the second floor.

There were so many rooms, I really can't tell how some were used decades ago. This room was in the rear of the building. (This is a digital image taken with a Panasonic G3 camera.)

This handsome room on the second floor had a large space without pillars. Was it a smaller ballroom or dining hall?

This room had remnants of dark panelling. Was this a library or smoking room for the men? It certainly would not have been a smoking room for the women.

An inner courtyard must have once been a formal garden. Mildew was attacking the windows, but I was surprised that most were intact. There is much less graffiti or destruction than you would expect. But will the Yangon Heritage Trust ever be able to raise the funds to restore the building and grounds? And how would it be used? A 2014 article in the New York Times outlines some of the challenges in preserving Rangoon's fabulous architectural treasures.

We encountered a young lady from Hong Kong wandering around by herself. She had a film camera and asked how long I had been into film.

I took Photographs 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7 with a Leica M2 camera with a 35mm ƒ/2.0 Summicron lens. This is the 7-element type 4 Summicron from the late 1990s. I braced the camera on ledges or windowsills because of the long exposures. I used Kodak Tri-X 400 film, developed in Kodak HC110 developer, dilution B at 68° F, and then scanned the negatives with a Plustek 7600i film scanner. The negatives had some lint and spots, which I cleaned with Pixelmator software.

December 2016 update: A corespondent in Europe wrote that a friend had tried to visit the Pegu Club, but it was closed and a guard was posted. I'm glad my wife and I visited in 2014, when it was open.

Burmese Days 18: The Taunggyi Fire Balloon Festival in Tri-X

Taunggyi, a hill town in central Burma at 4,700 ft elevation, is the capital of Shan State. It was a garrison town during the British colonial era and is now a busy commercial and administrative center. But most tourists know it for the famous fire balloon festival, during which towns in the surrounding region pool their talents and skills to build amazing balloons. Although rooted in Buddhist and Hindu cosmology, the festival resembles a rock concert or state fair.

The balloons are made of paper (yes!) and carefully pasted together in the shape of animals. Once airborne, you see giant cows or sheep floating across the sky.

The balloons are filled with hot air from open fires. Needless to say, an occasional balloon catches fire, either on the ground or partially aloft, burning up the hopes of the town that sponsored the team. It is all in good fun. In the USA, a fire brigade would be present and spectators would be told to stand well back. Here everyone runs and avoids the falling shards of burning paper. But I am surprised that they do not use some form of enclosed (no exposed flame) heat source to do the initial filling of the balloons.

If the launch is successful, the village team goes into celebration mode.

The local tough guy teenagers were in really good spirits.

In town, we saw nuns or novices waiting in line for food. It might be donated by people in town.

We had lunch in a local cafeteria-style restaurant. The chicken was excellent. At a place like this, if you are a typical westerner, you better drink beer or bottled soft drinks and avoid any raw vegetables or fruits. But otherwise, the fare was very good.

Photographs taken with a Leica M2 camera, mostly with a 35mm f/2.0 Summicron lens. This is the 7-element type 4 Summicron from the late 1990s. I used Tri-X 400 film, developed in Kodak HC110 developer, dilution B at 68° F, and then scanned the negatives with a Plustek film scanner. The negatives had some lint and spots, which I cleaned with Pixelmator software.

Burmese Days 17: Pots of Nyaung-U

Dear Readers, I need to catch up and finish writing some notes on my last Asia trip, during which I used Tri-X film in my Leica M2 camera.

Nyaung-U is a town in Nyaung-U District in the Mandalay Region of central Burma. It is on the left bank (east side) of the Irrawaddy River about 4 km from historic Bagan. My group stopped for lunch at an outdoor restaurant, but I found the adjoining pottery manufacture to be more interesting than lunch.

The pots are fired and then decorated. I am not sure if they are fired a second time.

Some of them were being loaded into a lorry. Note the lack of steel toe boots, just flip flops.

Being near Bagan, there were pagodas and stupas in town, some intact, some crumbling.

Ancient Bagan (Burmese: ပုဂံ) is one of the architectural wonders of Asia. According to Wikipedia, "From the 9th to 13th centuries, the city was the capital of the Kingdom of Pagan, the first kingdom to unify the regions that would later constitute modern Myanmar. During the kingdom's height between the 11th and 13th centuries, over 10,000 Buddhist temples, pagodas and monasteries were constructed in the Bagan plains alone, of which the remains of over 2200 temples and pagodas still survive to the present day."

A 2002 article in Smithsonian, titled "Sacred and Profaned," outlines some of the  challenges with preserving the temples at Bagan. Many have been rebuilt with new bright brick or thick concrete, in shocking contrast to the ancient carved sandstone facades. A major problem with concrete, other than its lack of authenticity, is its rigidity. Bagan is in a seismically active area, and concrete makes the buildings rigid and less able withstand tremors.

We took an evening boat ride on there Irrawaddy. We were told that the lights on the far (west) bank  of the river were oil-drilling operations. Burma was one of the pioneering oil-producing areas in the 1800s, rivaling Pennsylvania and the Caspian region. I do not know what the reserves are now, but it may help with the country's foreign trade as it modernizes.

Photographs taken with a Leica M2 camera with 35mm or 50mm Summicron lenses. The 35 was the 7-element type 4 Summicron from the late 1990s. I think black and white film suited the mood here perfectly. I exposed the Tri-X at ISO 320 and developed it in Kodak HC110 developer at dilution B for 4:30 minutes and scanned the negatives with a Plustek scanner. There were small flaws and scratches on some of the negatives, which I cleaned with Pixelmator software. I thank my travel companions for being patient while I took film photographs.

Burmese Days 16: Mandalay's Marble-carving Street

Mandalay is famed for its artists and, especially, for stone carvers. Near the western entrance of the Mahamuni Paya is a lane called Kyauk Sit Tan (near 85th Street) which is lined with shops where workers trim, carve, polish, and finish marble. Most of the statues are variations of Buddha.

I was told that the stone carvers come from a limited number of families, who have dominated this skill for generations. Young men and women learn from their elders. The amount of skill can be seen in the progress of carving a statue. The newer or less-skilled workers carve the gross features of a statue and work on the clothing. Then the artists carve the faces. (The two photographs above are from Kodak Tri-X film exposed in a Leica M2 camera).

Stone-carving is dusty and hazardous. Many of the workers eventually get silicosis. I saw that few were wearing respirators or eye protection. Look at the young man in the third photograph - he is coated in rock powder. The Irrawaddy newspaper wrote about the health risks to the stone carvers and the need to relocate the operations to a site further away from the city.

The final polishing and smoothing is done by ladies, working with water and fine grit or polishing cloths. It is hard work.

Finally, the finished product is shipped to the buyer, who may be a wealthy individual, monastery, government office, or foreign customer. Many of the finest statues go to Thailand, Vietnam, and the United States. The Buddha in the photograph above was so heavy, five men had trouble maneuvering it to a truck.

The marble comes from Sagyin Mountain, about 32 miles north of Mandalay. The rock has been quarried for centuries. Five mountains in the area produce white marble, but they are being rapidly depleted by modern, industrial-scale mining. Last November, some of my Burmese friends told me there was a lot of objection to the sale of marble to Chinese companies. The fishermen above were trying to convince Irrawaddy dolphins to drive fish into their nets; part of the Sagyin Mountain is in the background.

Three photographs were taken with Tri-X film on a Leica M2 camera, with film developed in Kodak HC-110 developer. The digital files are from a FujiFilm X-E1 camera, processed with PhotoNinja software.

Burmese Days 15: Up the Irrawaddy

In the previous post, I posted some photographs from the Mandalay waterfront. Let's take a short boat trip upriver.

These long, thin, teak boats carry cargo, passengers, and animals, anything to earn a kyat. The ones set up for tourists are pretty comfortable.

You can be active and watch the unfolding scenery or snooze the day away. The diesel engine is noisy, but they do not run it at night. The boat's cook will prepare breakfast, but we brought our own coffee and filters.

Some of the commercial steamers (diesels) are pretty impressive - heavily laden with barrels and merchandise.

For the night, we pulled up to  a sand bank/sand island. These islands look rather barren, but families graze their cattle and set up residence during the low-water months. In some areas, they till the rich alluvial soil and grow crops. I wonder how they claim an area to farm? We fell asleep to the tinkle of a bell and aroma of cow dung.

Some of the local fishermen fish in cooperation with the now-endangered Irrawaddy dolphin (Orcaella brevirostris). The fishermen stand up in their boats and slap the water with their oars. The dolphins have been trained to know that this is fishing time. They herd fish into the nets and benefit from the bycatch that tumbles out or is discarded when the nets are pulled in. The day we watched the procedure, the dolphins were not very enthusiastic. The main threat to dolphin populations is habitat loss and accidents with nets. The dolphin populations in Indonesia and the Mekong River are almost extinct. These fishermen have a tough life. I gave a package of peanuts to the lady (the second photograph), and she ate them eagerly. She was hungry.

On another boat trip, we stopped on another sand island where some local families had been farming. It is hard work, and summer heat must be stifling. The high water is in July, August, and September, when the monsoon delivers tremendous rainfall to the jungles of central Burma and southern Himalaya. Melting of snow and glaciers in northern Burma adds to the volume. I could not find any recent hydrographs (a plot of flow rate (discharge) versus time at a specific location on the river). Possibly the Burmese government does not have a stream-gauging program, although the design of the controversial dams further north must have been based on some sort of data.

Finally, we saw some riverbank erosion control work near a village. I could not tell what the wood frames were intended to do, and the rock riprap was too small. They should have requested help from the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory via a request through the State Department. A coworker told me that on some rivers and canals, sticks or frames like this are used for mussel production. Eventually, the mussels grow so thick that they form a type of living shore protection (and can be harvested as food). This concept here in USA is known as Engineering with Nature (EWN). Possibly Irrawaddy flood control activities are tied up with the politics of the Myitsone Dam. The dam would be the first to span the Irrawaddy and have high social and environmental impacts. The Irrawaddy is one of the few remaining great rivers on earth without dams, with fish migration possible from ocean to headwaters. Activists have (hopefully permanently) suspended the dam project.

Three photographs were taken on Tri-X film using a Leica M2 camera; the rest were digital files reprocessed into black and white with PhotoNinja software.