Mrauk-U: City of the Monkey Egg

Screened from the Ayeyarwady Valley by a long wall of jungle covered mountains, Rakhaing (aka ‘Arakan’) State in the northwest of Burma is today one of the most remote, under-developed parts of the country. Yet 350 years ago, its coastal strip formed the heartland of a prosperous and powerful kingdom presided over by the most cosmopolitan court in the history of southeast Asia.
Its capital was Mrauk-U (literally “Monkey Egg”), a port founded in 1430 by King Naramithla after he’d returned from exile in Bengal. Naramithla had fled his homeland following an invasion by the Burmese, and spent three decades across the border in the Bengali city of Gaur, soaking up its refined Turko-Afghan culture.
Thirty years later, his own court at Arakan would be no less sophisticated and hybrid that that of his former Bengali hosts. Buddhist traditions co-mingled fruitfully with those of Indo-Islamic India. Dance, music, poetry and philosophical debate flourished, both in Arakanese and Bengali. And a wealth of splendid pagodas, temples and palaces were erected on the banks of the River Kaladan.
Bolstered by thriving maritime trade, the new capital swelled to 160,000 inhabitants by the mid-15th century, attracting not just settlers from the hinterland, but Burmese, Bengalis, Afghans, Persians, Thais, Abyssinians and Japanese Christians, as well as Dutch and Portuguese fortune seekers. The king even boasted a personal bodyguard of Samurai warriors.
The accommodating spirit of the Arakanese court, however, would prove its downfall. In 1657, the Mughal prince Sha Shuha, son of the recently deceased Emperor Shah Jahan and former governor of Bengal, took refuge in Mrauk-U after a failed bid for his father’s throne. The royal fugitive and his entourage were generously received, but soon tired of their hosts’ generosity and made an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Arakanese king, ultimately paying for their hubris with their heads.
The executions, however, infuriated Shah Shuha’s brother, the new Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, who dispatched a punitive army to annexe the eastern portions of Bengal occupied by the Arakans, which effectively cut them off from their main source of prosperity at that time: slaves.
The loss was the beginning of the end Mrauk-U. With the Dutch discouraged by the Mughals from trading with Arakan, the port went into decline, the countryside lapsed into poverty, and in 1784, the Kingdom of Ava finally succumbed to another Burmese invasion. Hundreds of thousands of Arakanese men, women and children were massacred or taken prisoner, and the very symbol of their sovereignty, the Maha Muni image, was carried off across the hills to the Ayeyarwady plains.
Mrauk-U never recovered from the sacking. Marooned 65 km upriver from the coast, the vestiges of Naramithla’s once resplendent capital now stand forlorn maid the jungle, shrouded in cooking fires from the farming village that now nestles in the shadows of its ruined pagodas.

Shin Arahan: the Great Reformer

Legendary in the annals of medieval Burma, Shin Arahan is the missionary monk who, though his influence over four successive Kings of Bagan in the 11th and early-12th centuries, ensured Theravada Buddhism became the state religion of Myanmar at a time when it was fast declining elsewhere in Asia.
He was born in 1034AD, in the southeastern Mon Kingdom of Thaton. The local rulers had long since embraced Buddhism, but its beliefs and practises were increasingly under threat from Hinduism, which is why Shin Arahan, then a monk in his early 20s, fled north up the Ayeywarwady to meditate in a forest near the capital of Bagan.
Bagan in the mid-11th century the most powerful, prosperous city in central Burma, but its religious life was a wild mix of nat nature spirit worship, Tantricism and Tibetan-influenced Mahayana Buddhism promulgated by an order of forest monks known as the Ari, who were rumoured to engage in debauched rituals strongly disapproved of by Bagan’s King Anawrahta.
According to the Burmese chronicles, when reports reached Anawrahta that a yellow-robed monk "of pure heart and mind" was living alone in woods near his palace, he summoned the young ascetic to his court. But rather than perform the usual prostrations, Shin Arahan simply sat on the King’s throne – an act normally punishable with summary execution. The monk, however, claimed merely to be demonstrating his belief that “the only True Law was the teachings of the Buddha”.
The ruse worked. Anawrahta appointed the 22-year-old monk as his chief spiritual advisor, and Shin Arahan became the vanguard in Bagan’s battle with nat worship and the Ari order. At his behest, an army was dispatched south in 1057 to conquer Thaton, his homeland, whose King owned a coveted set of Buddhist scriptures known as the Tipitaka setting out the Buddha’s Three Sermons.
Bagan triumphed and its forces returned with thousands of Mon prisoners, among them architects, skilled craftsmen and scholars learned in Pali texts whose talents would be deployed over the coming decades building magnificent pagodas, temples and libraries – the splendid ruins of which still litter the Bagan Plains to this day. Their ranks were swollen by many eminent monks from the big Buddhist universities of northern India, at that time suffering repeated incursions by Muslim raiders.
Espoused by four generations of Bagan kings, Shin Arahan’s brand of traditional, pure Theravada Buddhism quickly spread across the kingdom, and by the time of the great reformer’s death at the age of 81, had taken took root in the neighbouring states of Siam (Thailand), Laos and Cambodia, where it remains the predominant school.
The monastery built for Shin Arahan by his first royal patron, Anawrahta, where the sage gave his first sermons in Bagan, is the principal memorial to the much venerated monk. It stands to the west of Hnget Pyit Taung Compound on the outskirts of Nyaung U.
Read more