Built in 1886, Holy Trinity Church (Yangon) perhaps the oldest colonial structure in Yangon. Holy Trinity Cathedral, an Anglican Church, was first used for Divine Service on the Second Sunday of Advent, 1865. The church held no bell, no pulpit, no font, no punkah (!), no lamps, no organ or other musical instrument, but at least it was there. It had cost 72,000 rupees, of which 10,000 had been raised by public subscription. And greater things were in store, for the English population of Rangoon was growing, and quite soon there was talk of the replacing the church with a cathedral.

STRUCTURE & LAYOUTS

This is the Anglican cathedral in Rangoon designed by Robert Fellowes Chisholm. Seemingly transplanted from England – but note the adaptation to the tropics in the porte-cochere at the base of the tower to shelter worshipers from the rain.  Although the foundation stone had been laid in 1886 by the then Viceroy of India Lord Dufferin, due to a shortage of funds it took 9 years to complete the church vestibule. The spire was added in 1913 and the bell tower installed in the following year. During the Japanese Occupation of Rangoon, the cathedral was used as a brewery! After liberation, the chapel was dedicated to the British/Indian 14th and 12th Armies who fought in the Burma Campaign.

Holy Trinity Cathedral is located at 446 Bogyoke Aung San Street, on the edge of the downtown area, a little past the Bogyoke Aung San Market as you come from the Yangon Station.  It is, of course, listed among those Top 200 buildings on the Yangon City Development Committee’s Heritage List.

Sources: ChurchCrawler, TalesOfAsia

Whenever I plan to shoot, there it rains… Finally, I had my shooting with an umbrella… A nice framing shot from the front right corner of the compound…

Built in 1886, that’s the oldest colonial structure in Yangon…

Feel the grandness of the cathedral… That’s located at the heart of Yangon…

That’s a bird-eye view of the cathedral taken from the fly-over…

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Today, 26 Oct 2009, is the one year birthday anniversary of my blog.  So, here is anniversary special post for you.  I have been busy with work lately.  My apology for not updating the blog on regular basis.  But I will try my best.  YOU know how much I love my blog.

A BRIEF BACKGROUND

THE THARABA GATEWAY (also known as SARABHA GATEWAY) is the main gate of the east wall and the only structure left of the old city built by King Pyinbya in the 9th century A.D.  Traces of stucco carvings on the frieze are visible on the exterior walls.  The entrance to it is guarded by two guardian nats or spirits.  The two spirits are of brother and sister, each of whose image is deposited in a masonry shrine, the male on the left and the female on the right as once enters the city by it.

Yes, that’s the entrance to Bagan…

I saw this cart passing by and had a snapshot...

It was Ko J's idea to climb up to the wall and shoot... Finally, we did that...

That's the inner part of gate... That's our ride during Bagan trip...

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အခုလာမယ္႔ ၂၀၀၉ ေအာက္တိုဘာလ ၂၆ ရက္ ဆိုရင္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ဘေလာ႔ဂ္ေရးတာ တစ္ႏွစ္ တိတိ ျပၫ္႔ပါၿပီ ခင္ဗ်ား။ YELWINOO.COM ရဲ႕ တစ္ႏွစ္ျပၫ္႔ ေမြးေန႔ လို႔လဲ ေျပာလို႔ရတယ္။ မွတ္မွတ္ ရရ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ပထမဆံုး တင္ျဖစ္ခဲ႔တဲ႔ ဓါတ္ပံုေလးက NOVICES ဆိုတဲ႔ ေခါင္းစဥ္ေလးနဲ႔ ပါ။ နာဂစ္ မုန္တိုင္း ကယ္ဆယ္ေရး အစီအစဥ္ နဲ႔ ဧရာ၀တီတိုင္း ၊ ဖ်ာပံု ခ႐ိုင္ ၊ ဖ်ာပံု ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ ၊ ေလးအိမ္တန္း ေက်း႐ြာကို ေရာက္ခဲ႔စဥ္က ႐ြာဦးဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာင္းမွာ ကိုရင္ေလး ႏွစ္ပါးကို အမွတ္မထင္ ႐ိုက္ခဲ႔တဲ႔ ပံုေလးပါ။ မေတာက္တစ္ေခါက္ ႐ိုက္ထားတဲ႔ ပံုေလးေတြနဲ႔ ညီငယ္ေလး မ်ိဳးေက်ာ္ထြန္း ရဲ႕ တိုက္တြန္းမႈ ၊ ကၽြန္ေတာ္႔ အေဖ ရဲ႕ အားေပးမႈ ေတြက ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ဒီေန႔ ဒီအခ်ိန္ အထိ ပံုေတြ ဆက္တိုက္တင္ ဖို႔အတြက္ အဓိက တြန္းအား ျဖစ္ခဲ႔တာပါ။ သြားရင္းလာရင္းနဲ႔ ေတြ႕လို႔ ႐ိုက္ထားတာေလးေတြ ႐ိွသလို ၊ ဘေလာ႔ဂ္မွာ တင္ဖို႔ဆိုၿပီး တသီးတသန္႔ ထြက္႐ိုက္ခဲ႔တာေတြလည္း တစ္ပံုတစ္ပင္ ရယ္ပါ။ တစ္ႏွစ္ ဆိုတဲ႔ ကာလ တစ္ခုမွာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္႔ကို အၿမဲတေစ အားေပး ကူညီ ခဲ႔တဲ႔ သူငယ္ခ်င္း ၊ အေပါင္းအသင္းေတြ ႐ိွသလို ဘယ္ကမွန္းမသိ ၊ ဘေလာ႔ဂ္ကို လာၿပီး ေအာက္တန္းက်တဲ႔ ကြန္မန္းေတြ လာေရးသူေတြလဲ ႐ိွပါတယ္။ အဲဒီ ဘေလာ႔ဂ္ လုပ္ရတဲ႔ ရည္႐ြယ္ခ်က္ ၊ ကၽြန္ေတာ္႔ရဲ႕ ခံယူခ်က္ ၊ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ရင္းႏွီး ခဲ႔တဲ႔ အခ်ိန္ ၊ ေငြ စတာေတြက နဲနဲေနာေနာ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ ဘာမဟုတ္တဲ႔ ၂ ေၾကာင္းေလာက္ ႐ိွတဲ႔ ဒီ ေအာက္တန္းစား ကြန္မန္း ေတြကို အေရးလုပ္လို႔ ကၽြန္ေတာ္႔ ဘေလာ႔ဂ္ကို ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ဖ်က္သိမ္းဖို႔ေတာ႔ အစီအစဥ္ မ႐ိွတာ အမွန္ပါ။ ဒီလိုေျပာလို႔ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ဘေလာ႔ဂ္မွာ ခ်ီးက်ဴးတဲ႔ ကြန္မန္းေတြ သာေရးရမယ္ လို႔ ဆိုလိုတာ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ သင္ယူေနဆဲ ဓါတ္ပံုသမား တစ္ေယာက္ ပီပီ ကၽြန္ေတာ္႔ကို Technical, Shooting, Camera Setting, Lighting, Angle အစ ႐ိွတဲ႔ Fault ေတြကို ေထာက္ျပႏိုင္တဲ႔ ကြန္မန္းမ်ိဳးကို ကၽြန္ေတာ္ အၿမဲ တေစ ႀကိဳဆို လ်က္ပါ။ ကိုေမာင္လွ ၊ မ်ိဳးေက်ာ္ထြန္း ၊ ကိုမ်ိဳးဟန္ထြန္း ၊ ကိုေဂ် ၊ ညီမင္းစံ ၊ ႏိုင္ႏိုင္ထြန္း (Exposure) နဲ႔ ကိုထြန္းလင္းစိုး (Rain Stealer) အစ ႐ိွတဲ႔ ညီေနာင္ေတြ က ကၽြန္ေတာ္႔ ပံုေတြကို Technical Point of View ကေန အၿမဲ အႀကံျပဳ ေ၀ဖန္ ေနခဲ႔တာပါ။ သူတို႔ ေတြကိုလည္း အရမ္းကို ေက်းဇူး တင္ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီလို ကြန္မန္းေတြသာ မရခဲ႔ဘူး ဆိုရင္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ဒီေန႔ ၊ ဒီအခ်ိန္ ႐ိုက္ေနတဲ႔ ဓါတ္ပံုမ်ိဳးေတြ ဆိုတာ ဘယ္နား ေနမွန္းေတာင္ သိမွာ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။

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In Myanmar, there are seasonal festival in every month of Myanmar Lunar Calendar. These festivals develop harmony among the Myanmar people and make them relax both in terms of mentally and physically.  The lunar Thadingyut month falls in October. At the middle of the month, the Thadingyut festival, which is also known as War Kyut festival is celebrated throughout the country, especially on the full moon day.

Different regions celebrate Thadingyut in accordance with their respective rituals and traditions.  People decorate  pagodas, monasteries , houses and streets with various kinds of lighting: candles, oil lamps, oil lamps posts, lanterns, electrical bulbs, etc. for about 3 days. Some entertainments such as  stage shows, dances  traditional opera (in Burmese: Zat Pwe) are shown. Some regions pay homage to Lord Buddha with 9,000 Lights (See Mie Koe Htaung), some areas organize alms offering and free food donation for all visitors rich or poor (in Burmese: Sa Tu Di Tha), some celebrate with classical dances and sport competition and the likes.

Apart from the usual celebrations, people from TAVOY of Tenasserim Division celebrate a special  occasion: the FESTIVAL OF ALMS BOWL FLOWS (in Burmese: Tha Beik Hmyaw Pwe) at the early morning hours of the Full Moon day of Thadingyut. They usually put candles, joss sticks, fruits and money into the bowl and let it flow along the river. They said to pay respect to the noble Shin U Pa Gotta, the guardian of the sea in Buddhism.

And SHWE KYIN of Bago Division celebrate Thadingyut inimitably. People from these area commemorate so called FESTIVAL OF FIRE FLOWS (in Burmese: Mie Hmyaw Pwe) believing that their sins will be wipe away on the religious occasion of Thadingyut. It’s been 158 years that Shwe Kyin has been keeping that tradition. On the festival day, the competition of decorated boats and flotillas is also held along the Shwe Kyin River. People not only from Shwe Kyin but also from other regions nearby come to this festival and participate. Pleasantly decorated Motor Boats compete in Shwe Kyin River the whole day. When the sun sets, the beautifully decorated Karaweik Barge which carries the images of Lord Buddha and the Stupa of Shin U Pa Gotta monk turns round right three times to accept the homage of the people’s worshiping. Then, the people fire firecrackers and set oil lotus lamps along the Shwe Kyin River. There are countless oil lamps floating along the river. After lighting the camps, the stupa of Shin U Pa Gotta from the Karaweik Barge is moved to the bamboo raft, which is surrounded by the bamboo fence and then set adrift. According to the Buddha teaching, it is believed that the setting of Shin U Pa Gotta Stupas in the river will save and protect the people who make a living on the water.

COLORFUL LOTUS OIL LAMPS

The Thadingyut Setting Oil Lamps Festival of Shwe Kyin in Bago Division is very renown in Myanmar. It is annually held on the 1st day after the Thadingyut full moon day. The very objective of this festival is to offer lights to Lord Buddha and Shin U Pa Gotta by setting the colorful oil lanterns along the Shwe Kyin River. The makers of these lotus shaped oil lanterns believe that the festival wipe away all the sins and bad lucks along with the water.  Thus,  ladies from Shwe Kyin spend time to manufacture these oil lanterns by themselves to gain merit.

THE MAKING OF LOTUS LANTERNS

In making oil lanterns, the first step is to cut the  oil-paper of various colors around 2 x 4 feet. The oil-paper is a type of smoky paper, which bears heat, resists long hours of lighting and prevents from burning easily. Later, it is systematically cut and fold to the lotus shaped cups and stick with glue. A great deal of customary skill is needed in sticking to get the shape of lotus cup. Then the liquid wax is poured into lotus shaped cup paper and the wick is buried in the middle before the liquid wax gets formed. The wick is compacted to light a long time. Finally, you can pleasantly see the colorful, lotus oil lanterns. “Every year, not less than light 50 thousand oil lamps are manufactured not only for the people from Shwe Kyin but also for the visitors from various regions of the country,” a local said.

Credits: Ko Than Lwin & family (Ma Dauk Myo) for their heartiest host and the accompany.  Without them, there won’t be this post here…

Many groups of Burmese Classical Dancing Troupes (in Burmese: Yein A Phwe) on decorated boats to pay homage to Lord Buddha on this auspicious day…

A performance group demonstrating the lotus, a very symbol of Shwe Kyin Festival of Fire Flows…

5:00 in the evening, the performance troupes assemble at meeting point…  That’s SHWE KYIN RIVER…

The guards demonstrating the ancient tradition of rowyers…

The image of Shin U Pa Gotta monk turns right three times to accept the homage of the people’s worshiping…

it is believed that the setting of Shin U Pa Gotta Stupas in the river will save and protect the people who make a living on the water…

The audience on the bank of SHWE KYIN RIVER…

Pilgrims playing water along SHWE KYIN RIVER…

People started lighting up the lotus lanterns when the darkness comes…

That’s how SHWE KYIN natives pay homage to offer lights to Lord Buddha and Shin U Pa Gotta…

The fireworks started around 8:00 PM and that’s end of the festival…

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Myanmar is rich in traditions and culture, and has developed its own distinctive culture. Buddhism has great influence on the daily lives of Myanmar people. The Full Moon Day of Thadingyut is the Lighting Festival of Myanmar. This nationwide festival is held at the end of the Buddhist lent on the festival day it as a custom. This is the second most popular festival after Thingyan (New Year Water Festival). It celebrates the descent of Buddha from heaven after he preached the Abidhama (the most difficult of Buddhist teaching) to his mother reborn in heaven.

WHY DO PEOPLE LIGHT UP?

When Lord Buddha descended from heaven after preaching his reborn mother, people all over the country light candles to welcome back. As years passed by, it became a tradition and a festival. The festival in a small town and villages are more enjoyable than in cities. In small towns, there are small earthen saucers filled with sesame oil where pieces of cotton thread are used as wicks. People collect donations for charity, decoration and entertainment purposes. Roads and streets are full with amateur dancing groups, music troupes, stalls and spectators for free entertainment. On the festival day, groups of young people and children can be seen walking with candles and gifts in their hands to pay respect to elders. In Burmese we call Kan Dawt, actually it is more than paying respects or doing obeisance. For the Buddhist, the Buddha, His law, His Order of the Sangha, Parents and Teachers are the first to be reserved, next come those who are older and those to whom we owe gratitude.

PAYING HOMAGE TO ELDERS

Younger people pay homage to elders during this season. They ask for forgiveness if they have committed any and in return, the elders give them back love, forgiveness and wish them best for up coming days.

DONATIONS and ALMS OFFERING ON FULL MOON DAY

On the full moon day, residents in Yangon go to Shwedagon pagoda and other famous pagodas to pay homage, to offer alms, candle lights, joss sticks, flowers and fruits.  Hundreds of thousands of religious Buddhists assembles on Shwedagon pagoda for prayer saying and for doing other kinds of good deeds.  Some Buddhists unions and groups invites monks to offer robes and other monkshood accessories on this auspicious full moon day.

SHOOTING

This post is an output of two shootings.  The same place but then different day and different theme.

(PART I): The first part of the post represent the lighting activities on Shwedagon pagoda.  The biggest candle lighting festival called 9,000 Lights (See Mie Koe Htaung Pwe) is held on Shwdagon pagoda from 6:30 – 9:00 PM.  So, it was the day before full moon day.  I was there on Shwedagon pagoda for this special event.

The arch way set up at Shwedagon Western Approach says “MYANMAR TRADITIONAL THADINGYUT LIGHTING FESTIVAL”

The decorations simply reflect the core value of THADINGYUT…

New era comes and electric lanterns replaces the traditional ones…  But the our people still value those from old days…

Total of 9,000 small earthen saucers filled with sesame oil where pieces of cotton threads are used as wicks… once a year homage to Lord Buddha…

The glorious array of light dedicated to welcome descent of Lord Buddha from heaven…

(PART II) This is full moon day of auspicious Thadingyut, one of the most important days for Buddhists.  3 Oct 2009, I went to pagoda 4:30 in the morning with two photographer friends.  To capture the alms offering and religious activities.

The pilgrims on the Shwedagon Pagoda at 5:00 in the morning…

A Burmese lady offering Ah Yone Hsoon (Early morning alms) to the Lord Buddha…

Some religious Buddhists offer flowers on this special day…

These religious young guys form volunteer teams (in Burmese, Neik Ban Hsaw), collect donations and alms within their residential area, finally come to Shwedagon pagoda at 5:00AM…

A group of pilgrims on their way to Pagoda homage area…

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The blog posts here on my web page depends on my mood.  I have no precise routine of which photo to be published when.  I live on my heart beats, listen to my fans and make decision on the spectrum of my mood fluctuation.  For the past month, I have been sharing quite a lot of documentary series regarding ancient pagodas from Bagan.  My Bagan photos have becomes a great cure for home sick folks.  Especially, for those who are oversea and my foreign friends.  Honestly, it eats lots of time to prepare for a single post of such documentary.  I need to do lots of data mining, read articles and history books thoroughly.  And I even could not touch my candid shots and street lives, my favorite types of photography. Candid Photography is best defined as “un-posed and unplanned, immediate and unobtrusive. This is in contrast to classic photography, which includes aspects such as carefully staged portrait photography, landscape photography or object photography. Candid photography catches moments of life from immersion in it.” And yes, this Candid photography is the very reason that I hold my camera today.

MY CANDID POSTS

Last week, I shared a picture of an abandoned woman from U Pain bridge.  Many of my friends fond of that single candid shot which I titled No Surrender.  So now I am giving another candid post for you.  This time is called The Survivor.  It is a portraiture of a street child looking for the plastic bottles and bags.  While I desaturated the photo, I remember a poem I came across when I was back in university life. The poem says:

I shall often sit down alone
till darkness fades gently away
but fast
slowly, i tried to recall but cried
thinking of ancestral home; too distant to return…

MESSAGE FROM YE LWIN OO

I still have Bagan photos and I will be back them after a while.  And there will be a SHWEDAGON night scene photos which I have been shooting lately, SHWEDAGON from different angles…

“In extreme circumstances, street children are the neglected, abused and rejected offspring of parents and communities benumbed by the minimal conditions of their lives.”

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“The mind has exactly the same power as the hands — not merely to grasp the world, but to merely survive”

HOPE, WHAT IS THAT???

Hope is such a marvelous thing. It bends, it twists, it sometimes hides, but rarely does it break. It sustains us when nothing else can. It gives us reason to continue and courage to move ahead, when we tell ourselves we’d rather give in.
Hope puts a smile on our face when the heart cannot manage.
Hope puts our feet on the path when our eyes cannot see it.
Hope moves us to act when our souls are confused of the direction.
Hope is a wonderful thing, something to be cherished and nurtured, and something that will refresh us in return. And it can be found in each of us, and it can bring light into the darkest of places.
Never lose Hope.

SHOOTING

It was a CANDID shot I made near U Pein Bridge of Mandalay Division, Central Burma.  Yes, I went Mandalay with some businesses.  And I have got a chance to visit U Pein with a group of staffs from my company.  We had walked on the bridge for a while.  The burning heat of A NYAR (Central Burma) made us all worn out so quickly.  So we decided to enjoy some local sugar cane juice at a nearby shop.

It was May 13th 2009, the hottest juncture of Burmese summer.  All of a sudden, I saw this woman in my view finder.  Of course, she can’t walk.  She was dragging herself on the ground.  There’s no one helping her.  The sun was scorching, and she looks so frail.  She does not surrender, she does not give up.  Her face unveils bravery.  Yes, bravery to survive on a hope.  The hope that she would never lose…

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ဒီေန႔ သူငယ္ခ်င္း တစ္ေယာက္က Gtalk မွာ ျပလို႔ Link တစ္ခုကို ဖြင္႔ၾကၫ္႔ျဖစ္တယ္။ “ရဲလြင္ဦး ေရ… ၊ မင္းနာမည္ႀကီး အဲဒီ အထဲမွာ ပါေနတယ္ ဟ” ဆိုေတာ႔ လန္႔သြားတာ။ ဖြင္႔ၾကၫ္႔ေတာ႔ www.shwedarling.com ဆိုတဲ႔ Website ရဲ႕ post တစ္ခုပါ။ ျမန္မာ ႏိုင္ငံနဲ႔ ပတ္သတ္တဲ႔ ၊ ျမန္မာေတြ ေရးတဲ႔ ဘေလာ႔ဂ္ေတြထဲ က လူၾကၫ္႔အမ်ားဆံုး ဘေလာ႔ဂ္ (၅၀) ကို စာရင္း ျပဳစုထားတာ ေတြ႕ရတယ္။ Website Ranking ေလာက မွာ လူေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ား သိၾကတဲ႔ Alexa Traffic Ranking က Result ေတြ အရ စီထားတာဗ်။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္႔ကို ဒီ Website ျဖစ္လာေအာင္ ပံုေဖာ္ တိုက္တြန္း ေပးခဲ႔တဲ႔ ကိုၿဖိဳး (မ်ိဳးေက်ာ္ထြန္း) က နံပါတ္ (၂) မွာ။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ က သူနဲ႔ ကပ္လ်က္ နံပါတ္ (၃) မွာ ၊ ညီမင္းစံ (ပုဂံနက္) က နံပါတ္ (၅) မွာ ၊ စာေရးဆရာမ မႏိုင္းႏိုင္းစေန က နံပါတ္ (၉) မွာ ၊ ကိုေမာင္လွ က နံပါတ္ (၁၁) ၊ ကိုတိုး (မ်ိဳးဟန္ထြန္း) က နံပါတ္ (၁၆) ၊ ကိုညီလင္းဆက္ က နံပါတ္ (၁၇) စသျဖင္႔ ေပါ႔။ List တစ္ခု လံုးကို ဒီေနရာ မွာ ႏွိပ္ၿပီး ၾကၫ္႔လို႔ ရပါတယ္။ စာရင္း ျပဳစုေပးတဲ႔ www.shwedarling.com ကိုလဲ အထူး ေက်းဇူး တင္ပါတယ္။ List ထဲမွာ ပါလာတဲ႔ သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြကိုလဲ Congratulations!!! ဒီထက္မက ေအာင္ျမင္ၾကပါေစ လို႔ဗ်ာ…။

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Situated about half a mile west of Nyaung U, Shwezigon Pagoda is a solid, cylindrical structure resting on three square terraces, a prototype of Burmese stupas.  It has a bold waist-band round the bell shaped dome above which rises a series of concentric moldings ending in a final and crowned by an umbrella.  It has up-turned lotus, petals, celestial stairways and so forth like a sacred reliquary of typical Bagan architecture.  It was built by King Anawrahta under the guidance of Shin Arahan but left in unfinished state.  And completed by King Kyansittha (1084 – 1113 A.D.).  Around the terraces of the pagoda, there are, set in panels, enamelled plaques illustrating the scenes in the previous lives of Buddha.  It is believed to contain the frontal bone and a tooth of Buddha and is thus held in great veneration by the Buddhists around Burma.  On each of the four sides of the pagoda is a small temple which enshrines a standing Buddha, 13 feet high, of the Gupta school of art. On either side of the east of approach to the pagoda is a square stone pillar with Mon inscriptions on all four sides dedicated by King Kyansittha (Kyanzittha).

NINE FAMOUS WONDERS

Shwezigon pagoda embraces nine wonders:
(1) it’s umbrella being steadfast without being fastened with cable
(2) its shadow never extend beyond its fence walls
(3) gold leaf papers dropped from atop not getting beyond the walls
(4) its walled environs never being congested regardless of a huge mass of pilgrims
(5) no human could be the first in offering alms early in the morning
(6) the stupa seeming to be higher than it is
(7) the drum sounded from one side cannot be heard from the other side
(8) no rain water remains within the walls
(9) the star flower plants bear flowers all years round

Credits: My beloved Dad for his special gift, Pictorial Guide to Bagan…

It was around 20:00 when I arrived the pagoda, right after the rain stopped…  A wide angle shot from north-western corner of the pagoda compound…

It was very first time I tried my Nikon D-90 Live View function with Long Exposure shot…  Thanks Ko. J for his Long Exposure tutorial…  Again there is the reflection on the floor…

It has up-turned lotus, petals, celestial stairways and so forth like a sacred reliquary of typical Bagan architecture…

One of the nine wonders of Shwezigon pagoda is that the stupa seeming to be higher than it is…

On each of the four sides of the pagoda is a small temple which enshrines a standing Buddha, 13 feet high, of the Gupta school of art…

The local produces and souvenirs are available along the corridor towards the pagoda…

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“Thatbyinnyu” signifies “omniscience”, one of the attributes of the Buddha.  The temple was built around the middle of the 12th century A.D. by King Alaungsithu, grandson and successor of the King Kyansittha who erected the Ananda Temple.  Standing within the city walls, some 500 yards to the south-west of the Ananda, the Thatbyinnyu rises the height of 201 feet above the ground and overtops all other monuments.  Its general plan is not unlike the Ananda, but it does not, like the latter form a symetrical cross.  The eastern porch alone projects considerably from the wall.  It has two main stories and the Buddha image is seated on the upper floor.  The central stairways guarded by two standing figures of guardians faces the eastern hall and entrance.  The steps lead to a circumambulatory corridor round the central mass.  Climbing up one of the pair of stairs built in the thickness of the walls one reaches the top of the vestibule from where an external flights of stairs lead to the upper story.  The pilasters combine to give a soaring effect to the monument.  The two tiers of windows in each story make the interior bright and airy.  But the walls are bare and the recesses along the plinth and terraces do not contain any glazed plaque.

FACTS

Its height earned it the title of BAGAN TOWER.  In olden days, it was used as a library for monks.  Today its height gives a vantage point for enjoying the famous scene of sunset at Bagan.

The name “Thatbyinnyu” signifies “omniscience”, one of the attributes of the Buddha…

Thatbyinnyu rises the height of 201 feet above the ground and overtops all other monuments…

The pilasters combine to give a soaring effect to the monument…

The corridors on the ground floor has numerous Buddha images adjacent to the windows…

Its height earned it the title of BAGAN TOWER.  My tele shot from SHWESANDAW PHAYA…

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