Eight Things That Stay With You From Myanmar

Myanmar sits between India and China, the country that was called Burma for most of the colonial century, with court cities strung along the Irrawaddy and a lake in the Shan hills. It was never the easy circuit of its neighbours. The roads were slower, the network thinner, and the pagodas had not been reduced to a single brand. What I met there was dress, food, a morning obligation, gold on a statue, a plain of temples, a teak bridge, a lake, and a closed house in the old capital. These eight are the things that stayed.

The Bagan pages from that trip are Old Bagan etiquette, the pagodas, and the wider Bagan note.

Longyi, thanaka, and hnyat-phanat

The first thing that reads as the country, before any monument, is what people wear. Longyi is the unisex sarong, a tube of cotton or silk wrapped at the waist. Men fold the excess into a knot at the front. Women tuck it at the side. It is ordinary dress, not a costume kept for festivals, and it works in heat in a way trousers do not. A formal version appears at weddings and at the pagoda. The everyday one is what you see on a bus.

Hnyat-phanat are the velvet sandals that go with that formal end of the wardrobe, often with a small decoration on the toe. They are the shoe you can slip off at a threshold, which matters in a country where shoes come off at every religious entrance. Thanaka is the other daily mark. The bark of the thanaka tree is ground on a flat stone with a little water until it becomes a pale yellow paste, then drawn on the cheeks, the forehead, sometimes in a pattern and sometimes as a plain patch. It is a sunscreen, a cosmetic, and a smell that belongs to the street. Children wear it. Market sellers wear it. It is not applied for a photograph.

I noticed these three before I noticed the architecture. A country that still dresses itself, rather than dressing for visitors, is already telling you something about how commercial the surface has become. Longyi, thanaka, and the velvet sandal were still the morning, not the souvenir.

How to tie a longyi tutorial:

All the temples in Bagan require visitors to take off their shoes and enter barefoot, so what’s more convenient than walking the miles in a pair of Hnyat-phanat? Hnyat-phanat is a Burmese traditional sandal, similar to flip-flops. To me, they are a great pairing for my Longyi and I loved it. Visit my other post for more tips about the etiquette and tradition in Old Bagan.

It’s also common to see Burmese ladies wearing yellowish-white paste on their faces, while this paste, called Thanaka, is actually a traditional and natural cosmetic that protects them from the sun and cools their skin in hot weather. Thanaka is made mainly from the roots and timber of Thanaka trees by a simple process – the materials are first soaked in water and then ground in a mortar. Sometimes flowers were added to give a pleasant smell to the product. Thanaka could be found commonly in markets, and Burmese women love to apply it on a daily basis; they could bring it along as they travel around. It is also used in special events and festivals as a showcase of their social status.

A Burmese meal, and tea-leaf salad

The table is rice at the centre and a set of small dishes around it, rather than one plate with a name. There is usually a clear soup, a sour or fermented side, a cooked vegetable, and something with fish or meat if the house eats it. The balance is sour, salty, and the crunch of something fried. Mohinga, a fish soup with rice noodles, banana stem, and lemongrass, is the breakfast many people will name if you ask what the country eats. It is sold from stalls in the morning and eaten as a meal, not a snack.

Tea-leaf salad is the dish that stayed with me. Lahpet is tea that has been fermented rather than dried for the cup, packed and sour, and eaten. Lahpet thoke tosses those leaves with peanuts, sesame, fried garlic, tomato, sometimes dried shrimp, and a squeeze of lime. It is a salad and a stimulant. The same leaf, prepared differently, is served as a gesture of hospitality, the pickled tea offered to a guest. I went looking for it from a taxi, away from the hotel menu, and the version that arrived was a few dollars and better than the dressed plate. The country grows tea in the hills. Eating the leaf, rather than only drinking it, is the local use of the crop.

The alms round at dawn

Mahagandayon in Amarapura is one of the monasteries where the morning alms round is still a public hour. Monks file out in a line. Lay people kneel at the side of the road with rice, fruit, and packets of food. The monk does not ask. The giver places the offering in the bowl. It is a daily obligation on both sides, the monastic rule of not handling money or cooking for oneself, and the lay duty of supporting the order. Bagan and Mandalay have their own versions. The hour is early because the meal has to be finished before noon. Theravada practice, which is the Buddhism of Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, keeps that rule.

The difficulty is that the line has been photographed until the boundary between obligation and performance is thin. A monastery that knows it will be watched may arrange the path. A visitor who treats it as a spectacle is in the way of something that was not built for an audience. I watched from the side. The queue of bowls and the kneeling row are the picture. They are also someone’s breakfast duty. The cultural fact underneath is older than the tourism: a society in which a portion of the young men still ordain for a period, and in which feeding them is ordinary merit.

Gold leaf on the Buddha

At Shwezigon in Nyaung-U, and at other active pagodas, there is a stall selling small squares of gold leaf in packets. You take one, or several, and press them onto the statue. The figure is already gilded. Each new square adds a patch, and the surface turns from a dull yellow-brown to a brighter gold according to how many hands have reached that spot. It is an offering. Gold on a Buddha is merit, the same logic as the alms round, a gift that does not come back as an object.

Shwezigon itself belongs to the early Bagan period, traditionally tied to King Anawrahta in the 11th century, one of the temples that marked the country’s turn toward Theravada. The act of gilding is not special to that one building. Shwedagon in Yangon is maintained by the same practice at a different scale, entire families buying sheets. Shoes come off at the entrance. The platforms are stone and, in the middle of the day, hot enough that people walk on the shaded side. The cultural point is that the statue is not a finished artwork. It is a surface that the living keep covering.

Barefoot in Bagan, and the balloon

Bagan is the plain of temples and pagodas built mostly between the 11th and 13th centuries, when it was the capital of the Pagan kingdom. Anawrahta, and the kings after him, filled the dry land beside the Irrawaddy with brick. The count of monuments is in the thousands. A smaller number are maintained and open. Earthquakes, including the one in 1975 and another in 2016, have cracked what the centuries had already worn. Restoration has been uneven. Some spires are new brick on an old plan. The plain is still the largest concentration of Buddhist temples in the country, and one of the largest anywhere.

Walking them barefoot is the ordinary rule, the same rule as any pagoda, extended across a landscape. The paths between are dust and sand. A hot-air balloon at sunrise became the photograph of the place in the years before the current period, the brick glowing and the river in the distance. I did not take the balloon. I walked. The light on the brick is what the balloon sells. The brick, and the rule about shoes, are the place itself. Which platforms are active, what to wear, and how the temples differ, is in the Old Bagan etiquette page and the pagoda notes.

Sunrise in Bagan, sunset at U Bein

Sunrise is the hour Bagan is known for, because the plain faces east and the first light hits the spires before the day turns white. I watched it from a pagoda top, including Shwesandaw, the one with the steep stair and the view across the monuments. The colour is brief. After that the brick is simply hot. People who stay for the sunrise and leave by mid-morning have understood the climate.

U Bein is the other end of the day, and a different kind of structure. The bridge at Amarapura crosses a lake on teak columns, more than a kilometre of them, and the story is that the columns came from a dismantled palace at Inwa when the capital moved. Amarapura itself was a capital for a time, one of the several cities the Konbaung dynasty used near modern Mandalay before the British took the last one. The bridge is a working footbridge. Monks cross it. Residents cross it. At sunset the angle of the light and the length of the teak make it a viewpoint, and it has been one for long enough that the crowds are part of the hour. It is still a bridge. The cultural fact is the reuse: a palace taken apart, its columns carrying a road.

Inle, and the leg-rowers

Inle Lake sits in the Shan hills, east of the Irrawaddy plain, a shallow lake where the Intha people built villages on stilts and grew vegetables on floating beds of weed and silt. The technique everyone photographs is the rowing. The fisherman stands at the stern, wraps one leg around the oar, and rows with the leg, leaving both hands free for the conical net. It is a method for a shallow lake, where you need to see into the water and handle the trap at the same time. It became the image of the lake, and then a demonstration. Boats will find you a fisherman who is fishing, and boats will find you one who is posing. The difference is visible if you watch for more than a minute.

The lake has its own pagodas, including the Phaung Daw Oo, whose small Buddha images are gilded so heavily that the original shape has disappeared under the gold, a cousin of the gold-leaf practice at Shwezigon. A festival carries them around the lake once a year. Floating gardens, tomato beds, and the morning market that rotates between villages are the working life underneath the photograph. I went for the rowing. I stayed for the sense that the water was a road.

And if you ever wonder what it’s like:

A closed house in Yangon

Yangon was Rangoon, the colonial capital, laid out by the British on a grid with the Shwedagon on the hill above it. The Shwedagon is the country’s most visited religious site, a gilded stupa whose present form is centuries of rebuilding on an older hill. The city around it is churches, a railway, and the wide avenues of a colonial port, with the Burmese pagoda watching over the plan.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s house on University Avenue was, when I stayed within walking distance, a closed compound. Her father, Aung San, had negotiated the independence that arrived in 1948 and was assassinated the year before it. She returned from Oxford in 1988, was held at that house for long periods, and became the face of the civilian government that shared power with the army after 2015. The house was a political symbol rather than a museum. I could walk to the gate. I could not go in. It has had several lives since, and the government she led did not last. The cultural point of the visit, for me, was the ordinary street leading to a gate that stood for a century of unfinished independence. The pagoda on the hill and the closed house in the grid are the two Yangons.

What the eight are

Dress, a salad made from tea, a morning queue of bowls, gold pressed onto a statue, a plain of temples walked without shoes, a sunrise and a teak bridge, a lake rowed with one leg, and a house you could not enter. That is the country as I met it. The notes are not a plan for a current trip. Routes and visas belong to a later check, if they belong anywhere. The eight, and the three Bagan pages, are what I kept.