Myo Daunt Pagoda Festival

I was surprised that Shwebo did not seem crowded bearing in mind there was a pagoda festival. I was even more surprised when I learned there are 17 paya or pagodas around Shwebo and 17 Buddhist festivals take place over five months. The one we’ll attend is the Myo Daunt Paya, five kilometres out of town.

In the centre of the town, built by King Alaungsithu 251 years ago and maintained by King Narapatisithu stands the Shwe Tan Sar pagoda. This is not the largest or most famous of Shwebo payas, nor is it the one with the festival, but is the most historic. It is undergoing a yearlong renovation by the Ministry of Culture and will be even more sumptuous than it is now. Inside the main hall where the populous come to pay their respects to the Buddha towering pillars reach from floor to ceiling. These are covered not in gold paint as is often the case, but gold leaf. The upper parts are left plain and smooth. Lower down the gold has been molded into figures of elephants, angels and devas who leap with one bent leg to the front and the other bent to the back – very striking. 

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Oh this is more like it: hundreds of people, hundreds of motorbikes and buses full, really full, of people are headed for the Myo Daunt paya festival. As well as paying homage to the Buddha, the people come to socialize and to sell whatever they produce. The atmosphere is one of a fair and a party. We were advised not to come in the evening when there are real parties and everyone is drunk!

Shwebo, north of Mandalay, is famous for the quality of its rice, its woven and colourful cotton blankets and for thanakha, which is the fawnish whitish powder that men, women and children wear on their face.

Win Kyaing’s family has thanakha trees and if things go wrong in the future they can sell the trees, so they are a good investment. The stumps don’t need to be dug up as the tree will grow again from the roots. It is only the trunk that produces fine quality thanakha: branches are pruned away and it’s the quality of the bark that indicates the quality of the powder within.  Thanakha works as a sunscreen and insect repellent. It is used medicinally and it covers pimples and moles. Women keep a log or two at home and grind it in a little pestle and mortar each day.

Commercially, the cut trees are put in a tank with water and clay to make a slurry which eventually turns into paste. The little town of Yesagyo about a hundred kilometres from Shwebo makes incense sticks using thanakha which smells delightful when lit. Almost every household would have an appropriate little machine and the producers can sell a bundle of 200 sticks for about Ky200: (Ky1,000 = $1) certainly not a fortune but at least they can be made at home.

As always the passages leading to the pagoda were crowded with stalls. Clothes stalls, children’s toys, food in wide array, flowers, bananas and green coconuts to be given as offerings to the Buddha.

This paya had an ingenious feature that I’d not seen elsewhere. We headed toward men chanting and an orchestra playing.

Off to one side was a pulley reaching from the ground to the top of the paya. But this was no ordinary pulley. This was a winged horse pulling a winged chariot in which two devas sat. One deva in particular was bending forward and paying homage to the Buddha as the chariot jogged upwards. On the ground a queue of mostly women carried what I thought were prayer sticks: a small folded paper in the top of each stick. But then I noticed another queue buying small gold leaf squares with paper folded around them. So the prayer sticks were carriers of gold. Usually these would gild a Buddha image and indeed all four were being decorated in the usual way. But the bell of this pagoda needed gilding too, hence the ingenious pulley.

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