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Updated: June 4, 2025
Up the steps we pass, higher and higher, and come out on to a great platform which looks like a street, for it is lined with buildings on all four sides and in the middle too; but rising above those in the middle is the great pagoda, the Shwe Dagon, shwe means golden, and this is the most wonderful thing in Burma.
I am glad for his sake, and for the sake of all the millions to whom Buddha's doctrine is "the Light of Asia," that it is a religion at least without the degrading, blighting tendencies of Hinduism, and that the smiling faces of the images about the Shwe Dagon present at least some faint idea of a God who tempers justice with mercy and made human life good rather than a God of cruelty who made life a curse and a mockery.
Having watched this glorious spectacle for some minutes, the air grew chilly, compared with the intense heat of the day, and darkness was coming on apace as we turned to retrace our steps. A few days before, we had noticed a Chinese joss-house, standing in one corner of the huge elevated platform upon which the Shwé Dagon rests.
He was a Malay born in India: married once in Burma, where his wife had a cigar-shop on the Shwe Dagon road; once in Singapore, to a Chinese girl; and once in Madras, to a Mahomedan woman who sold fowls.
By the lakes you encountered Europe more particularly Great Britain. At the Shwe Dagon you found yourself in touch with an older world and face to face with the silken East! Gregory's proved to be a vast and imposing concern, occupying a prominent situation on the Strand and evidently doing an immense trade.
But the greatest of all the Burmese pagodas, the Shwe Dagon of Rangoon, is a solid mass of brick, with no interior cell, yet enormous in size, erected on a broad platform one hundred and sixty-six feet from the ground, towering to an additional height of two hundred and seventy feet, and crowned with a jewelled "umbrella" at the total elevation of four hundred and thirty-six feet above the teeming streets of the city below.
"Oh, I'm not going until next Thursday." The smile returned to her face, and her body bent in a kind of kotow. He was so big, and his beard glistened like the gold-leaf on the Shwe Dagon Pagoda. She understood. The white to the white and the brown to the brown; it was the Law. Warrington went up to his room.
Would any people, not firmly bound by their religion, put up with it all for a moment? If you went into a Mahommedan mosque in Delhi with your boots on, you would probably be killed. Yet we clump round the Shwe Dagon pagoda at our ease, and no one interferes. Do not suppose that it is because the Burman believes less than the Hindu or Mahommedan.
I haven't seen a white elephant yet, but in the Shwe Dagon Temple I found a lively eight-months-old youngster, an orphan from Mandalay, that could eat bananas twice as fast as my Burmese boy-guide and I could peel them, and the boy-guide in question assured me that he will turn white by the time he is two or three years old. Which would be very interesting if true, but I fear it isn't.
Most beautiful of all their buildings is the pagoda, as their temples are called, and most beautiful, perhaps, of all the temples in Burma is the great Shwe Dagon pagoda in Rangoon. "Shwe" means golden, and this beautiful bell-shaped pyramid, which rises 370 feet above the mound upon which it is built, is entirely overlaid with gold.
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