Kuthodaw Pagoda

The Kuthodaw Pagoda is known for housing an extraordinary edition of the Pali canon, the body of Theravada Buddhist scripture. The text is inscribed across 729 marble tablets, each placed within an individual white stupa, arranged in rows surrounding a central gilded pagoda in Mandalay, Myanmar, forming a monumental religious complex.

The Kuthodaw Pagoda was completed in 1868 by order of King Mindon, who ruled Myanmar from 1853 to 1878. It was commissioned as part of his broader effort to establish Mandalay as the country’s new royal capital and to promote and preserve Theravada Buddhist teachings while serving as a monument of Myanmar’s culture.

The central stupa of the Kuthodaw Pagoda houses various sacred relics, most notably tooth relics of the Buddha that were obtained from Sri Lanka. Such relics have long held religious importance in the Buddhist tradition of Myanmar and, more broadly, across the Buddhist world, where they are objects of devotion and pilgrimage.

The marble tablets were produced through a multistage process. The text was first reviewed by clerics and then copied by scribes onto marble slabs. Stonemasons chiseled the inscriptions by hand, averaging 10 lines per day. The marble was quarried from Sagyin Hill and transported by river to Mandalay for carving.

The inscriptions on the marble tablets were originally filled with gold, making the carved letters more visible against the stone. However, after the British annexation of Mandalay in 1885, much of the gold was looted. Beginning in 1892, the inscriptions were instead filled with black ink to preserve their legibility.