Today in History—May 4: When Buddhist Scripture Was Written on 729 Giant Tablets

May 4, 1868: A scripture engraved to outlast empires

On this day in 1868, the Kuthodaw Pagoda in Mandalay, Myanmar, was completed.

Inside and around it was a book unlike any other: 729 marble tablets, each one five feet tall and too heavy for a single person to carry, inscribed on both sides with a complete edition of Theravada Buddhist scripture, the Tripitaka.

King Mindon, ruler of Myanmar, had commissioned the work as part of the construction of his new royal capital, Mandalay.

The Tripitaka had been passed down orally in India for centuries after the death of the Buddha before being written down in Sri Lanka about the 1st century bce.

Over time the texts spread across Theravada Buddhist countries—Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia—but small differences emerged between versions. Mindon wanted to standardize an enduring version and chose his medium accordingly.

Fun Fact

The inscriptions on the tablets at the Kuthodaw Pagoda were originally inlaid with gold, but the gold was looted during the British colonial period.

Work began in 1860. Monks consulted existing manuscripts of the Tripitaka, which scribes copied onto marble for stonemasons to chisel. Eight years later, 729 tablets contained the body of the text; a 730th recorded the story of the project, sort of like an old-school “About the Author” page. Each tablet was housed in its own small white stupa, arranged around a central gilded pagoda.

In 1885 the British captured Mandalay and moved the capital to Yangon. (It would later move again, to Nay Pyi Taw, in 2006.) Mandalay became, permanently, the last royal capital of Myanmar. It is still the country’s second largest city and widely regarded as its cultural heart.

In 2013 UNESCO added the Kuthodaw Inscription Shrines to its Memory of the World register, recognizing the site as an enduring contribution to Buddhist tradition and the culture of Myanmar.