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The Mandalay Palace.
Printed at
THE RANGOON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Faculty of Social Sciences Building
University Estate
Rangoon (Burma) 1963
P R E F A C E
MANDALAY is not a very old city, but the last devastating war hadcompletely wiped off the palace buildings and left us with only the memories ofthe past grandeur of the seat of the two last kings of the Konbaung Dynasty.
However, the shattered fort walls with a few remaining pyatthats (woodenpavilions) over them and the surrounding moat still present an impressive sceneand arouse the desire to visualize the glittering halls and spires that once stoodstately on the platform in the centre of the fort.The miniature model to the west of the desolated platform and the replica now exhibited within the compound of the National Museum in Rangoon(now YANGON) provide us with but a sketchy idea of the elaborate palatial buildings. It wouldseem to be out of place to reprint the Guide Book, long out of print, without any illustrations, when the buildings are no more to be seen. On the contrary, intrinsic interest is still attached to the fact that the palace was the last representative in Burma of a wooden civil architecture whose general plan carries us back to many centuries. To help one to understand the architectural descriptions of the buildings suitable illustrations would be most useful, but due to the congested layout of the structures the preparation of photographs of the full view of each building was not possible. But fortunately, many measured drawings of the structures and architectural motifs are still preserved in the Archaeological Department, and opportunity is now taken to place them on permanent record and to present a collection of these architectural drawings to interested scholars. The historical outline and the descriptions of the buildings are reproduced from the Guide to the Mandalay Palace by Mon. C. Duroiselle, former Superintendent of the Archaeological Survey, Burma(now Myanmar). Rangoon (now YANGON), 1st. November 1962.
Director, Archaeological Survey, Burma.
THE MANDALAY PALACE
Interest of the Mandalay Palace and City
Architectural and Historical — The first thing which the resident in Burma or the tourist, when he comes to Mandalay for the first time, desires to see before everything else, is the Palace. He has already heard of it and most probably also read about it in more or less accurate but generally glowing descriptions. He is under the glamour which the very word ‘palace’ and above all ‘oriental palace’ calls forth to the mind, and it is in anticipatory visions of majestic piles and grandiosely decorated halls that, through the broad, white and dusty roads of the city, he directs his steps towards the abode of the last kings of Burma. The result of the visit is at first generally, somewhat of a disillusion. This is due to several causes; the visitor has before him only what remains of the palace; much of the painting, gilding, and ornaments which, when it was inhabited, must have made of it a glorious sight and a joy to the eye, have disappeared or faded; he has in fact before him the palace, but not as it was; for not a few of the parts which contributed to the harmony and grandeur of the whole are now no more to be seen. The signboards bearing, in English and Burmese, the name of each apartment, tell him but little or nothing, if he be not accompanied by a person familiar with the uses to which these rooms were put, and able, by his explanations, to repeople for him those empty, echoing halls, with the fleeting images of those personages, high and low, who, only a few decades ago, filled them with life and movement and who played a role in the gorgeous pageants or revolting dramas once witnessed by these stolid walls. But perhaps the principal and foremost reason for the momentary disillusion — momentary because of the keener appreciation of the real beauty of the buildings which is experienced on a second visit — is the failing, readily comprehensible on the part of the casual visitor, to estimate to its proper value the real and abiding importance, from an historical and architectural standpoint, of the Shwe Nandaw, or Golden Palace. The last representative in Burma of a long series of such buildings. — For the intrinsic interest of the palace at Mandalay lies in the fact that it is the last, and only one preserved to us, of a long series of similar structures built by succeeding dynasties at the numerous capitals of Burma and, in all its barbaric splendour, a solitary and silent witness of an order of things that has now for ever passed away; also in the fact that it is the only example of wooden civil architecture now left in Burma which, in its general plan and design, repeated from century to century with an almost blind adherence to the traditional plan of palaces which have now long disappeared, reproduces to a certain extent the wooden architecture of ancient India and of Asia. Its plan, in its great lines, is not merely old Indian, but rather pan-Asiatic, for its prototypes were found scattered over a vast stretch of country from Patna to Peking and — perhaps — as far as Nineveh. For these ancient cities and palaces were built, with often greatly varying details, on aplan common to all.
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