It cannot have pleased Myanmar’s ruling family: the collapse of a 2,300-year-old gold-domed pagoda into a pile of timber just three weeks after the wife of the junta’s top general helped rededicate it.
There is no country in Asia more superstitious than Myanmar, and the crumbling of the temple was seen widely as something more portentous than shoddy construction work.
The debacle coincides with the junta’s trial of the country’s pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, after an American intruder swam across a lake and spent a night at the villa where Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for most of the past 19 years.
After two weeks of testimony that began on May 18, the trial has been suspended as the court considers procedural motions — and as the junta apparently tries to decide how to manage what seems to have been a major blunder, drawing condemnation from around the world.
The superstitious generals may be consulting astrologers as well as political tacticians for guidance. That would not be unusual for many people in Myanmar.
Currency denominations and traffic rules have been changed, the nation’s capital has been moved and the timing of events has been selected — even the dates of popular uprisings — with astrological dictates in mind.
“Astrology has as significant a role in policies, leadership and decision-making in the feudal Naypyidaw as rational calculations, geopolitics and resource economics,” said Zarni, a Burmese exile analyst and researcher who goes by one name.
He was referring to the country’s fortified capital, which opened in 2005.
And so it seemed only natural to read a darker meaning into the temple’s collapse.
The Danok pagoda on the outskirts of Yangon was newly blessed on May 7 in the presence of Kyaing Kyaing, the wife of the country’s supreme leader, Senior General Than Shwe, along with an A-list of junta society. The rite received major coverage in government-controlled media.
In a solemn ceremony, the worshippers fixed a diamond orb to the top of the pagoda along with a pennant-shaped vane and sprinkled scented water onto the tiers of a holy, golden umbrella, according to the government mouthpiece, The New Light of Myanmar.
Like the rest of the heavily censored press, the newspaper was silent when it all came crashing down.
But word of mouth — and foreign radio broadcasts — spreads fast in Myanmar.
“People were laughing at her,” said a longtime astrologer, reached by telephone in Myanmar, speaking of Kyaing Kyaing.
“OK, she thinks she is so great, but even the gods don’t like her — people believe like that,” the astrologer said on condition of anonymity.
“Even the spiritual world will not allow her to do this thing or that thing,” the astrologer said. “People laugh like that.”
The ceremony was part of a decades-old campaign by the senior general to legitimize his military rule on a foundation of Buddhist fealty — dedicating and redecorating temples, attending religious ceremonies and, with his influential wife, making donations to monks and monasteries.
That campaign was undermined, and perhaps fatally discredited, in September 2007 when soldiers beat and shot monks protesting military rule in the streets, invaded monasteries without removing their boots and imprisoned or disrobed hundreds of monks.
“No matter how many pagodas they build, no matter how much charity they give to monks, it is still they who murdered the monks,” said Josef Silverstein, a Myanmar specialist and professor emeritus at Rutgers University, at the time of the protests.
So when the Danok pagoda suddenly collapsed on May 30 as workmen were completing its renovation — killing at least 20 people, according to emigre reports — many people saw it as the latest in a series of bad omens for the junta that included a devastating cyclone early last year.
The pagoda’s sacred umbrella tumbled to the ground, and its diamond orb was lost in the rubble, according to those reports.
“The fact that the umbrella did not stay was a sign that more bad things are to come, according to astrologers,” said Ingrid Jordt, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and a specialist in Burmese Buddhism.
“It is also a sign that Than Shwe does not have the spiritual power any longer to be able to undertake or reap the benefit from good acts such as this,” Jordt said in an e-mail message. “In a sense, the pagoda repudiated Than Shwe’s right to remain ruler.”
As laborers began trying to rebuild the pagoda, local residents gave emigre publications vivid accounts of supernatural happenings.
“The temple collapsed about 3:10pm while I was loading bricks on a platform around the pagoda,” a 24-year-old construction worker told The Irrawaddy, an exile magazine based in Thailand.
“The weather suddenly turned very dark,” he was quoted as saying.
“Then we saw a bright red light rising from the northern end of the pagoda. Then, suddenly, the temple collapsed. I also heard a strange haunting voice coming from the direction of the light,” he said.
Indeed, the Danok pagoda may have been a poor choice for the junta’s ruling family to seek religious affirmation.
According to The Irrawaddy, “Several elderly locals from Danok Model Village said that they believed that the pagoda never welcomed cruel or unkind donors, and always shook when such persons made offerings.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long been expansionist and contemptuous of international law. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), the CCP regime has become more despotic, coercive and punitive. As part of its strategy to annex Taiwan, Beijing has sought to erase the island democracy’s international identity by bribing countries to sever diplomatic ties with Taipei. One by one, China has peeled away Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic partners, leaving just 12 countries (mostly small developing states) and the Vatican recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation. Taiwan’s formal international space has shrunk dramatically. Yet even as Beijing has scored diplomatic successes, its overreach
In her article in Foreign Affairs, “A Perfect Storm for Taiwan in 2026?,” Yun Sun (孫韻), director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington, said that the US has grown indifferent to Taiwan, contending that, since it has long been the fear of US intervention — and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) inability to prevail against US forces — that has deterred China from using force against Taiwan, this perceived indifference from the US could lead China to conclude that a window of opportunity for a Taiwan invasion has opened this year. Most notably, she observes that
For Taiwan, the ongoing US and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets are a warning signal: When a major power stretches the boundaries of self-defense, smaller states feel the tremors first. Taiwan’s security rests on two pillars: US deterrence and the credibility of international law. The first deters coercion from China. The second legitimizes Taiwan’s place in the international community. One is material. The other is moral. Both are indispensable. Under the UN Charter, force is lawful only in response to an armed attack or with UN Security Council authorization. Even pre-emptive self-defense — long debated — requires a demonstrably imminent
Since being re-elected, US President Donald Trump has consistently taken concrete action to counter China and to safeguard the interests of the US and other democratic nations. The attacks on Iran, the earlier capture of deposed of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and efforts to remove Chinese influence from the Panama Canal all demonstrate that, as tensions with Beijing intensify, Washington has adopted a hardline stance aimed at weakening its power. Iran and Venezuela are important allies and major oil suppliers of China, and the US has effectively decapitated both. The US has continuously strengthened its military presence in the Philippines. Japanese Prime
RSS