Great (greatx4) grandfather's pagoda
The small country road led me to my maternal ancestral village of Gadoe-Kornat near Mawlamyine. Gadoe was a mythical place for me growing up, as it used to be a difficult place to reach to, and ethnic insurgency and piracy was rife on the roads leading to the place, thus nobody wanted to go back to visit. But it is my ancestral village. The only one that I knew of for me, as my paternal ancestors were, rather peripatetic, though of upper Burma, if a huge swath of land incorporating several towns and cities can be deemed an "ancestral town or village". My mother told us of a pagoda our great grandfather had built (or was it great great grandfather, I forgot), and I wanted to see it.
I was thinking it would be covered in vegetation and in disrepair, but hoped it would at least be maintained, as many of the former residents of this village had fled the village due to the afore-mentioned strife in the area since, it seems, WW2. On the road leading up to the pagoda, there were giant tropical trees with wild orchids hanging off its trunks lining the street towards what looks like a recently renovated pavilion for the pagoda. And as I approached the pavilion, to my surprise, the pagoda itself appears to have been recently renovated, resplendent in gold and a base coat of red (4th photo). Smaller pagodas that line the periphery of the main pagoda also seems to have been repaired recently as well. All the renovations were by present and former residents and their descendents and not the government who once burned down parts of the village.
I ventured into the monastery attached to the pagoda (as there usually are). The monastery was more of what I had expected - while some of the more "recent" buildings were in decent condition, inhabited by monks and continued to be maintained, the older buildings (photos #6-10) bearing architectural style of late Kongbaung dynasty and incorporating greco-style colonades, were abandoned, and covered in vegetation. One temple pavilion had iron bars and was locked up, in obvious attempt at thwarting thieves of antique religious relics. Within the ruins of one monastery building, a large jack-fruit tree had grown, bearing sizable fruits that will swell and ripen in a few months' time. It was a fascinating vision, made real, by my visit, by my presence in that place, in what John Burger would have called, a return to the centre of my universe.
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