Review: Mandalay and the Art of Building Cities in Burma

Abstract

Book Review| September 01 2022 Review: Mandalay and the Art of Building Cities in Burma François Tainturier Mandalay and the Art of Building Cities in Burma Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2021, 272 pp., 80 color and 5 b/w illus. $45 (paper), ISBN 9789814722773 Simon Soon Simon Soon Universiti Malaya Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2022) 81 (3): 380–382. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2022.81.3.380 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Simon Soon; Review: Mandalay and the Art of Building Cities in Burma. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 September 2022; 81 (3): 380–382. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2022.81.3.380 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search King Mindon of Burma founded Mandalay as a new royal city in 1859 in response to Britain’s annexation of Pegu Province (Lower Burma) and the former royal capital of Amarapura. Twenty-six years after the new city’s founding, in 1885, British forces captured Mandalay’s royal palace and brought an end to the Konbaung dynasty. Perhaps because of Mandalay’s significance as the last Burmese royal city ever built, scholars have tended to view its history as largely the continuation of a local architectural and urban planning knowledge system, a system that was believed to connect the city’s architectural and spatial expressions to a perceived cosmic order reliant on Buddhist cosmological associations to manifest and legitimate a universalist concept of a royal political power as a “wheel-turning ruler” (187). In fact, the vision of King Mindon extended beyond the localized knowledge used to realize the brick-fortified royal city compound and addressed equally the... You do not currently have access to this content.