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99-628: The Press Scrutiny and Registration Division ( Burmese : စာပေစိစစ်နှင့်မှတ်ပုံတင်ဌာန , formerly the Press Scrutiny Board or PSB ) is a division under the Ministry of Information , responsible for censorship of media in Myanmar . Its current director is Major Tint Swe. PSRD censors all forms of media, ranging from publications such as newspapers and magazines and other published content like books. New publishers are required to register publications with

198-560: A pitch-register language like Shanghainese . There are four contrastive tones in Burmese. In the following table, the tones are shown marked on the vowel /a/ as an example. For example, the following words are distinguished from each other only on the basis of tone: In syllables ending with /ɰ̃/ , the checked tone is excluded: In spoken Burmese, some linguists classify two real tones (there are four nominal tones transcribed in written Burmese), "high" (applied to words that terminate with

297-552: A common set of tones, consonant clusters, and written script. However, several Burmese dialects differ substantially from standard Burmese with respect to vocabulary, lexical particles, and rhymes. Spoken Burmese is remarkably uniform among Burmese speakers, particularly those living in the Irrawaddy valley, all of whom use variants of Standard Burmese. The standard dialect of Burmese (the Mandalay - Yangon dialect continuum ) comes from

396-465: A derivative of a Pali word, although the exact word of origin remains unclear. The root word has been speculated to be maṇḍala (မဏ္ဍလ), referring to circular plains or Mandara , a mountain from Hindu mythology. When it was founded in 1857, the royal city was officially named Yadanarbon ( ရတနာပုံ , [jədənàbòʊɰ̃] ), a loan of the Pali name Ratanapūra ( ရတနပူရ ) "City of Gems." It

495-645: A festival at the foot of Mandalay Hill. Special commemorative stamps were issued. During Ne Win 's isolationist rule (1962–1988), the city's infrastructure deteriorated. By the early 1980s, the second largest city of Burma resembled a town with low-rise buildings and dusty streets filled mostly with bicycles. In the 1980s, the city was hit by two major fires. In May 1981, a fire razed more than 6,000 houses and public buildings, leaving more than 90,000 homeless. On 24 March 1984, another fire destroyed 2,700 buildings and made 23,000 people homeless. The fire caused US$ 96 million in property damage. Fires continue to plague

594-543: A lesser extent, Burmese has also imported words from Sanskrit (religion), Hindi (food, administration, and shipping), and Chinese (games and food). Burmese has also imported a handful of words from other European languages such as Portuguese . Here is a sample of loan words found in Burmese: Since the end of British rule, the Burmese government has attempted to limit usage of Western loans (especially from English) by coining new words ( neologisms ). For instance, for

693-659: A monk]", Lower Burmese speakers use [sʰʊ́ɰ̃] instead of [sʰwáɰ̃] , which is the pronunciation used in Upper Burma. The standard dialect is represented by the Yangon dialect because of the modern city's media influence and economic clout. In the past, the Mandalay dialect represented standard Burmese. The most noticeable feature of the Mandalay dialect is its use of the first person pronoun ကျွန်တော် , kya.nau [tɕənɔ̀] by both men and women, whereas in Yangon,

792-531: A number of largely similar dialects, while a minority speak non-standard dialects found in the peripheral areas of the country. These dialects include: Arakanese in Rakhine State and Marma in Bangladesh are also sometimes considered dialects of Burmese and sometimes as separate languages. Despite vocabulary and pronunciation differences, there is mutual intelligibility among Burmese dialects, as they share

891-890: A prosperous business community. Identity cards allowed the Chinese immigrants to stay indefinitely and bypass legal barriers on foreign ownership of businesses such as hotels, shops, and restaurants. The imposition of sanctions by the United States and the European Union in the 1990s and Burma's open-door immigration policy in the 1990s encouraged Chinese entrepreneurs to move to Mandalay. A substantial increase in foreign direct investment has poured in from mainland China, mostly ending up in Mandalay's real estate sector, through Burmese citizen intermediaries of Chinese ancestry. Retail outlets were opened by Chinese entrepreneurs, ranging from cement mixing to financial services turning Mandalay into

990-466: A stop or check, high-rising pitch) and "ordinary" (unchecked and non-glottal words, with falling or lower pitch), with those tones encompassing a variety of pitches. The "ordinary" tone consists of a range of pitches. Linguist L. F. Taylor concluded that "conversational rhythm and euphonic intonation possess importance" not found in related tonal languages and that "its tonal system is now in an advanced state of decay." The syllable structure of Burmese

1089-494: Is C(G)V((V)C), which is to say the onset consists of a consonant optionally followed by a glide , and the rime consists of a monophthong alone, a monophthong with a consonant, or a diphthong with a consonant. The only consonants that can stand in the coda are /ʔ/ and /ɰ̃/ . Some representative words are: Mandalay Mandalay ( / ˌ m æ n d ə ˈ l eɪ / or / ˈ m æ n d əl eɪ / ; Burmese : မန္တလေး ; MLCTS : manta.le: [màndəlé] )

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1188-532: Is UTC/GMT +6:30 hours and is 626 km from Yangon. Mandalay lies along the Sagaing Fault , a tectonic plate boundary between the India and Sunda plates. The biggest earthquake in its history, occurred on 23 March 1839 , an estimated magnitude 8.2 destroyed the former capital Ava and caused extreme destruction in nearby cities. The most recent quake was a magnitude of 7, occurred in 1956. The devastation

1287-510: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Burmese language Burmese is a tonal , pitch-register , and syllable-timed language , largely monosyllabic and agglutinative with a subject–object–verb word order. It is a member of the Lolo-Burmese grouping of the Sino-Tibetan language family . The Burmese alphabet is ultimately descended from a Brahmic script , either

1386-541: Is connected to other parts of the country and to China and India by multiple modes of transportation. Mandalay International Airport (MDL) was one of the largest and most modern airports in Myanmar until the modernization of Yangon International Airport in 2008. Built at a cost of US$ 150 million in 2000, it is highly underused; it serves mostly domestic flights with the exception of those to Kunming and to/from Bangkok and Chiang Mai, with daily flights on Air Asia and Bangkok Airways. The airport has come to represent

1485-442: Is pronounced [mõ̀ũndã́ĩ] . The vowels of Burmese are: The monophthongs /e/ , /o/ , /ə/ , /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ occur only in open syllables (those without a syllable coda ); the diphthongs /ei/ , /ou/ , /ai/ and /au/ occur only in closed syllables (those with a syllable coda). /ə/ only occurs in a minor syllable , and is the only vowel that is permitted in a minor syllable (see below). The close vowels /i/ and /u/ and

1584-515: Is the national radio service and broadcasts mostly in Burmese (and in English during specific times.) Semi-state-run Mandalay City FM (87.9FM) is the Mandalay metropolitan area's pop culture oriented station. The military government, which controls all daily newspapers in Burma, uses Mandalay to publish and distribute its three national newspapers , the Burmese language Myanmar Alin and Kyemon and

1683-568: Is the second-largest city in Myanmar , after Yangon . Located on the east bank of the Irrawaddy River , 631 km (392 miles; road distance) north of Yangon, the city has a population of 1,225,553 (2014 census). Mandalay was founded in 1857 by King Mindon , replacing Amarapura as the new royal capital of the Konbaung dynasty . It was Burma's final royal capital before the kingdom's annexation by

1782-533: Is the value of the four native final nasals: ⟨မ်⟩ /m/ , ⟨န်⟩ /n/ , ⟨ဉ်⟩ /ɲ/ , ⟨င်⟩ /ŋ/ , as well as the retroflex ⟨ဏ⟩ /ɳ/ (used in Pali loans) and nasalisation mark anusvara demonstrated here above ka (က → ကံ) which most often stands in for a homorganic nasal word medially as in တံခါး tankhá 'door', and တံတား tantá 'bridge', or else replaces final -m ⟨မ်⟩ in both Pali and native vocabulary, especially after

1881-635: Is the word "moon", which can be လ la̰ (native Tibeto-Burman), စန္ဒာ/စန်း [sàndà]/[sã́] (derivatives of Pali canda 'moon'), or သော်တာ [t̪ɔ̀ dà] (Sanskrit). The consonants of Burmese are as follows: According to Jenny & San San Hnin Tun (2016 :15), contrary to their use of symbols θ and ð, consonants of သ are dental stops ( /t̪, d̪/ ), rather than fricatives ( /θ, ð/ ) or affricates. These phonemes, alongside /sʰ/ , are prone to merger with /t, d, s/ . An alveolar /ɹ/ can occur as an alternate of /j/ in some loanwords. The final nasal /ɰ̃/

1980-486: The [ ɹ ] sound, which has become [ j ] in standard Burmese. Moreover, Arakanese features a variety of vowel differences, including the merger of the ဧ [e] and ဣ [i] vowels. Hence, a word like "blood" သွေး is pronounced [θw é ] in standard Burmese and [θw í ] in Arakanese. The Burmese language's early forms include Old Burmese and Middle Burmese . Old Burmese dates from

2079-569: The /l/ medial, which is otherwise only found in Old Burmese inscriptions. They also often reduce the intensity of the glottal stop . Beik has 250,000 speakers while Tavoyan has 400,000. The grammatical constructs of Burmese dialects in Southern Myanmar show greater Mon influence than Standard Burmese. The most pronounced feature of the Arakanese language of Rakhine State is its retention of

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2178-584: The British Empire in 1885. Under British rule, Mandalay remained commercially and culturally important despite the rise of Yangon, the new capital of British Burma. The city suffered extensive destruction during the Japanese conquest of Burma in the Second World War . In 1948, Mandalay became part of the newly independent Union of Burma. Today, Mandalay is the economic centre of Upper Myanmar and considered

2277-470: The Burmese alphabet began employing cursive-style circular letters typically used in palm-leaf manuscripts , as opposed to the traditional square block-form letters used in earlier periods. The orthographic conventions used in written Burmese today can largely be traced back to Middle Burmese. Modern Burmese emerged in the mid-18th century. By this time, male literacy in Burma stood at nearly 50%, which enabled

2376-517: The Defence Services Academy were the only three universities in Upper Burma. Only a few other cities had "Degree Colleges" affiliated with Mandalay University that offered a limited number of subjects. Today, the city attracts a fraction of students as the military government requires students to attend their local universities in order to reduce concentration of students in one place. In November 1959, Mandalay celebrated its centennial with

2475-602: The English language in the colonial educational system, especially in higher education. In the 1930s, the Burmese language saw a linguistic revival, precipitated by the establishment of an independent University of Rangoon in 1920 and the inception of a Burmese language major at the university by Pe Maung Tin , modeled on Anglo Saxon language studies at the University of Oxford. Student protests in December of that year, triggered by

2574-657: The Kadamba or Pallava alphabets. Burmese belongs to the Southern Burmish branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages , of which Burmese is the most widely spoken of the non- Sinitic languages. Burmese was the fifth of the Sino-Tibetan languages to develop a writing system, after Classical Chinese , Pyu , Old Tibetan and Tangut . The majority of Burmese speakers, who live throughout the Irrawaddy River Valley, use

2673-714: The Mon people , who until recently formed the majority in Lower Burma . Most Mon loanwords are so well assimilated that they are not distinguished as loanwords, as Burmese and Mon were used interchangeably for several centuries in pre-colonial Burma. Mon loans are often related to flora, fauna, administration, textiles, foods, boats, crafts, architecture, and music. As a natural consequence of British rule in Burma , English has been another major source of vocabulary, especially with regard to technology, measurements, and modern institutions. English loanwords tend to take one of three forms: To

2772-522: The Myanma Salonpaung Thatpon Kyan ( မြန်မာ စာလုံးပေါင်း သတ်ပုံ ကျမ်း ), was compiled in 1978 by the commission. Burmese is a diglossic language with two distinguishable registers (or diglossic varieties ): The literary form of Burmese retains archaic and conservative grammatical structures and modifiers (including affixes and pronouns) no longer used in the colloquial form. Literary Burmese, which has not changed significantly since

2871-605: The Pyu language . These indirect borrowings can be traced back to orthographic idiosyncrasies in these loanwords, such as the Burmese word "to worship", which is spelt ပူဇော် ( pūjo ) instead of ပူဇာ ( pūjā ), as would be expected by the original Pali orthography. The transition to Middle Burmese occurred in the 16th century. The transition to Middle Burmese included phonological changes (e.g. mergers of sound pairs that were distinct in Old Burmese) as well as accompanying changes in

2970-455: The State Peace and Development Council came to power in 1988. Many Chinese immigrants from Yunnan and, to a lesser extent, Sichuan poured into Upper Burma in the 1990s and many ending up in Mandalay, living illegally there. In the 1990s alone, about 250,000 to 300,000 Yunnanese are estimated to have migrated to Mandalay. Today, ethnic Chinese people are believed to make up about 40%–50% of

3069-504: The Thudamma zayats or public houses for preaching Buddhism and a library for the Pāli Canon . In June 1857, the former royal palace of Amarapura was dismantled and moved by elephants to the new location at the foot of Mandalay Hill, although construction of the palace compound was officially completed only two years later, on Monday, 23 May 1859. For the next 26 years, Mandalay was to be

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3168-413: The 11th to the 16th century ( Pagan to Ava dynasties); Middle Burmese from the 16th to the 18th century ( Toungoo to early Konbaung dynasties); modern Burmese from the mid-18th century to the present. Word order , grammatical structure, and vocabulary have remained markedly stable well into Modern Burmese, with the exception of lexical content (e.g., function words ). The earliest attested form of

3267-457: The 13th century, is the register of Burmese taught in schools. In most cases, the corresponding affixes in the literary and spoken forms are totally unrelated to each other. Examples of this phenomenon include the following lexical terms: Historically the literary register was preferred for written Burmese on the grounds that "the spoken style lacks gravity, authority, dignity". In the mid-1960s, some Burmese writers spearheaded efforts to abandon

3366-410: The 19th century, in addition to concomitant economic and political instability in Upper Burma (e.g., increased tax burdens from the Burmese crown, British rice production incentives, etc.) also accelerated the migration of Burmese speakers from Upper Burma into Lower Burma. British rule in Burma eroded the strategic and economic importance of the Burmese language; Burmese was effectively subordinated to

3465-511: The British RAF had by now withdrawn all its aircraft to India. Three-fifths of Mandalay's houses were destroyed and 2,000 civilians were killed. Many residents also fled when the city was under Japanese occupation from May 1942 to March 1945. The palace citadel, which had been turned into a supply depot by the Japanese, was in turn burnt to the ground by Allied bombing; only the royal mint and

3564-521: The British in the lead-up to the independence of Burma in 1948. The 1948 Constitution of Burma prescribed Burmese as the official language of the newly independent nation. The Burma Translation Society and Rangoon University's Department of Translation and Publication were established in 1947 and 1948, respectively, with the joint goal of modernizing the Burmese language in order to replace English across all disciplines. Anti-colonial sentiment throughout

3663-552: The Buddhist clergy (monks) from the laity ( householders ), especially when speaking to or about bhikkhus (monks). The following are examples of varying vocabulary used for Buddhist clergy and for laity: Burmese primarily has a monosyllabic received Sino-Tibetan vocabulary. Nonetheless, many words, especially loanwords from Indo-European languages like English, are polysyllabic, and others, from Mon, an Austroasiatic language, are sesquisyllabic . Burmese loanwords are overwhelmingly in

3762-656: The Burmese language into Lower Burma also coincided with the emergence of Modern Burmese. As late as the mid-1700s, Mon , an Austroasiatic language, was the principal language of Lower Burma, employed by the Mon people who inhabited the region. Lower Burma's shift from Mon to Burmese was accelerated by the Burmese-speaking Konbaung Dynasty 's victory over the Mon-speaking Restored Hanthawaddy Kingdom in 1757. By 1830, an estimated 90% of

3861-462: The Burmese language is called Old Burmese , dating to the 11th and 12th century stone inscriptions of Pagan . The earliest evidence of the Burmese alphabet is dated to 1035, while a casting made in the 18th century of an old stone inscription points to 984. Owing to the linguistic prestige of Old Pyu in the Pagan Kingdom era, Old Burmese borrowed a substantial corpus of vocabulary from Pali via

3960-400: The English language New Light of Myanmar . The state-run Yadanabon is published in Mandalay and serves the Upper Burma market. The Mandalay Daily newspaper is published by Mandalay City Development Committee since 30 November 1997. Mandalay's sporting facilities are quite poor by international standards but are still the best in Upper Burma. The 17,000 seat Bahtoo Stadium was

4059-490: The Irrawaddy River valley. Regional differences between speakers from Upper Burma (e.g., Mandalay dialect), called anya tha ( အညာသား ) and speakers from Lower Burma (e.g., Yangon dialect), called auk tha ( အောက်သား ), largely occur in vocabulary choice, not in pronunciation. Minor lexical and pronunciation differences exist throughout the Irrawaddy River valley. For instance, for the term ဆွမ်း , "food offering [to

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4158-476: The OB vowel *u e.g. ငံ ngam 'salty', သုံး thóum ('three; use'), and ဆုံး sóum 'end'. It does not, however, apply to ⟨ည်⟩ which is never realised as a nasal, but rather as an open front vowel [iː] [eː] or [ɛː] . The final nasal is usually realised as nasalisation of the vowel. It may also allophonically appear as a homorganic nasal before stops. For example, in /mòʊɰ̃dáɪɰ̃/ ('storm'), which

4257-644: The PSRD. The PSRD's time-consuming and arbitrary process has forced nearly all privately held news publications in Burma to publish on a weekly or monthly basis. All of the daily newspapers in Burma are government-owned. Its origins date to August 1962, with the promulgation of the Printers' and Publishers' Registration Act, which established the Press Scrutiny Board, by the Revolutionary Council . In April 2005,

4356-526: The Press Scrutiny Board was renamed the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division. In 2009, a medical malpractice incident that resulted in the death of a young girl, which was widely reported in local Burmese media prompted a crackdown in censorship by the PSRD. Publications that report unapproved material, or "subversive" material can face publication bans. "Sandwich reporting," in which messages are included in stories or written works, that aren't caught by

4455-484: The UN puts Mandalay's population at nearly 1 million. The city's population is projected to reach nearly 1.5 million by 2025. While Mandalay has traditionally been the bastion of Bamar (Burman) culture and populace, the massive influx of illegal ethnic Han Chinese in the last 20 years has effectively influenced the ethnic Bamar majority there. Although many native ethnic Han Chinese could not get Burmese citizenship,

4554-491: The adoption of neologisms. An example is the word "university", formerly ယူနီဗာစတီ [jùnìbàsətì] , from English university , now တက္ကသိုလ် [tɛʔkət̪ò] , a Pali-derived neologism recently created by the Burmese government and derived from the Pali spelling of Taxila ( တက္ကသီလ Takkasīla ), an ancient university town in modern-day Pakistan. Some words in Burmese may have many synonyms, each having certain usages, such as formal, literary, colloquial, and poetic. One example

4653-436: The censorship board, have become part of the working vocabulary of Burmese journalists. The 20 July 2010 directive issued by the Press Scrutiny and Registration Board, called for "correct and complete quoting of the [2008] constitution, electoral laws and its rules". It also warns domestic journals that stern action could include loss of publishing licenses for breach of the directive. This article about media in Myanmar

4752-407: The centre of Burmese culture. A continuing influx of irregular Chinese immigrants, mostly from Yunnan , since the late 20th century, has reshaped the city's ethnic makeup and increased commerce with China. Despite Naypyidaw 's recent rise, Mandalay remains Upper Myanmar's main commercial, educational and health center. The city gets its name from the nearby Mandalay Hill . The name is probably

4851-487: The city of Mandalay, with clients from Hong Kong continuing to be the source of main customers. Mandalay has been virtually sinicized economically and culturally, to the resentment of locals. More than 50 percent of the commercial business activity generated in Downtown Mandalay is derived from the eclipsing plethora of Chinese-owned shops, hotels, restaurants, and showrooms that predominate the area. About 80 percent of

4950-438: The city's output of commercial business activity relative to their small population size. Prime residential and commercial real estate in central Mandalay have been bought by wealthy Chinese businessmen and investors. As many as half of the city's residents have Chinese ancestry with the seven of the top ten entrepreneurs in Mandalay being of Chinese descent fully controlling 60 percent of its entire economy. About 50 percent of

5049-526: The city's population that is nearly the same as the natives, and are a major factor in the city's doubling of population from about 500,000 in 1980 to one million in 2008. Chinese festivals are now firmly embedded in the city's cultural calendar. The Chinese dominance in the city center has pushed out the rest to the suburbs. The urban sprawl now encompasses Amarapura, the very city King Mindon left some 150 years ago. Mandalay celebrated its 150th birthday on 15 May 2009, at precisely 4:31:36 am. Despite

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5148-554: The city. A major fire destroyed Mandalay's second largest market, Yadanabon Market , in February 2008, and another major fire in February 2009 destroyed 320 homes and left over 1600 people homeless. The 1980s fires augured a significant change in the city's physical character and ethnic makeup. Huge swaths of land left vacant by the fires were later purchased, mostly by the ethnic Han Chinese , many of whom were recent immigrants from Yunnan . The Chinese influx accelerated after

5247-518: The city. In 1904–1905, a plague caused about one-third of the population to flee the city. During World War II , Mandalay suffered devastating air raids. On 3 April 1942, during the Japanese conquest of Burma , the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service carried out an extensive assault. The city was in effect defenseless as its firefighting resources were weak, having been lost in earlier bombing, it had no anti-aircraft capacity, and

5346-419: The city. Mandalay also features wet and dry seasons of nearly equal length, with the wet season running from May through October and the dry season covering the remaining six months. The highest reliably recorded temperature in Mandalay is 45.0 °C (113.0 °F) on 12 May 2010 while the lowest is 7.6 °C (45.7 °F) on 26 December 1999. There is considerably more diurnal temperature variation in

5445-534: The city. The airport serves some flights to Myanmar towns. The Ayeyarwady River remains an important arterial route for transporting goods such as farm produce including rice, beans and pulses, cooking oil, pottery, bamboo and teak. Mandalay Central Railway Station is the terminus of Myanmar Railways 's metre gauge main rail line from Yangon ( Yangon–Mandalay Railway ) and the starting point of branch lines to Pyin U Lwin (Maymyo), Lashio ( Mandalay–Lashio Railway ), Monywa , Pakokku , Kalay , Gangaw , and to

5544-525: The close portions of the diphthongs are somewhat mid-centralized ( [ɪ, ʊ] ) in closed syllables, i.e. before /ɰ̃/ and /ʔ/ . Thus နှစ် /n̥iʔ/ ('two') is phonetically [n̥ɪʔ] and ကြောင် /tɕàũ/ ('cat') is phonetically [tɕàʊ̃] . Burmese is a tonal language , which means phonemic contrasts can be made on the basis of the tone of a vowel. In Burmese, these contrasts involve not only pitch , but also phonation , intensity (loudness), duration, and vowel quality. However, some linguists consider Burmese

5643-593: The country. These varieties include the Yaw , Palaw, Myeik (Merguese), Tavoyan and Intha dialects . Despite substantial vocabulary and pronunciation differences, there is mutual intelligibility among most Burmese dialects. Below is a summary of lexical similarity between major Burmese dialects: Dialects in Tanintharyi Region , including Palaw, Merguese, and Tavoyan, are especially conservative in comparison to Standard Burmese. The Tavoyan and Intha dialects have preserved

5742-455: The dry season than the wet season. The Mandalay Region Government is the government for Mandalay Region including Mandalay City. The Mandalay City Development Committee (MCDC) is municipal organization for Mandalay City. The Mandalay District consists of seven townships. Mandalay's strategic location in Central Burma makes it an important hub for transport of people and goods. The city

5841-647: The early post-independence era led to a reactionary switch from English to Burmese as the national medium of education, a process that was accelerated by the Burmese Way to Socialism . In August 1963, the socialist Union Revolutionary Government established the Literary and Translation Commission (the immediate precursor of the Myanmar Language Commission ) to standardize Burmese spelling, diction, composition, and terminology. The latest spelling authority, named

5940-522: The entire Pāli Canon , each housed in its own white stupa . The buildings inside the old Mandalay city walls, surrounded by a moat, which was repaired in recent times using prison labor, comprise the Mandalay Palace , mostly destroyed during World War II . İt is now replaced by a replica, military Prison and a military garrison, the headquarters of the Central Military Command . Much of

6039-444: The ethnic Bamar. A sizable community of Indian immigrants (mostly Tamils ) also resides in Mandalay. Burmese is the principal language of the city, while Chinese is increasingly heard in the city's commerce centers as the second language. English is the third language, only known by some urban people. Mandalay is Burma's cultural and religious center of Buddhism, having numerous monasteries and more than 700  pagodas . At

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6138-496: The foot of Mandalay Hill sits the world's official " Buddhist Bible ", also known as the world's largest book, in Kuthodaw Pagoda . The styles of Mandalay Buddha Images and Buddha Statues were many since King Mandon, who was a devout Buddhist, and had filled Mandalay with them and through the years Mandalay Buddhist art became established as the pure art of Myanmar. There are 729 slabs of stone that together are inscribed with

6237-465: The foot of Mandalay Hill , ostensibly to fulfill a prophecy on the founding of a metropolis of Buddhism in that exact place on the occasion of the 2,400th jubilee of Buddhism. The new capital city site was 66 km (25.5 sq mi) in area, surrounded by four rivers. The plan called for a 144-square block grid patterned citadel, anchored by a 16 square block royal palace compound at the center by Mandalay Hill. The 1,020-acre (413-hectare) citadel

6336-450: The foreign-born Yunnanese can easily obtain Burmese citizenship cards on the black market. Ludu Daw Amar of Mandalay, the native journalist had said it felt like "an undeclared colony of Yunnan ". Today, the percentage of ethnic Han Chinese, estimated at 50% of the city (with the Yunnanese forming an estimated 30% of Mandalay's population), is believed to be nearly the same as that of

6435-598: The form of nouns . Historically, Pali , the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism , had a profound influence on Burmese vocabulary. Burmese has readily adopted words of Pali origin; this may be due to phonotactic similarities between the two languages, alongside the fact that the script used for Burmese can be used to reproduce Pali spellings with complete accuracy. Pali loanwords are often related to religion, government, arts, and science. Burmese loanwords from Pali primarily take four forms: Burmese has also adapted numerous words from Mon, traditionally spoken by

6534-399: The genealogies of kings and the kingdom's official records. Mandalay was razed. However, the palace, its structures and the city walls were spared destruction. While Mandalay would continue to be the chief city of Upper Burma during the British colonial rule, the commercial and political importance had irreversibly shifted to Yangon. The British view on the development of Mandalay (and Burma)

6633-400: The government allows only a few thousands of vehicles to be imported each year, motor transportation in Burma is highly expensive for most of its citizens. Most people rely on bicycles , motorcycles and/or private and public buses to get around. Back in the 2000s, the most popular car in Mandalay was the 1982/83 Nissan Sunny pickup truck . Because of its utility as a private bus or taxi,

6732-465: The hotels and guesthouses, more than 70 percent of the restaurants, more than 45 percent of gold and jewellery shops, about 30 percent of jade and gemstone trading, and nearly 100 percent of the sale centres for mainland Chinese-made commodities in Mandalay are owned and operated by the Chinese. Chinese entrepreneurs and investors have acquired much of Central Mandalay's economic crown jewels and have been disproportionately responsible for generating much of

6831-515: The introduction of English into matriculation examinations , fueled growing demand for Burmese to become the medium of education in British Burma; a short-lived but symbolic parallel system of "national schools" that taught in Burmese, was subsequently launched. The role and prominence of the Burmese language in public life and institutions was championed by Burmese nationalists, intertwined with their demands for greater autonomy and independence from

6930-576: The land plots in Downtown Mandalay are controlled by the Chinese. In addition, all of Mandalay's shopping malls and hotels were entirely built by Chinese-owned construction and real estate development companies. Besides Mandalay's economic development being shaped by the Burmese Chinese business community's immense development output, it has also been amplified with additional investment from foreign Chinese investment from mainland China and overseas bamboo networks . The apparent influence of mainland China

7029-475: The largest in Upper Myanmar before the construction of Mandalarthiri Stadium and hosts mainly local and regional association football and track-and-field tournaments. Since May 2009, professional football has arrived in Mandalay, with Yadanabon FC representing the city in the newly formed Myanmar National League , the country's first professional football league. In 2013, a new stadium, Mandalarthiri Stadium

7128-503: The last royal capital of the Konbaung dynasty , the last independent Burmese kingdom before its final annexation by the British Empire . Mandalay ceased to be the capital on 28 November 1885 when the British conquered the city and sent Thibaw Min and his queen Supayalat into exile in India. Moreover, a group of drunken soldiers set fire to the Pitakataik (Royal Library) which had contained

7227-565: The leading traditional industries are silk weaving, tapestry , jade cutting and polishing, stone and wood carving, making marble and bronze Buddha images, temple ornaments and paraphernalia, the working of gold leaves and of silver, the manufacture of matches, brewing and distilling. Since the country's post-1988 shift towards economic liberalization , large numbers of Chinese migrants in search of economic opportunity have poured into Mandalay. These migrants brought with them talent, skills, goods and services, and capital, but also purchased most of

7326-515: The literary form, asserting that the spoken vernacular form ought to be used. Some Burmese linguists such as Minn Latt , a Czech academic, proposed moving away from the high form of Burmese altogether. Although the literary form is heavily used in written and official contexts (literary and scholarly works, radio news broadcasts, and novels), the recent trend has been to accommodate the spoken form in informal written contexts. Nowadays, television news broadcasts, comics, and commercial publications use

7425-428: The media in Mandalay – like elsewhere in Burma – comes from Yangon. The city's non-satellite TV programming comes from Yangon-based state-run TV Myanmar and military-run Myawaddy , both of which provide Burmese language news and entertainment. Since December 2006, MRTV -4, formerly a paid channel, has also been available in Mandalay. Mandalay has two radio stations. Naypyidaw -based Myanmar Radio National Service

7524-408: The military regime's propensity for bad planning and penchant for white elephant projects. Myanmar's recent opening stance on tourism means the airport is now receiving a growing number of visitors from Bangkok and Chiang Mai. The airport is far from the city, 45 km (28 mi) on a modern highway. Before the construction of this airport, Mandalay Chanmyathazi Airport was the main airport of

7623-525: The north, Shwebo , Kawlin , Naba , Kanbalu , Mohnyin , Hopin , Mogaung and Myitkyina ( Mandalay–Myitkyina Railway ). Mandalay has a station on the standard gauge Kunming , China - Kyaukphyu port railway. Mandalay does not have an intra-city metro rail system. The former Trams in Mandalay has been decommissioned. Mandalay literally is at the center of Burma's road network. The highway network includes roads towards: Most stretches of these highways are one-lane roads in poor condition. As

7722-563: The number of cars in a city of one million is low, traffic in Mandalay is highly chaotic as thousands of bicycles and (unregistered) motorbikes freely roam around all the lanes of the streets. Unlike in Yangon where motorbikes, cycle rickshaws and bicycles are prohibited from entering downtown and busy areas, in Mandalay it is anything goes. In 2018, as part of Mandalay Smart City initiatives, new traffic lights with internet-connected sensors have been installed by Mandalay City Development Committee to manage traffic at junctions. A 2007 estimate by

7821-460: The palace compound Fort Dufferin and used it to billet troops. Throughout the colonial years, Mandalay was the centre of Burmese culture and Buddhist learning, and as the last royal capital, was regarded by the Burmese as a primary symbol of sovereignty and identity. Between the two World Wars, the city was Upper Burma's focal point in a series of nationwide protests against the British rule. The British rule brought in many immigrants from India to

7920-636: The population in Lower Burma self-identified as Burmese-speaking Bamars; huge swaths of former Mon-speaking territory, from the Irrawaddy Delta to upriver in the north, spanning Bassein (now Pathein) and Rangoon (now Yangon) to Tharrawaddy, Toungoo, Prome (now Pyay), and Henzada (now Hinthada), were now Burmese-speaking. The language shift has been ascribed to a combination of population displacement, intermarriage, and voluntary changes in self-identification among increasingly Mon–Burmese bilingual populations in

8019-922: The prosperous business centre it is today. As Mandalay became more economically prosperous, existing Burmese Chinese have facilitated continued immigration from China. The transformation of Mandalay into a booming modern metropolis filled with foreign businesses and gem trading centers occurred under the auspices of the entrepreneurial Chinese minority. The Chinese minority in Mandalay own virtually all of Mandalay's retail gold shops, mining concessions, foreign businesses and timber trading companies. In Central Mandalay, about 80 percent or four out of five gold and jewellery shops are Chinese-owned. Many Chinese-owned and operated businesses such as trading cooperatives, market stalls, food joints, traditional Chinese medicinal clinics, hotels, gemstone mining concessions, wholesale marketing, hotels, restaurants, and real estate have also flourished. Foreign purchasers of jade and gems flock to

8118-425: The region. Standardized tone marking in written Burmese was not achieved until the 18th century. From the 19th century onward, orthographers created spellers to reform Burmese spelling, because of ambiguities that arose over transcribing sounds that had been merged. British rule saw continued efforts to standardize Burmese spelling through dictionaries and spellers. Britain's gradual annexation of Burma throughout

8217-552: The rise of Naypyidaw, the country's capital since 2006, Mandalay remains Upper Burma's main commercial, educational and health center. In October 2018, Mandalay was ranked by CIO Asia as number fifth among the top 10 cities in Southeast Asia in the process of becoming a smart city for ASEAN Smart Cities Network . Mandalay is located in the central Dry Zone of Burma by the Irrawaddy river at 21.98° North, 96.08° East, 80 meters (260 feet) above sea level. Its standard time zone

8316-506: The said pronoun is used only by male speakers while ကျွန်မ , kya.ma. [tɕəma̰] is used by female speakers. Moreover, with regard to kinship terminology , Upper Burmese speakers differentiate the maternal and paternal sides of a family, whereas Lower Burmese speakers do not. The Mon language has also influenced subtle grammatical differences between the varieties of Burmese spoken in Lower and Upper Burma. In Lower Burmese varieties,

8415-482: The shops and real estate in the centre of Mandalay, transforming the economic dynamics of the city. This influx of poor Han Chinese immigrants mostly trace their ancestry to the Southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan . Many were able to illegally obtain identity papers on the black market to become naturalized Burmese citizens overnight. Arriving impoverished, they now sit at the helm of the Burmese economy as

8514-764: The spoken form or a combination of the spoken and simpler, less ornate formal forms. The following sample sentence reveals that differences between literary and spoken Burmese mostly occur in affixes: Burmese has politeness levels and honorifics that take the speaker's status and age in relation to the audience into account. The suffix ပါ pa is frequently used after a verb to express politeness. Moreover, Burmese pronouns relay varying degrees of deference or respect. In many instances, polite speech (e.g., addressing teachers, officials, or elders) employs feudal-era third person pronouns or kinship terms in lieu of first- and second-person pronouns. Furthermore, with regard to vocabulary choice, spoken Burmese clearly distinguishes

8613-448: The traditional homeland of Burmese speakers. The 1891 Census of India , conducted five years after the annexation of the entire Konbaung Kingdom , found that the former kingdom had an "unusually high male literacy" rate of 62.5% for Upper Burmans aged 25 and above. For all of British Burma , the literacy rate was 49% for men and 5.5% for women (by contrast, British India more broadly had a male literacy rate of 8.44%). The expansion of

8712-584: The two-and-a-half-decade old model still had strong demand and heady prices to match—from K10 million to K14 million (US$ 8,000 to US$ 11,000) in mid-2008. To get around severe import limits, people of Mandalay had turned to illegally imported and hence unregistered (called "without" in Burmese English ) motorcycles and cars despite the government's periodic confiscation sprees then. In March 2008, Mandalay had nearly 81,000 registered motor vehicles plus an unknown number of unregistered vehicles. Although

8811-425: The underlying orthography . From the 1500s onward, Burmese kingdoms saw substantial gains in the populace's literacy rate , which manifested itself in greater participation of laymen in scribing and composing legal and historical documents, domains that were traditionally the domain of Buddhist monks, and drove the ensuing proliferation of Burmese literature , both in terms of genres and works. During this period,

8910-455: The verb ပေး ('to give') is colloquially used as a permissive causative marker, like in other Southeast Asian languages, but unlike in other Tibeto-Burman languages. This usage is hardly used in Upper Burmese varieties, and is considered a sub-standard construct. More distinctive non-standard varieties emerge as one moves farther away from the Irrawaddy River valley toward peripheral areas of

9009-464: The watch tower survived. (A faithful replica of the palace was rebuilt in the 1990s.) After the country gained independence from Britain in 1948, Mandalay continued to be the main cultural, educational and economic hub of Upper Burma. Until the early 1990s, most students from Upper Burma went to Mandalay for university education. Until 1991, Mandalay University , the University of Medicine, Mandalay and

9108-459: The wide circulation of legal texts, royal chronicles , and religious texts. A major reason for the uniformity of the Burmese language was the near-universal presence of Buddhist monasteries (called kyaung ) in Burmese villages. These kyaung served as the foundation of the pre-colonial monastic education system, which fostered uniformity of the language throughout the Upper Irrawaddy valley,

9207-410: The word "television", Burmese publications are mandated to use the term ရုပ်မြင်သံကြား (lit. 'see picture, hear sound') in lieu of တယ်လီဗီးရှင်း , a direct English transliteration. Another example is the word "vehicle", which is officially ယာဉ် [jɪ̃̀] (derived from Pali) but ကား [ká] (from English car ) in spoken Burmese. Some previously common English loanwords have fallen out of use with

9306-453: The year. Average temperatures in January, the mildest month, hovers around 22 °C or 71.6 °F while the hottest month, April, averages 32 °C or 89.6 °F. Mandalay is very hot in the months of April and May, with average high temperatures easily exceeding 37 °C or 99 °F. It is not uncommon to see high temperatures surpass 40 °C or 104 °F during these two months in

9405-475: Was also called Lay Kyun Aung Myei ( လေးကျွန်းအောင်မြေ , [lé dʑʊ́ɰ̃ àʊɰ̃ mjè] , "Victorious Land over the Four Islands") and Mandalay Palace ( မြနန်းစံကျော် , [mja̰ náɰ̃ sàɰ̃ tɕɔ̀] , "Famed Royal Emerald Palace"). Like most former (and present) capitals of Burma, Mandalay was founded on the wishes of the ruler of the day. On 13 February 1857, King Mindon founded a new royal capital at

9504-538: Was built to host the Women Football matches of 27th SEA Games and became the largest stadium in Mandalay and Upper Myanmar. At Waterfall Hill, the first bolted rock climbing site in Myanmar have been developed with the help of Mandalay climbers led by Steve, Tylor and Technical Climbing Club of Myanmar since 2010. Mandalay is the major trading and communications center for Upper Myanmar . Much of Burmese external trade to China and India goes through Mandalay. Among

9603-676: Was greatest in nearby Sagaing , and it came to be known as the Great Sagaing Quake . Bodies of water near Mandalay are Mandalay Kantawgyi, a small lake and Irrawaddy River to the west of the city. Although the rain shadow of the Arakan Mountains is powerful, the city qualifies as having a tropical wet and dry climate (Köppen climate classification: Aw ), bordering a hot semi-arid climate ( BSh ), though if using 1981-2010 data, Mandalay does qualify as hot semi-arid ( BSh ). Mandalay features noticeably warmer and cooler periods of

9702-488: Was mainly with commercial intentions. While rail transport reached Mandalay in 1889, less than four years after the annexation, the first college in Mandalay, Mandalay College , was not established until 40 years later, in 1925. The British looted the palace, with some of the treasures going on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum ; in 1964 they were returned to Burma as a gesture of goodwill. The British also renamed

9801-508: Was surrounded by four 2,032 m (6,666 ft) long walls and a moat 64 m (210 ft) wide, 4.6 m (15 ft) deep. At intervals of 169 m (555 ft) along the wall, were turrets with gold-tipped spires for watchmen. The walls had three gates on each side, and five bridges to cross the moat. In addition, the king also commissioned the Kuthodaw Pagoda , the Pahtan-haw Shwe Thein Ordination Hall ,

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