Prome

They peered into grimy glass cabinets at gold-painted sphinxlike creatures in a rundown library in the town of Prome, near where the first Buddhists in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, lived.

At the curators’ last stop, the tin-roofed annex of the museum in Prome, a 1,500-year-old bronze Buddha, encrusted with a rough patina from centuries buried in the ground, stood on a green plastic tablecloth under a bare neon strip light.

The curators searched in the former capital, Yangon; in the new capital, Naypyidaw; in Prome; and here in Bagan, which from the ninth century to the 13th century was the center of a royal kingdom where the creative energy was so intense that nearly 2,000 brick and gilded temples were built across a vast plain.

At Rangoon the track is already laid for a railroad up the country to Prome.

He says: "British Burmah embraces all variety of aspect, from the flats of Holland, at the mouths of the Irrawaddy, to the more than Scottish beauty of the mountainous valley of the Salwen, and the Rhenish river banks of the Irrawaddy near Prome."