There's a large collection of recordbreaking religious buildings just outside the palace/fort. While this sort of vanity building created ancient wonders like the pyramids, it's a testament to the backwardness of the Burmese monarchy that they were able to muster enough slave labor to create these structures in the mid to late 1800's. The Kyauktawgyi Paya (not pictured), built in 1878, is famous for its huge seated Buddha carved from a single block of marble. It took ten thousand lucky men two weeks to lug the marble block to Mandalay. What is pictured here is Kuthodaw Paya, which is actually not a building but the world's largest book. The king thought it would be fun to have the entire Buddhist scripture, the Tripitaka, engraved in marble on stupas, so the entire book is engraved on 730 marble slabs, and each slab is mounted on its own stupa. The 730 whitewashed stupas is an amazing sight, although not very practical as a book, definitely not something you can bring to the beach for some light reading. When it was finished, a team of 2400 monks formed a nonstop relay, and read the slabs day and night continuously for six months.