page_title: Mandalay Palace
section_title: Lion Throne Room
hierarchical_section_title: Mandalay Palace / On the palace platform / Lion Throne Room
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of the Lion Throne in the Royal Palace at Mandalay, probably taken by Felice Beato in c.1890. Mandalay, the second largest city in Burma, was founded in 1857 by King Mindon Min (who shifted his capital here from Amarapura) and became the country's last great royal capital. Thibaw was the last king of Burma and ruled from 1878 until 1885, when Mandalay was annexed by the British Empire and he was exiled to south India together with his queen Supayalat. His throne dominated the Great Audience Hall and was one of eight in the palace. It is a magnificent gilded wooden structure topped with a pediment decorated with flaring ornamental forms known as saing-baung, derived from the haunches of a wild ox. It is decorated with floral designs, glass mosaic work and carved imagery including divine beings, astrological symbols, and lions, from which the throne takes its name. The imagery was designed to express the universality of the monarch and links the throne to the heavenly realm of Thagyamin, the king of the gods, and Mount Meru, the sacred mountain at the centre of the world in Burmese Buddhist cosmology. It dates from 1857-61 and is now in the National Museum at Rangoon (Yangon). The photograph is from an album devoted almost entirely to Lord Elgin's Burma tour of November to December 1898. Victor Alexander Bruce (1849-1917), ninth Earl of Elgin and 13th Earl of Kincardine, served as Viceroy of India between 1894 and 1899.
context_page_description: The Mandalay Palace, located in Mandalay, Myanmar, is the last royal palace of the last Burmese monarchy. The palace was constructed between 1857 and 1859 as part of King Mindon's founding of the new royal capital city of Mandalay. The plan of Mandalay Palace largely follows the traditional Burmese palace design, inside a walled fort surrounded by a moat. The palace itself is at the centre of the citadel and faces east. All buildings of the palace are of one storey in height. The number of spires above a building indicated the importance of the area below.
  Mandalay Palace was the primary royal residence of King Mindon and King Thibaw, the last two kings of the country. The complex ceased to be a royal residence and seat of government on 28 November 1885 when, during the Third Anglo-Burmese War, troops of the Burma Field Force entered the palace and captured the royal family. The British turned the palace compound into Fort Dufferin, named after the then viceroy of India. Throughout the British colonial era, the palace was seen by the Burmese as the primary symbol of sovereignty and identity.
context_section_description: There were eight thrones in the Palace, of which the Lion Throne (သီဟာသနပလ္လင်, Sihasana Palanka) was the greatest, and as such much more elaborately sculptured and finished than the others; an exact replica of the one in the Palace was formerly in the Hluttaw. The King alone, of course, had a right to sit on it; and for anybody else to do so would be considered a case of high treason; the fact indeed was that anybody sitting on this throne was practically the King, if he could keep the rightful owner off. The base is a lotus throne formed of two lotuses, the upper one inverted on the top of the other; this pattern in no way differs from an ordinary altar supporting a Buddha image; but in the centre, where it is narrowest, that is, at the point where the two lotuses meet, is a small band containing a row of niches, with a somewhat larger one above it; in these niches were small figures of lions, besides the two large ones which may be seen now at each side of the Throne. Access to the Throne was obtained by means of a flight of steps in the room behind it from which it is shut off by a sliding door of gilt iron lattice work.
  The other thrones were the Hintha Throne (ဟင်္သာသနပလ္လင်), Elephant Throne (Gajasana) in the Byedaik (Privy Council Hall), Thinga Throne, Deer Throne (Migasana), Peacock Throne (Marurasana), Lily Throne (ပဒုမ္မာသနပလ္လင်), and Bee Throne (Bhamarasana).
  The original Lion Throne was saved from destruction in the bombings of World War II, because it was transported by the British authorities to India in 1885 after the Third Anglo-Burmese War, and later returned. It is now exhibited in the National Museum of Myanmar in Yangon.
caption: The Lion Throne in 1903
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