Kyaiktiyo, the Golden Rock, is a boulder of some 600 tonnes balanced at the very edge of a cliff on a mountain in Mon State, southern Myanmar, covered entirely in gold leaf and topped with a small pagoda, and pilgrims say it is held there by a single strand of the Buddha's hair. The rock looks as if a push would send it down the mountain, and it has not moved in living memory; the story is that a hermit named Taik Tha was given the hair by the Buddha, kept it in his topknot, and asked that it be enshrined in a rock shaped like his head, which the king found on the seabed and set here by the power of the relic. It is one of Myanmar's three great pilgrimages, and the terrace around it fills with families who have come up the mountain in the open back of a truck, and then walked the last stretch barefoot on sun-warmed stone past shrines, gold-leaf stalls and resting pilgrims.
At the rock, men cross a small bridge to press a square of gold leaf directly onto the boulder, adding to centuries of offerings that have thickened its golden skin; women may not touch it, since the rock is taken to be a relic shrine tied to a monk's head, and monks may not be touched by women, so they pray from the terrace. Along the cliff edge pilgrims kneel to light candles and burn incense, sending thin trails of smoke against a view that drops away over forested hills to the plains. The hours are the thing. Day-trippers ride the last trucks down in the afternoon, and those who stay at the summit guesthouses are out on the platform before sunrise, when the rock glows in the first light with the mist below it and the monks chanting, and again after dark, when it is lit and the candles burn all along the terrace. Kyaiktiyo is a rock that should have fallen, and a country has been climbing up to see it stay.