Inle is a shallow lake at 880 metres in the Shan hills of eastern Myanmar, and the fields on it float. The beds are mats of matted weed and lake mud, staked to the bottom with bamboo, so they rise and fall with the water and never flood. A plot cut free of its stakes can be poled to a new spot like a raft. Farmers work long rows of tomatoes and beans from a canoe, poling past you between the beds, and the beds are rich enough to send tomatoes across the country. The villages do the same trick on legs. Houses of wood and woven bamboo stand on stilts with the lake beneath the floor, and you can only reach them by boat. Their working sheds hold silversmiths at their fires, women rolling cheroots, and weavers who make thread from lotus. If you break a stem, fine sticky fibres stretch from it; rolled together by hand they become a cloth valued above silk, and a single monk's robe can take some 200,000 stems.
Out on the water at first light the fishermen are already standing. An Intha rows from the stern of a narrow boat with one leg hooked around the oar, which leaves his hands free for the tall conical net he lowers into the shallows. In the still misty hour before the boat traffic builds, you see them across the water in silhouette. The holiest place on it is Phaung Daw Oo, where golden stupas rise straight from the water around five small Buddha images. Only men may press gold leaf onto them, and generations of it have swelled all five into smooth, shapeless mounds. Around the October full moon four of the five ride a gilded royal barge around the lake for eighteen days, village to village, towed by teams of leg-rowers pulling in unison. The fifth never goes. Long ago, the story runs, the barge capsized in a squall and one image sank; the searchers came back to find it already on its altar, still dripping, and since then one always stays home.