Kyaiktiyo is a boulder of some 600 tonnes balanced on the lip of a cliff in southern Myanmar, gilded from top to bottom and, pilgrims say, held there by a single strand of the Buddha's hair. It stands on a ridge in Mon State with a small pagoda on its crown, and looks as though one push would send it down the mountain. The story accounts for the rock and its shape. A forest hermit named Taik Tha was given the hair by the Buddha and passed it to a king on one condition: that it be enshrined in a boulder shaped like his own head. The king found this one and built the stupa on it. People have climbed to it since about the eleventh century, and it ranks with Shwedagon and Mahamuni among the country's three holiest places.
Open trucks grind up the mountain road. Past the truck stop you walk the last stretch barefoot on sun-warmed stone, past shrines, gold-leaf stalls and resting pilgrims, the golden spire showing and vanishing through the trees above you. Men cross a short bridge to press their square of leaf straight onto the rock; women pray from the terrace a few metres back, because the stone is taken to stand for a monk's head and monks are not touched by women. The rest of the summit is theirs as much as anyone's. Along the cliff edge families kneel to light candles and burn incense, the smoke going out thin over the valley. Rows of brass bells hang from the railings, worn bright by the hands that ring them. Day-trippers take the last trucks down in the afternoon. If you stay in one of the summit guesthouses you are on the platform before sunrise, when the ridge cloud thins and the gilded dome comes clear of the fog. At the Tabaung full moon in March tens of thousands of candles ring the terrace. The rock is never finished. Its skin is a little thicker every year, and every layer of it came up this mountain in somebody's hand.