The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c29.s4.29

v3.c29.s4.29

Shinsawbu spent the remaining years of her life in retirement at the Shwedāgon. Successive princes had added to the original structure, and she made it practically what we see to-day. Round it she banked up the terrace fifty feet high, nine hundred feet wide, with a great stone balustrade and encircling walls, between which she planted palm trees; she kept forty-four people continually tending the sacred lamps, dedicated five hundred prisoners of war as slaves, and offered her own weight (91 lb.) in gold for gilding the dome¹. When, at the age of seventy-eight, she felt her end approaching, she had her bed placed where her eyes could rest on that wondrous spire, and thus she breathed her last.