The king immediately sent out his troops to wake the people and make them do as the Goat-Bull Monk had ordered. As the sun rose, the monk passed from house to house, dipping the Philosopher’s stone into every pot. The metals were changed into silver and gold, and the people of Pagan were amply rewarded for their years of poverty.

This, it is said, is the source of the wealth that built Pagan’s many temples. The people were released from their lives of hardship, and the monk and his assistant left the city and went into the mountains to the north. The assistant could not follow his master into the next world, however. He was not fated to share his master’s triumphs as an alchemist.

Before the two parted company, the monk gave the novice a single piece of gold. Later, when the young monk gave the gold to his mother to buy food, he found another piece in his pocket. Each time he gave it away, another would appear. The great alchemist had left his assistant the gift of perpetual wealth.

How corruption came to Pagan

In the eleventh century, with the advent of a formal alphabet, Burmese history crossed from the realm of oral myth and lore into written records. Many myths undoubtedly found their way into the accepted histories. The legend of the Philosopher’s Stone may have been based on an oral myth, or it may be an allegory for the changes that took place in Pagan during that period.

Ancient Burma’s greatest city, Pagan was founded on a broad plain beside the Irrawaddy in A.D. 849. Within 150 years it became the center of a kingdom that extended across most of what is now Myanmar, supplanting the former kingdom of Prome in upper Burma. The ascension of King Anawrahta to Pagan’s throne in 1044 marks the beginning of Burma’s chronicled history.