A chief in a larger house

In 1798 the East India Company sent the surveyor Francis Buchanan through Chittagong and its hill country to look for land that might grow spices. Somewhere beyond Bajalia, in present-day Satkania, he was received by a jhum-cultivating chief he recorded as the Po-mang, Kong Hla Prue.

Buchanan was not much impressed by grandeur, because there was little to see. The chief's house, he noted, was built exactly like the houses of the other jhumias, only larger, and furnished with chairs, carpets, bedding and mats. Po-mang is the title we now write as Bohmong.

By then the Bohmong line had already travelled a long way. Family tradition traces a descent out of Arakan after a falling-out with the Arakanese kings, then a slow drift north through Naikhongchhari, Ramu, Lama and Chakaria to Bajalia. They were a court without a capital, and they were about to move again.

The monkeys' dam

Six years after Buchanan's visit, in the time of Raja Kong Hla Prue, the royal household and its followers crossed into the valley of the Sangu, the river the Marma call Shankha. The forest was deep and full of animals, and nobody was sure the settlement would last. So they built nothing permanent. Houses stood on bamboo and timber posts, raised off the ground as machang; even the Raja's palace was a machang.

South of the new settlement ran a stream where troops of monkeys crossed from one bank of forest to the other. From a distance, the moving line of animals looked like a bund thrown across the water. The Marma called it ম্যয়ক সে, the monkeys' dam. The stream kept the name and wore it down into Maxi Khal. In the mouths of Bangla speakers, the settlement became Bandarban.

Ninety years of bamboo

According to records kept by the royal family, the Company formally recognised the head of the Bohmong house as a chief in 1822, just after the household had shifted from the west bank of the Sangu to the east. People kept arriving. The settlement grew. And for the better part of a century, the Bohmongs still built only in bamboo and wood, as if the decision to stay had not quite been made.

Captain T. H. Lewin, the first administrator of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, wrote about the Bohmong family in his accounts of 1866–67. The court he describes is real and established. The town is still made of things that will rot.

The first thing built to last

Around 1894 the Bohmong Raja and his people finally began building permanent homes. And the first permanent building was not a palace. It was a monastery for the Raja's teacher.

The ninth Bohmong Raja, Sak Hna Nyo Chowdhury, began the Rajguru Vihar in the Burmese manner: a raised machang hall eighty feet long and sixty feet wide. A Buddha image in precious metal was brought from Burma to sit in it, and two lions were set up on either side of the entrance to guard it. The Marma have their own name for it.

A rajguru is a royal preceptor, the monk to whom a king himself bows. To make the teacher's house the first building meant to endure says something about what the Bohmongs thought a capital was for. The palace of that time is gone; the bamboo royal houses have long since returned to the soil. The kyang is the one building from the town's founding that still holds its place, and Prothom Alo's reporting describes it as the only old structure left in the district.

Rebuilt without being changed

Timber and bamboo in a monsoon climate do not last. In 1938 Raja Kyaw Zaw Sain Chowdhury rebuilt the vihar, and the monks who keep it say he took care to keep its architecture intact. Another old image came from Burma at that time, a Buddha the Marma call আসাইম্রাইং. In a report dated 19 October 2020, the Department of Archaeology suggested the image may be between 550 and 800 years old, which would place it among the oldest Buddha images in Bangladesh.

Since then the kyang has been repaired and rebuilt many times. The present abbot says it plainly: the wood-and-bamboo vihar of 130 years ago no longer exists, but its design and its tradition have been carried into the masonry building. What survives here is not the original fabric. It is the form, the image, the site, and an unbroken line of teachers.

The line of teachers

The Rajguru is not simply elected. The office passes through the vihar's community of monks and is confirmed by the Raja, so every succession renews the old bond between the royal house and its teacher.

On 13 April 2020 the abbot U Pannyajota Mahathera, remembered locally as Uchala Bhante, passed away. In late May, U Nyanasiggi (Gyanpriya) Mahathera was received with royal ceremony as the ninth head of the vihar. The following year the office passed again. On 21 July 2021, in the presence of the sangha, the royal family and the Buddhist lay community of Bandarban, the seventeenth Bohmong Raja, U Cho Prue Chowdhury, installed U Ketu Mahathera as the tenth Rajguru. He formally received the letter of office, and with it the headship of the central vihar for the Buddhists of the Bohmong Circle.

Ten teachers in a little over 130 years. The bamboo is gone; the succession is not.

Walking up the hill

You begin at the road, at a boundary wall papered with banners, beside a solar street lamp and a tangle of power lines. Behind the wall is an open ground of bare, trodden earth, the place where the community gathers. At its back stands a great tree, its trunk bound in red and saffron cloth, as sacred trees are across the Buddhist world. Other trees crowd behind it, so tall and wide that from the ground they read as one dark wall.

To the right is the kyang itself: a white two-storey building under a broad hipped roof, crowned by a stepped spire of diminishing tiers. Its plaster has greyed in the monsoons. Beside it, a long, narrow stair sets off up the slope and disappears into the green.

The stair is steep and damp under the trees. Near the top the light opens up, the balustrades turn white, and the finial of the zedi appears above the last step, gold against a monsoon-washed sky.

The summit is a broad concrete platform, stained in grey and ochre by years of rain, edged by a baluster parapet. The main zedi rises from a square, terraced base in gold and lacquer red. Small spirelets mark its corners; above them the bell swells, the rings narrow, and the hti, the jewelled umbrella, carries a vane at the very top. A red iron railing encloses it, and a band of white tile has been laid around it for circumambulation. On its flanks, gilded arched niches hold seated Buddhas and offerings of red flowers.

It is not alone. At the eastern edge of the platform, on an octagonal plinth painted deep maroon, stands a second golden zedi with small niches at its corners and low-relief elephants walking along its base. The forest pushes right up to it: shrubs, saplings and a fallen log lie just beyond the concrete.

And near the head of the stair stands a third, entirely white: a lime-washed zedi of stepped square terraces rising to a ribbed spire and a gilded, filigree umbrella, set in a shallow sunken tray. Beside the gilding it looks austere, almost older in spirit, as if it remembered what the hill was like before the town arrived.

What the hill is holding

Go back to the view from above. The hill is now an island. On one side, multi-storey concrete; on the other, a dense settlement of tin roofs creeping up the lower slopes. The old trees are the last large canopy in this part of town, and they are doing real work: in a hill town that receives the full force of the monsoon, their roots hold the slope that carries the platform, the stair and the kyang.

The Rajguru Kyang teaches something unusual about heritage. Almost nothing here is original in the material sense. The bamboo hall of 1894 is gone; the 1938 building has been renewed many times; the zedis gleam with recent gold. What has endured is continuity: the same hill, the same purpose, an image that has sat in this kyang for generations, and a line of ten teachers each confirmed by a Raja's hand. That is a living heritage, and it is more fragile than stone, because it depends on the place around it staying whole.

Keeping it whole asks for a few plain things:

• A measured record of the kyang, the stair and the three zedis, drawn and photographed before the next round of renovation.
• The canopy treated as part of the monument, with the old trees protected as firmly as the zedis they shelter.
• Rainwater led safely off the platform and down the slope, so the monsoon stops eating at the deck and the hillside.
• Renovation guided by the monastery's own tradition, so that new gold and new concrete continue the form instead of replacing it.

The Bohmongs waited ninety years before they built something meant to last, and when they did, they built it for their teacher. A century and a quarter later, the least we can do is make sure it lasts.