Andaw Thein

Andaw Thein is a Buddhist ordination hall in Mrauk U, the former capital of the Arakan Kingdom in present-day Myanmar, built in 1515 during the city's peak as a thriving trade hub linking Bengal and Southeast Asia. In Theravada Buddhism, ordination halls — known as thein — served as consecrated spaces for the formal admission of monks into the Sangha, making them ritually distinct from ordinary temples or pagodas. The structure sits within a broad archaeological landscape containing dozens of temples from the 15th to 17th centuries, most of them sparsely documented. Mrauk U remains difficult to reach, but that relative isolation has preserved the site's atmosphere as a largely unexcavated medieval royal city.