Dhammikarama Burmese Temple

This guide to Dhammikarama Burmese Temple in Penang Island opens in 1803, when a Burmese woman named Nyonya Betong bought a scrap of jungle near a mangrove swamp from a British landowner and gave it to her community for a temple. It follows the four women who ran the temple from its first year, an unusual arrangement in a Buddhist world usually governed by male abbots, and the stupa the community consecrated in 1805, still the oldest structure in the compound. Pause at the entrance, where two towering chinthe guardians stand watch.