Alexandra Kaloyanides: "Sanctifying Prison Grounds: The Visual Culture of Burma's Let Ma Yoon"

In 2013, thousands of American Baptists traveled to Burma to celebrate the 200-year anniversary of the arrival of Ann and Adoniram Judson, the United States’ first intercontinental missionaries and the evangelists credited with establishing Burma’s Baptist church. Featured among the visited sacred Christian and Buddhist sites were the grounds of Let Ma Yoon prison, where Adoniram was incarcerated by King Bagyidaw during the First Anglo-Burmese War, 1824–1826. These grounds have been attracting Protestant pilgrims since at least the 1870s, and Let Ma Yoon has been depicted in detailed illustrations in the American press since 1853. This paper examines the pilgrimage practices and 19th-century print culture inspired by Adoniram’s imprisonment to understand how Let Ma Yoon became a particularly sacred site for Baptists and to reflect on the broader relationship between mass media and religious tourism, particularly tourism fixated on sites of extreme suffering. I wager that print visuals of violence and death in the Buddhist kingdom were especially effective at capturing the Protestant imagination and argue that these drawings of chained bodies and lonely grave sites reveal pervasive concerns about the corporeal costs of the Burma mission.