It cannot have pleased Myanmar’s ruling family — the collapse of a 2,300-year-old gold-domed pagoda into a pile of timbers just three weeks after the wife of the junta’s top general had helped re-consecrate it.

There is no country in Asia more superstitious than Myanmar, and the collapse of the temple was seen as something more portentous than shoddy construction work. It comes at a moment when the junta has put on trial its pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. The trial is on hold as the junta decides how to manage the ‘major blunder’.

The superstitious generals may be consulting astrologers as well as political tacticians as they decide how to proceed. Currency denominations and traffic rules have been changed in the past, the nation’s capital has been moved and the timing of events has been selected with astrological dictates in mind. And so it seemed only natural to read a darker meaning into the temple collapse.

The Danok pagoda on the outskirts of Yangon was blessed on May 7 in the presence of Daw Kyaing Kyaing, the wife of the country’s supreme leader, Senior Gen Than Shwe. The worshippers fixed the diamond orb to the top of the pagoda along with a pennant-shaped vane and sprinkled scented water onto the tiers of a holy umbrella, according to the Government mouthpiece, The New Light of Myanmar.

When the Danok pagoda collapsed last Saturday — killing at least 20 people, according to émigré reports — many people saw it as the latest of a series of bad omens for the junta that included a devastating cyclone early last year. Its umbrella tumbled and its diamond orb was lost in the rubble, according to those reports.

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