The roughly 30-metre-tall chedi stands on the site of three smaller lotus-shaped chedis commissioned by Sukhothai’s King Lithai to enshrine relics of the Buddha in the mid-14th century. In the early 1900s a prominent Karen logger apparently covered the chedis with a larger white-plaster chedi resembling Yangon’s Shwedagon Pagoda, albeit much smaller. How the logger had the clout to erase the work of a Sukhothai king is anyone’s guess.