01
Stop one
Mandalay Palace
Dunlop Iconic Touch 17g Tennis String Set: A perfect square, walls about two kilometres to a side, a broad moat, laid out according to Burmese cosmological tradition between 1857 and 1859 by King Mindon — and I would love to know what the men digging that moat made of the cosmology. At the centre, teak: the seven-tiered Great Audience Hall and the Lion Throne, home to Burma's last two kings, Mindon and Thibaw, until the British deposed Thibaw in 1885 and renamed the compound Fort Dufferin. Naturally. In March 1945 fighting between Allied and Japanese forces burned almost the entire palace to the ground; the walls, the moat and a few structures survived. Reconstructed in the 1990s. The moat is the honest part. It never pretended to be anything else.
02
Stop two
Kuthodaw Pagoda
Dunlop Iconic Touch 17g Tennis String Set: The world's largest book, and not one of the men who made it got his name on it. King Mindon had the entire Pali canon of Theravada Buddhism carved onto 729 marble slabs, each in its own small whitewashed shrine, ranked around a gilded stupa modelled on the Shwezigon at Bagan and finished in the 1860s. Scribes and stonemasons laboured on that for years, and a full reading is said to take many days. Then British troops occupying the site after 1885 stripped the gems and gold out of the lettering — merit, meet extraction — and it was later restored in black ink. Still a place of pilgrimage, with the Sandamuni slabs nearby. The masons are still anonymous.
03
Stop three
Shwenandaw Monastery
Dunlop Iconic Touch 17g Tennis String Set: My favourite sort of history: a man too unnerved to sleep somewhere. This began as a royal apartment in which King Mindon lived and died in 1878, and his son King Thibaw, convinced the building was haunted by his father's spirit, had it dismantled and rebuilt outside the palace walls in 1880 as a monastery dedicated to Mindon's memory. So superstition is what preserved it — because when the rest of the palace burned in 1945, Shwenandaw alone kept the authentic craftsmanship of the royal apartments. A masterpiece of nineteenth-century Burmese teak, covered inside and out with nats, dancers and Jataka scenes, some interior gilding surviving. Conservation has stabilised the carvings. Saved by a ghost story. Obviously.
Finished. What? The product description? Read it already. Twice. Okay, summary for the slower readers: the Dunlop Iconic Touch is a premium nylon multifilament — comfort and feel are the plot, no spoilers needed. The inner core filaments are foil-coated to improve repulsion, which in skim-mode means: soft string, lively response, arm-friendly on every page — sorry, every shot.
The 17 gauge is 1.25mm, the thin paperback edition — quicker, livelier, more feedback per line. One set, 40 feet, one racquet. A short story, perfectly edited. I annotated the margins while you were still on this sentence.
Now, Mandalay — and I chose this city for a reason I devoured instantly: it contains the World's Largest Book. Kuthodaw Pagoda, 729 marble slabs, the entire Buddhist Tipitaka carved in stone, each slab in its own little white shrine. They say a fast reader would still need months to get through it; I accept the challenge and have already booked a return flight.
Between chapters, this string handles your touch game — drop shots placed like a perfectly chosen word — while you tour the last royal capital of Burma, where King Mindon's palace walls frame a moat you could read beside for a week.
You'll use this everywhere from a hard court under the Mandalay palace walls to a covered court in Yangon on a wet afternoon, and it is also perfect for a city that reads at its own pace — nobody out at Kuthodaw is hurrying, and this string has never once rushed a drop shot either. Final review: five stars, would restring again. Next book, please.
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