When King Mindon (reigned 1853–78) transferred his court to Mandalay and began to build his palace there in 1857, many parts of the teak buildings were brought from the old capital of Amarapura. In the hundred years before that, the palace had already been disassembled and moved from Ava to Amarapura and back again before King Shwebo Min finally reassembled the royal buildings at Amarapura in 1837. Each time, complex wood structures covered with gilt carvings were taken apart and transported to the new royal centre. When it was re-erected, embellishments were added, and the whole refurbished with new paint and gilding.

Among the Taylor-Schechter Collection in the University Library Cambridge there are still Christian-Palestinian-Aramaic (CPA) fragments which have yet to be identified. One such fragment, T-S 12.742, was published for the first time in 1900 by A. Lewis and M. Gibson, though scarcely any of the text had been read.2 Like all the other CPA fragments of earlier date, T-S 12.742 is a vellum palimpsest, and has a small part of another page attached to it (see plates). The CPA script underneath the Hebrew square letters is very faint and consists of two unheaded columns of 24 lines each on both sides of the fragment. It is one of the most difficult CPA palimpsests to decipher.