The hintha is not a swan. Burmese culture reads it as a ruddy shelduck: plump-bodied, short-necked, with a flowering beak and a flaring tail. It is the emblem of the Mon people and of Hanthawaddy — the Realm of Hamsa — and Bago's founding legend puts two of them on an island in a lake, a female standing on the back of a male.

That stacked pair became a seal, then a flag, then a habit of ornament. Gold on a lacquer-red field, tiled down hanging banners at even intervals, gilded onto finials at the tops of monastery flagpoles. This system takes the banner as its unit: strict bilateral symmetry, repetition over hierarchy, gold hairlines around every filled shape.