Mrauk-U has a rich history that repays reading before you arrive.
The Land of the Great Image by Maurice Collis (1943) is the indispensable starting point — a slim, vivid account of the Mahamuni Buddha and the Rakhine kingdom by a colonial-era administrator who knew the region well. It is part travel writing, part history, and reads beautifully.
The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh (2000) is a sweeping novel that opens in 1885 with the British conquest of Burma. It does not centre on Mrauk-U but captures the colonial collapse of the Burmese kingdoms and the subsequent disruption of Rakhine, India and Malaya in fiction of unusual force.
A History of Arakan: Past and Present by Pamela Gutman (2001) is the most accessible scholarly history of the Rakhine kingdom, with good chapters on Mrauk-U's architecture and its place in the wider Bay of Bengal world.
The River of Lost Footsteps by Thant Myint-U (2006) is a personal and political history of Burma by the grandson of UN Secretary General U Thant. Not specific to Mrauk-U but essential for understanding the ethnic complexity of the country and the long shadow of the Burmese conquest.