A Buddhist monk in Myanmar has been caught hiding more than 4m methamphetamine pills in his monastery, police said, following a record haul of stimulant seizures last year.

The monk, named Arsara, was put into custody after police said they discovered hundreds of thousands of tablets in his car as he was driving from Shwe Baho village in the town of Maungdaw in Rakhine state, bordering Bangladesh.

Local police chief Kyaw Mya Win told AFP they found 400,000 drug pills when they searched his vehicle on Sunday evening. They then went to the monk’s monastery and found another 4.2 million pills.

Myanmar is one of the world’s top narcotics-producing countries, manufacturing huge quantities of methamphetamines as well as opium and cannabis.

Methamphetamine pills are hugely popular across Asia. Last year, police confiscated a record 98m stimulant tablets, after seizing 50m in 2015. The number of drug prosecutions also increased by about 50% from 2015 to 13,500, which police said reflected the growth in the local drug trade.

Trafficking has particularly been on the rise in Rakhine state, home to more than a million people from the impoverished Muslim Rohingya minority.

In September, state media reported that two men had been arrested after 6.2m methamphetamine tablets were found in their car in Maungdaw.