Bagan - Page 4

The ancient city of Bagan. From the 9th to 13th centuries, the city was the capital of the Kingdom of Pagan, and the political, economic and cultural nerve center of the Pagan Empire. During the kingdom's height between the 11th and 13th centuries, the wealthy Pagan rulers commissioned thousands of temples to be built in the Bagan plains. It is estimated that over 10,000 Buddhist temples, pagodas and monasteries once stood on this 100 square km plain in central Myanmar, of which the remains of over 2800 temples and pagodas (at a recent count here....) still survive.

Bagan became a central powerbase in the mid 9th century under King Anawratha, who unified Burma under Theravada Buddhism. Over the course of 250 years, Bagan's rulers and their wealthy subjects constructed over 10,000 religious monuments in the Bagan plains. The prosperous city grew in size and grandeur, and became a cosmopolitan centre for religious and secular studies. Monks and scholars from as far as India, Sri Lanka as well as the Khmer Empire came to Bagan to study prosody, phonology, grammar, astrology, alchemy, medicine, and law

Old Bagan - Really interesting but super charged with tourists......

I think the last count was now 2,803 monuments.....

Only a few dozen temples were regularly maintained. In the 1990s, the government made an effort to restore many of these damaged pagodas, but the failure to retain the original architectural styles and the use of modern materials drew widespread condemnation from art historians and preservationists worldwide. Bagan had to pay the price of the government's irresponsible act when UNESCO rejected the city as a designation for World Heritage Site due to the un-historic way the temples were restored. According to some, the government believes that the ancient capital's hundreds of unrestored temples and large corpus of stone inscriptions were more than sufficient to win the UNESCO designation. The other issue now is uncontrolled tourism. You see hundreds of visitors roaming freely and even climbing monuments for that "Special Facebook Photo"

Most interesting dress of our travels here.....

Sue and Mr. Min (our guide for a few days)

Sunsets are famous in Old Bagan