Bagan Myanmar

Ancient City of Bagan with Temples/Pagodas/Monasteries

Bagan is an area within the Central region of Myanmar covering an area of 16 square miles along the east bank of Ayeyarwaddy. The ancient city of Bagan located on the banks of the Ayeyarwady or Irrawaddy River is in the Mandalay Region of Burma.

The city was the capital of the Kingdom of Pagan and the political, economic as well as the cultural centre of the Pagan Empire from the 9th to 13th centuries and between the 11th and 13th centuries the wealthy Pagan rulers ordered thousands of temples to be constructed on its plains. It is presumed that over 10,000 Buddhist temples, pagodas as well as monasteries stood once upon a time on the 100 square km plain in central Myanmar where the remains of more than 2200 temples and pagoda still stand to this date.

Bagan was the central powerbase during the 9th century when King Anawratha unified Burma under Theravada Buddhism. Over a period of 250 years, the Bagan’s ruler together with their rich subjects built more than 10,000 monuments in the plains of Bagan and the city prospered in size and grandeur becoming a cosmopolitan centre for religious as well as secular studies where scholars and monks from far off places like India, Ceylon and the Khmer Empire came to study prosody, grammar, astrology, alchemy, phonology, medicine and law.

Old Capital – Pilgrimage Destination

The golden age of Bagan came to an end in 1287 when the Kingdom along with its capital city was conquered and thrown out by the Mongols. The population of the city was reduced to a village which remained amongst the ruins of the once known large city.

 With passage of time, new religious monuments continued to mid-15th century though later, the temple construction slowed down with less than 200 temples constructed during the 15th and 20th centuries However the old capital still continued as a pilgrimage destination though the pilgrimage was aimed only on the prominent temples.

The remaining of the thousands of the temples which were not popular were left to ruins where most of them did not survive the test to time while the others were ruined due to natural calamities like earthquake. Presently only a few temples are maintained regularly.

 Towards 1990, the government had made efforts to restore several of the damaged pagodas though failed to retain its original architectural styles and the use of modern materials brought about widespread disapproval from art historians as well as preservationist all across the world.

Archaeological Museums

Bagan had to pay the price of the government’s irresponsible act when it was rejected by UNESCO as a designation for World Heritage Site due to the un-historic way the temples had been restored though the government was of the belief that the ancient capital’s thousands of the unrestored temples as well as large corpus of stone inscriptions would be more than sufficient to win over the designation.

Bagan is a home to several archaeological sites with many temples and monuments that are found here and visitors can go on a spiritual as well as a historical excursion from one temple to another since each one is unique in its own individual design. However there is much more to explore in Bagan besides the temples and religious monuments where one will also find archaeological museums and the highly revered Mount Popa.