Bagan : It was a time of conquest and conversions. Above all, it was a time of construction, on a scale never seen before, reports AP.
Over 250 years, from the 11th century onwards, the rulers of Bagan built more than 10,000 magnificent religious monuments. The stupas, temples and monasteries became the defining emblems of Bagan, the capital of the Pagan (pronounced PUH’-gahn) empire that ruled Myanmar from roughly 1044 to 1287.
Scores of the monuments – of which only about 2,200 remain – were damaged in a powerful 6.8 magnitude earthquake.
Yet much of what fell was modern material, sanctioned by Myanmar’s former army rulers who had put top priority on restoring the temples with little regard for the original architectural styles.
Bagan covers more than 80 square kilometres of a flat plain. It is the country’s biggest tourist attraction, and along with Cambodia’s Angkor Wat and Indonesia’s Borobudur temple, the temples of Bagan are considered one of Southeast Asia’s major historical landmarks.
Yet unlike those Southeast Asian archaeological cousins, Bagan is not listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO due to a tangled modern tale of neglect followed by a fervid if misguided effort at renovation in the 1990s, partly to restore damage from a 1975 earthquake.
