Bagan

The city

Burmese chronicles say that Pagan was founded in the second century, but the walled city is generally dated to the mid-ninth century, the date the chronicles give for its walls. It lay on a bend of the Irrawaddy in the dry zone of central Burma, a region of rice irrigation that could support a large population. From the mid-eleventh century it was the capital of the first kingdom to unite most of the Irrawaddy valley.

The temple builders

Anawrahta (r. 1044–1077) is remembered as the founder of the kingdom's power. The chronicles say that he took the Mon city of Thaton in 1057 and brought back its king, monks, scriptures and craftsmen, establishing Theravada Buddhism at Pagan. Historians now treat parts of this story with caution, since Mahayana, tantric and Hindu elements also flourished at Pagan, but the eleventh century did see an explosion of building. Anawrahta began the Shwezigon stupa, completed under Kyansittha (r. 1084–1112/13), whose reign also produced the Ananda temple. Later kings built the Thatbyinnyu, the tallest temple; the Dhammayangyi, the most massive, associated with the violent king Narathu; the Sulamani; and the Gawdawpalin.

Over two and a half centuries, kings, queens, nobles and ordinary donors built thousands of religious monuments, recording their gifts in inscriptions in Burmese, Mon, Pali and Pyu. The temples are of brick with stucco ornament, many with vaulted interiors whose walls were painted with scenes from the life of the Buddha and the Jataka stories. The donations of land and labour to the monasteries shifted much of the kingdom's wealth into the sangha, which some historians have connected with the kingdom's later weakness.

Not every monument is Buddhist. The Nathlaung Kyaung, a brick temple of Vishnu usually dated to the tenth or eleventh century, is the one surviving Hindu temple on the plain, and is often linked with a community of Indian merchants or Brahmins serving the court. Brahmins took part in royal ceremony at Pagan, as at other courts of mainland Southeast Asia.

Decline

In the late thirteenth century the kingdom came into conflict with the Mongol Yuan empire. Mongol forces invaded in the 1280s, and King Narathihapate fled the capital, earning in the chronicles the name of the king who fled from the Chinese. The kingdom broke up after 1287, and power passed to new centres. Pagan was not destroyed, however. It remained a town and a religious centre, and building and repair continued on a smaller scale for centuries.

The site today

An earthquake in 1975 damaged many monuments. In the 1990s the military government sponsored extensive rebuilding, often with new materials and conjectural designs, which delayed recognition by UNESCO for many years. Another earthquake struck in 2016. Bagan was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2019.