Bagan - WikiHQ

Bagan ( ; ; formerly Pagan) is an ancient city and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Mandalay Region of Myanmar. From the 9th to 13th centuries, the city was the capital of the Pagan Kingdom, the first kingdom that unified the regions that would later constitute Myanmar. During the kingdom's height between the 11th and 13th centuries, more than 10,000 Buddhist temples, pagodas and monasteries were constructed in the Bagan plains alone,

Etymology

Bagan is the present-day standard Burmese pronunciation of the Burmese word Pugan (), derived from Old Burmese Pukam (). Its classical Pali name is Arimaddanapura (, lit. "the City that Tramples on Enemies"). Its other names in Pali are in reference to its extreme dry zone climate: Tattadesa (, "parched land"), and Tampadīpa (, "bronzed country"). The Burmese chronicles also report other classical names of Thiri Pyissaya (; ) and Tampawaddy (; ).

History

9th to 13th centuries

thumb|left|300px|Bagan's prosperous economy built over 10,000 temples between the 11th and 13th centuries.

thumb|150px|Pagan Empire c. 1210

According to the royal chronicles, Bagan was founded in the second century CE, and fortified in 849 by King Pyinbya, 34th successor of the founder of early Bagan. Western scholarship however holds that Bagan was founded in the mid-to-late 9th century by the Mranma (Burmans), who had recently entered the Irrawaddy valley from the Nanzhao Kingdom. It was among several competing Pyu city-states until the late 10th century when the Burman settlement grew in authority and grandeur.

From 1044 to 1287, Bagan was the capital as well as the political, economic and cultural nerve center of the Bagan Empire. Over the course of 250 years, Bagan's rulers and their wealthy subjects constructed over 10,000 religious monuments (approximately 1000 stupas, 10,000 small temples and 3000 monasteries) in an area of in the Bagan plains. The prosperous city grew in size and grandeur, and became a cosmopolitan center for religious and secular studies, specializing in Pali scholarship in grammar and philosophical-psychological (abhidhamma) studies as well as works in a variety of languages on prosody, phonology, grammar, astrology, alchemy, medicine, and legal studies. The city attracted monks and students from as far as India, Sri Lanka and the Khmer Empire.

The culture of Bagan was dominated by religion. The religion of Bagan was fluid, syncretic and by later standards, unorthodox. It was largely a continuation of religious trends in the Pyu era where Theravada Buddhism co-existed with Mahayana Buddhism, Tantric Buddhism, various Hindu (Saivite, and Vaishana) schools as well as native animist (nat) traditions. While the royal patronage of Theravada Buddhism since the mid-11th century had enabled the Buddhist school to gradually gain primacy, other traditions continued to thrive throughout the Pagan period to degrees later unseen.

Bagan's ascendancy also coincided with a period of political and economic decline in several other nearby regions, like Dvaravati, Srivijaya, and the Chola Empire. As a result, immigrants from those places likely also ended up moving to Bagan, in addition to people moving there from within Myanmar. According to Michael Aung-Thwin, a more likely explanation is that the provincial governors tasked with defending against Mongol incursions were so successful that they became "the new power elite", and their capitals became the new political centers while Bagan itself became a backwater.

14th to 19th centuries

thumb|A hot-air balloon flying over a pagoda in Bagan

Bagan survived into the 15th century as a human settlement, and as a pilgrimage destination throughout the imperial period. A smaller number of "new and impressive" religious monuments still went up to the mid-15th century, but afterward, new temple constructions slowed to a trickle, with fewer than 200 temples built between the 15th and 20th centuries.

20th century to present

thumb|The original Bupaya seen here in 1868 was completely destroyed by the 1975 earthquake. A new gilded pagoda in the original shape has been rebuilt.

Bagan, located in an active earthquake zone, had suffered from many earthquakes over the ages, with over 400 recorded earthquakes between 1904 and 1975. A major earthquake occurred on 8 July 1975, reaching 8 MM in Bagan and Myinkaba, and 7 MM in Nyaung-U. The quake damaged many temples, in many cases, such as the Bupaya, severely and irreparably. Today, 2229 temples and pagodas remain.

Many of these damaged pagodas underwent restorations in the 1990s by the military government, which sought to make Bagan an international tourist destination. However, the restoration efforts instead drew widespread condemnation from art historians and preservationists worldwide. Critics were aghast that the restorations paid little attention to original architectural styles, and used modern materials, and that the government has also established a golf course, a paved highway, and built a watchtower. Although the government believed that the ancient capital's hundreds of (unrestored) temples and large corpus of stone inscriptions were more than sufficient to win the designation of UNESCO World Heritage Site, the city was not so designated until 2019, allegedly mainly on account of the restorations.

On 24 August 2016, a major earthquake hit Bagan, and caused major damages in nearly 400 temples. The Sulamani and Myauk Guni temples were severely damaged. The Bagan Archaeological Department began a survey and reconstruction effort with the help of the UNESCO. Visitors were prohibited from entering 33 much-damaged temples.

On 6 July 2019, Bagan was officially inscribed as a World Heritage Site by the UNESCO, 24 years after its first nomination, during the 43rd session of the World Heritage Committee. Bagan became the second World Heritage Site in Myanmar, after the Ancient Cities of Pyu. As part of the criteria for the inscription of Bagan, the government had pledged to relocate existing hotels in the archaeological zone to a dedicated hotel zone by 2020.

Bagan today is a main tourist destination in the country's nascent tourism industry.

Geography

The Bagan Archaeological Zone, defined as the area centred around Old Bagan, consisting of Nyaung U in the north and New Bagan in the south,

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Cityscape

Architecture

Bagan stands out for not only the sheer number of religious edifices of Myanmar but also the magnificent architecture of the buildings, and their contribution to Burmese temple design. The artistry of the architecture of pagodas in Bagan proves the achievement of Myanmar craftsmen in handicrafts. The Bagan temple falls into one of two broad categories: the stupa-style solid temple and the gu-style (ဂူ) hollow temple.

Stupas

A stupa, also called a pagoda or chedi, is a massive structure, typically with a relic chamber inside. The Bagan stupas or pagodas evolved from earlier Pyu designs, which in turn were based on the stupa designs of the Andhra region, particularly Amaravati and Nagarjunakonda in present-day south-eastern India, and to a smaller extent to Ceylon. The Bagan-era stupas in turn were the prototypes for later Burmese stupas in terms of symbolism, form and design, building techniques and even materials.

Originally, a Ceylonese stupa had a hemispheric body ( "the egg"), on which a rectangular box surrounded by a stone balustrade (harmika) was set. Extending up from the top of the stupa was a shaft supporting several ceremonial umbrellas. The stupa Buddhist cosmos: its shape symbolizes Mount Meru while the umbrella mounted on the brickwork represents the world's axis. The brickwork pediment was often covered in stucco and decorated in relief. Pairs or series of ogres as guardian figures ('bilu') were a favourite theme in the Bagan period.

The original Indic design was gradually modified first by the Pyu, and then by Burmans at Bagan where the stupa gradually developed a longer, cylindrical form. The earliest Bagan stupas such as the Bupaya (c. 9th century) were the direct descendants of the Pyu style at Sri Ksetra. By the 11th century, the stupa had developed into a more bell-shaped form in which the parasols morphed into a series of increasingly smaller rings placed on top of one another, rising to a point. On top of the rings, the new design replaced the harmika with a lotus bud. The lotus bud design then evolved into the "banana bud", which forms the extended apex of most Burmese pagodas. Three or four rectangular terraces served as the base for a pagoda, often with a gallery of terra-cotta tiles depicting Buddhist jataka stories. The Shwezigon Pagoda and the Shwesandaw Pagoda are the earliest examples of this type.

Hollow temples

In contrast to the stupas, the hollow gu-style temple is a structure used for meditation, devotional worship of the Buddha and other Buddhist rituals. The gu temples come in two basic styles: "one-face" design and "four-face" design—essentially one main entrance and four main entrances. Other styles, such as five-face and hybrids, also exist. The one-face style grew out of the 2nd century Beikthano, and the four-face out of the 7th century Sri Ksetra. The temples, whose main features were the pointed arches and the vaulted chamber, became larger and grander in the Bagan period.

Innovations

Although the Burmese temple designs evolved from Indic, Pyu (and possibly Mon) styles, the techniques of vaulting seem to have developed in Bagan itself. The earliest vaulted temples in Bagan date to the 11th century, while the vaulting did not become widespread in India until the late 12th century. The masonry of the buildings shows "an astonishing degree of perfection", where many of the immense structures survived the 1975 earthquake more or less intact.

| Thatbyinnyu Temple

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| Sithu I

| ; Tallest temple in Bagan

| Tuywindaung Pagoda

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| Anawrahta

The walled core of "Old Bagan"

The 140-hectare core on the riverbank is surrounded by three walls. A fourth wall, on the western side, may have once existed before being washed away by the river at some point. The Irrawaddy has certainly eroded at least some parts of the city, since there are "buildings collapsing into the river both upstream and downstream from the walled core".

The walled core called "Old Bagan" takes up only a tiny fraction of the 8,000-hectare area where monuments are found. It is also much smaller than the walled areas of major Pyu cities (the largest, Śrī Kṣetra or Thayekittaya, has a walled area of 1,400 hectares). Altogether, this suggests that "'Old Bagan' represents an elite core, not an urban boundary". But the palace above the foundation is completely conjectural.

3D documentation with LiDAR

The Zamani Project from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, offered its services towards the spatial documentation of monuments in Bagan in response to the destruction of monuments by an earthquake in August 2016. After reconnaissance visit to Bagan and a subsequent meeting at the UNESCO offices in Bangkok in February 2017, the Zamani Project documented 12 monuments in Bagan using LiDAR, during three field campaigns between 2017 and 2018, including Kubyauk-gyi (Gubyaukgyi) (298); Kyauk-ku-umin (154); Tha-peik-hmauk-gu-hpaya (744); Sula-mani-gu-hpaya (Sulamani) (748) Monument 1053; Sein-nyet-ama (1085); Sein-nyet-nyima (1086); Naga-yon-hpaya (1192); Loka-ok-shaung (1467); Than-daw-kya (1592); Ananda Monastery; and the City Gate of old Bagan (Tharabha Gate).

Transport

Bagan is accessible by air, rail, bus, car and river boat.

Air

Most international tourists fly to the city. The Nyaung U Airport is the gateway to the Bagan region. Several domestic airlines have regular flights to Yangon, which take about 80 minutes to cover the 600 kilometres. Flights to Mandalay take approximately 30 minutes and to Heho about 40 minutes. The airport is located on the outskirts of Nyaung U and it takes about 20 minutes by taxi to reach Bagan.

Rail

The city is on a spur from the Yangon–Mandalay Railway. Myanmar Railways operates a daily overnight train service each way between Yangon and Bagan (Train Nos 61 & 62), which takes at least 18 hours. The trains have a sleeper car and also 1st Class and Ordinary Class seating.

Between Mandalay and Bagan there are two daily services each way (Train Nos 117,118,119 & 120) that take at least 8 hours. The trains have 1st Class and Ordinary Class seating. and 200,000 people. Until the advent of tourism industry in the 1990s, only a few villagers lived in Old Bagan. The rise of tourism has attracted a sizable population to the area. Because Old Bagan is now off limits to permanent dwellings, much of the population reside in either New Bagan, south of Old Bagan, or Nyaung-U, north of Old Bagan. The majority of native residents are Bamar.

Administration

The Bagan archaeological zone is part of Nyaung-U District, Mandalay Region.

Sister cities

Luang Prabang, Laos
Siem Reap, Cambodia