Bagan
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How it came to be
Bagan lies on a bend of the Ayeyarwady River in Myanmar's dry central plain. Royal chronicles say King Pyinbya fortified the town in 849, while Western scholars date its founding by the Burmans to the mid-to-late 9th century. From 1044 to 1287 it was the capital of the Pagan Empire.
Royal patronage of Theravada Buddhism from the mid-11th century, with the king as chief donor, turned merit-making into a building boom. More than 10,000 temples, stupas and monasteries went up on the plain between the 11th and 13th centuries, among them the Shwezigon Pagoda of 1102 and the 51-metre Ananda Temple sponsored by King Kyansittha in 1105. The World Heritage property counts 3,595 recorded monuments.
Repeated Mongol invasions in the late 13th century brought the empire down, and Bagan ceased to be the capital in 1297. Major earthquakes on 8 July 1975 and 24 August 2016 damaged many temples, nearly 400 of them seriously in 2016. UNESCO inscribed Bagan in 2019.
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