Place · Buddhist temple city · Myanmar
Bagan, Myanmar
/bəɡàɰ̃/
Also known as Bagan
The 11th-13th century capital of the Pagan kingdom on the Irrawaddy in central Myanmar, with over 4,000 Buddhist temple structures (about 2,200 surviving) in the Pagan plain — the largest concentration of Buddhist religious architecture in the world. Built by Anawrahta (ruled 1044-1077) and his successors after the king's conversion to Theravada Buddhism under the Mon monk Shin Arahan. The Bagan temples belong to the same wider maritime and Mahayana-to-Theravada Buddhist intellectual world as the Pala monasteries of Bengal — the Bagan court imported the Buddhist Tripitaka from the Mon kingdom of Thaton after Anawrahta's 1057 conquest. Many temples hold Sanskrit and Pali inscriptions. UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2019.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 21.172, 94.859
Worth knowing
Its temple plans and vaulting come partly from Bengal and Odisha, and the Mahabodhi temple at Bagan is a deliberate scale copy of the one at Bodh Gaya, built about 1215. Burmese kings repaired the Indian original more than once, most substantially in the 1290s and again in the 1870s.
Connections (3)
- Maritime routeBodh Gayā / Mahābodhi Temple
Bagan's Burmese kings sent repair missions to Bodh Gayā in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and built a copy of the Mahābodhi temple at home. Maintaining a building four thousand kilometres away, twice, is one of the clearest measures of how far the pilgrimage claim reached. Bagan's Mahabodhi temple is a scaled copy of the Bodh Gayā tower, built about 1215, and it is the only precise replica of an Indian temple anywhere in Southeast Asia.
- Architectural modelBodh Gayā / Mahābodhi Temple
The Mahabodhi temple at Bagan, built about 1215, is a deliberate scale copy of the one at Bodh Gaya, and Burmese kings sent missions to repair the Indian original in the 1290s and again in the 1870s — the second restoration so thorough that what stands at Bodh Gaya today is substantially a Burmese-funded reconstruction supervised by Cunningham. The copy is now better evidence for the thirteenth-century original than the original is.
- Architectural modelSomapura Mahāvihāra, Paharpur
Bagan's temple architecture draws on eastern Indian models — the Pala brick vihara and the shikhara of Bengal and Odisha — carried by the sea and by monks rather than by any conquest, and Somapura at Paharpur, the largest monastery south of the Himalaya, is the type its cruciform plans descend from. Anawrahta's conversion in the eleventh century coincides almost exactly with the decline of the Pala foundations that supplied the model.
On these journeys
Sources
ICWA, Mapping India’s Historical Ties with Southeast Asia
Open Bagan, Myanmar in the repository →