Bagan

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Before the sun clears the eastern haze the plain is the color of ash, and then the first light finds the brick and the whole field of it turns the red-gold of old fired clay: temple after temple, stupa after stupa, some the size of a house and some the size of a cathedral, standing out of scrub and toddy palms in a long shallow bend of the Irrawaddy. There are more than two thousand of them still, on some forty square kilometers of dry ground, and they are the survivors — the chronicles and the ruins together remember many times that number raised and fallen. This is Bagan, and the eye takes in first the sheer arithmetic of devotion. What is harder to see from a balloon at dawn, and is the more consequential thing, is that this plain is where a king who could not forbid the old spirits chose instead to enshrine them — where the Thirty-Seven Nats were set to circle a golden reliquary as the Buddha’s own devotees, and the two devotions of the Burmese were made, deliberately, into one.

The plain of Old Bagan at sunset, its temples and stupas stretching to the Irrawaddy. Vyacheslav Argenberg, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

The parched land and its many names

Bagan stands on the east bank of the Irrawaddy — the Ayeyarwady — in the arid central plain of what is now Myanmar’s Mandalay Region, at roughly 21°10′ north and 94°52′ east, some two hundred ninety kilometers southwest of the city of Mandalay. The country here is the dry zone: a rain-shadowed belt of thorn scrub and cactus and palmyra palm, hot and brown for much of the year, where the river is the one reliable green. The place has never wanted for names, and the names read the land. Its Burmese name is Pugan (ပုဂံ), which colonial spelling fixed as Pagan; the classical Pali honorific, carried in the chronicles, is Arimaddanapura, “the City that Tramples on Enemies.” Alongside it the tradition kept two names that describe the ground rather than the throne — Tattadesa, “the parched land,” and Tampadipa, “the bronzed country” — as though the sun-baked plain itself were a proper seat for kings.

How the city began depends on whose account one keeps, and the two accounts should not be flattened together. The Burmese royal chronicles, the Glass Palace Chronicle tradition among them, reach the founding back to the 2nd century CE and record the walling of the city under a King Pyinbya in the year 849; this belongs to the legendary and semi-legendary reach of the record, transmitted through court histories that mingle memory and myth. Western scholarship, reading the archaeology and the epigraphy, places the town’s real emergence in the mid-to-late 9th century, when Burmese-speaking migrants settling the dry zone — arriving, on the usual account, out of the Nanzhao sphere to the north — gathered there as one of several fortified towns strung along the river. Between the two versions lies the true genealogy of the place: an old settlement of the newly arrived Burmese on ground that the earlier walled civilization of the Pyu had already made familiar, in a valley whose Theravada Buddhism the Mon of the south would help carry north.

The plain became consequential in 1044. In that year, by the chronicle account, a prince remembered as Min Saw raised a rebellion, challenged the reigning king Sokkate to single combat on horseback, and killed him near Myinkaba beside Bagan; on 16 December 1044 he took the throne under the Burmanized Sanskrit title Anawrahta — from Aniruddha. From that seat Anawrahta (r. 1044–1077) forged the first realm to unify the whole Irrawaddy valley, the kingdom that took the city’s name. His conquest of the Mon capital of Thaton in 1057, in the tradition, brought north the Tipitaka, the monks, and the craftsmen who set Bagan’s building age in motion; and over the following two centuries he and his successors — Kyansittha, Alaungsithu, Narapatisithu — covered the plain with temples. The chronicles speak of more than ten thousand religious monuments raised across the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, of which, after eight hundred years of earthquake and neglect and reuse, more than two thousand two hundred survive. It is one of the densest concentrations of Buddhist monumental architecture anywhere on earth, and it was built in the space of a single dynasty’s ascendancy.

What stands on the plain is not one kind of building but two, endlessly varied. There are the solid stupas — the bell-and-spire reliquaries, gilded or bare brick, raised over a relic or a votive deposit and meant to be circled, not entered; and there are the hollow temples, the great vaulted gu, their thick brick walls carrying corbelled arches over dim interior corridors where a seated Buddha faces each cardinal direction and the plaster once blazed with painted jataka scenes. The largest of them are the work of named kings: the Ananda, its cruciform mass and four standing Buddhas among the masterpieces of the age, ascribed to Kyansittha; the towering Thatbyinnyu and the Dhammayangyi and the Sulamani of the twelfth-century rulers; the golden Shwezigon at Nyaung-U where the older spirits were gathered in. Around and between these giants stand the thousands of lesser shrines and the ruined stubs of monasteries, each a merit-work — a temple raised, in the reckoning of the tradition, to carry its builder toward a better rebirth. The plain is a ledger of that reckoning, written in brick.

Where the nats were made a religion of the realm

The Buddhist plain is the setting; the thing that makes Bagan the capital of the Nat sacred world is a decision taken on it. The Burmese hold two devotions in one life — the Buddha, and the nats, the powerful and often dangerous spirits, many of them human beings raised to potency by a hard and violent death. Before Anawrahta these spirits were served across the valley in a thousand local forms, town by town and hill by hill, with no single roll and no throne. What the tradition credits to Anawrahta, and what the scholars, reading the tradition critically, largely concur on the shape of, is the act that gathered them: unable to abolish the veneration of the nats, the king chose to govern it.

The policy is remembered as one of patience rather than force. Men would not abandon their old gods for a new faith at a king’s word; but let them come to the great pagoda for the sake of the nats, and in time, the reasoning ran, they would be won to the Buddha. So Anawrahta did not raze the nat shrines. He gathered the images of the most powerful spirits and fixed their number at thirty-seven — the canon of the Thirty-Seven Great Nats — and he installed them at his golden reliquary, the Shwezigon Pagoda at Nyaung-U just north of the city, in postures of homage. The Shwezigon was begun under Anawrahta about 1059–1060 and finished by his son Kyansittha in 1102; its circular gilded stupa became the prototype of every Burmese stupa after it, and around its terraces the thirty-seven were set to stand as devotees of the Gautama Buddha, circumambulating the relic that the stupa enshrines. Over the whole company the king placed a new head: Sakra, the Indra of the older Indian order, Buddhicized as Thagyamin, king of the nats — set above even the house-lords of the great mountain, the Mahagiri nats led by Min Mahagiri of nearby Mount Popa.

This is the master-stroke of the Bagan settlement, and it is worth stating exactly, because it is neither a muddle nor a defeat of one faith by another. The older powers — of mountain and tree, of river and violent death — were not denied and were not driven out. They were subordinated: drawn under the Dhamma as its guardians, ranked beneath a Buddhicized king of the gods, and given a place inside the Buddhist frame rather than outside and against it. The result is the architecture of Burmese religion to this day. A Burmese Buddhist can keep a hung coconut in the house-corner for Min Mahagiri, the fire-lord who watches the threshold, and in the same breath take refuge in the Triple Gem, and be doing one coherent thing and not two contradictory ones. Bagan is the capital where nat and Buddha were taught to stand together — where the spirit religion was folded into the Buddhist order and held there, as a lasting theology and not a temporary compromise.

Three kinds of claim run through that account, and an honest telling keeps them apart. That Anawrahta reigned in the eleventh century, that he built the Shwezigon between about 1059 and 1102, that Bagan was the seat of the first unified Irrawaddy kingdom — these are scholarly consensus, grounded in inscriptions and standing brick. That he installed the nats at the pagoda under the Buddha and set Thagyamin at their head is chronicle-attested tradition, read critically: rooted in a real reign and a real pagoda, transmitted through court histories that carry legend alongside record. And the membership of the Thirty-Seven, together with the legends of the individual spirits, is genuinely contested and genuinely variable. The number thirty-seven is stable; the names in the list are not, shifting from telling to telling and region to region, and the historicity of the individual nat-figures — the blacksmith burned on the tree, the flower-gatherer executed on a king’s command — is doubted by scholars even as it is held by the faithful. How much older, pre-Buddhist religion the Bagan settlement actually preserved, and how much it reshaped, is disputed among scholars still. To pin one canonical roster would be to falsify a tradition whose life is partly in its variety.

Golden age, ruin, and the living plain

The scholarly record treats Bagan as the golden age of Burmese civilization, and reads Anawrahta’s ordering of the nats as an act of statecraft fully as much as of devotion. Gathering the spirits of many local peoples into one royally sanctioned pantheon, headed by a Buddhicized king of the gods, helped bind a freshly unified valley under Bamar kingship — a “Burmanisation,” in the scholars’ term, that pulled the diverse religious loyalties of the Irrawaddy into a single frame answerable to the throne at Bagan. The plain of temples and the roll of the Thirty-Seven were, in that reading, two faces of one consolidation.

The Shwezigon Pagoda at Nyaung-U, the gilded reliquary begun by Anawrahta and finished under Kyansittha in 1102. DIMMIS, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The kingdom did not outlast its second century of building. Weakened from within, the Pagan realm broke under the pressure of the Mongol invasions and collapsed around 1287, the last effective kings giving way as the Yuan armies pressed the frontier. But the city itself was not sacked to rubble; the plain suffered little direct destruction, and though the political center moved elsewhere, Bagan endured as a living pilgrimage landscape. The temples kept their donors and their monks; the Shwezigon kept its festival and its nats; and the merit-making that had raised the plain went on raising and repairing shrines on it, century after century, down to the present. The place was never abandoned to archaeology. It has always been in use.

The nat side of that life kept its own calendar. The Shwezigon holds a great festival at the full moon of the Burmese month of Nadaw, about November and December, when pilgrims come to the pagoda where Anawrahta gathered the spirits and the images of the Thirty-Seven still stand around the golden stupa. It is one node in a wider devotional geography that runs from the temple-plain to the volcanic seat of the nats at Mount Popa, fifty kilometers to the southeast, and north to the August spirit-festival at Taungbyon near Mandalay, where the executed Shwepyin brothers draw the mediums and the crowds. The spirit-mediums who serve at these festivals — the nat kadaw, many of them women or the acault, the transgender and gay men who become the spirits’ vessels — carry the interior life of a cult whose public face is the shrine and the offering; their operative practice is their own, and the record keeps a respectful distance from it. What matters for Bagan is that the plain sits at the head of this living circuit: the capital where the roll was fixed remains a place where the roll is served.

The formal study of the nat cult that Bagan anchors began in the colonial period, and it took the plain and the Shwezigon as its documentary center. Sir Richard Carnac Temple’s The Thirty-Seven Nats (1906) gave the pantheon its first full scholarly catalog — list and image and legend — anchored on the shrine where Anawrahta had installed them. Maung Htin Aung’s Folk Elements in Burmese Buddhism (1962) read the cult from within the Burmese tradition, and Melford Spiro’s Burmese Supernaturalism (1967) set it inside the frame of a working religious system. Each in turn treated the Bagan settlement as the origin of a canon that is, in fact, endlessly variable — a paradox that later ethnography, attentive to the spirit-mediums and the festival grounds, has made central rather than embarrassing. The lists differ; the legends differ; and how much of pre-Buddhist Burma the settlement carried forward is, honestly, still argued.

The modern plain has been shaken hard. A severe earthquake struck Bagan on 8 July 1975, toppling and cracking temples across the field, and another in August 2016 damaged nearly four hundred monuments — a reminder that this is seismic country and that the brick is old. Restoration after the 1975 shock, and the more aggressive rebuilding of later decades, drew criticism from conservators for reconstructions that favored appearance over archaeology; and for years the site’s future was entangled with tourism development — new hotels, a viewing tower, a golf course laid among the shrines — a friction that delayed international recognition. Bagan had first been put forward in the 1990s and was held back.

Recognition came at last on 6 July 2019, when the World Heritage Committee, meeting for its 43rd session in Baku, Azerbaijan, inscribed Bagan on the World Heritage List. The property is a serial nomination of eight components — seven on the east bank of the Ayeyarwady and one across the river — taking in a core zone of 5,005.49 hectares within a buffer of 18,146.83 hectares, and enclosing 3,595 recorded monuments: stupas, temples, monasteries, and the earthworks and shrines among them. The Committee inscribed it under three criteria: (iii), for its exceptional witness to the Buddhist civilization that peaked here in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries; (iv), for its extraordinary ensemble of Buddhist monumental architecture; and (vi), for its association with living Buddhist beliefs and traditions of merit-making — the criterion that reaches, explicitly, past the brick to the devotion still practiced on the plain. That living devotion is the very thing Anawrahta’s Bagan first set in place: the merit that raises a stupa and the offering left for a nat, Buddha and spirit served in one unbroken religious life. The dawn light that turns the plain gold falls on a working sacred landscape, and the coconut still hangs in the house-corner below the golden spires — the settlement made here nine centuries ago, kept whole in the keeping.

→ Related: Min Mahagiri · Thagyamin · Popa Medaw · Shwepyin Brothers · Ko Gyi Kyaw · Mount Popa · Taungbyon · Shwezigon Pagoda · The Burmese · The Mon · The Pyu