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MYANMAR: Bagan Photo Gallery |
Bagan (Pagan)
Age: founded in 1044 AD
Location: Latitude: 21° 10' N, Longitude: 94° 51' E
Weather: Partly Cloudy
Temperature: min 10°C - max 43°C
Location
The town of Bagan (formerly spelled as "Pagan"), central Myanmar (Burma), situated on the left bank of the Irrawaddy River and approximately 90 miles (145 km) southwest of Mandalay. The site of an old capital city of Myanmar, Pagan is a pilgrimage centre and contains ancient Buddhist shrines that have been restored and redecorated and are in current use. Ruins of other shrines and pagodas cover a wide area. An earthquake on July 8, 1975, severely damaged more than half of the important structures and irreparably destroyed many of them. The whole of the Buphaya Pagoda, for nine centuries a landmark for river-boatmen, tumbled into the Irrawaddy and was carried off by the waters. The village also has a school for lacquerware, for which the region is noted.
History
Pagan's importance lies in its heritage rather than its present. In 849 Burmans found the town of Bagan on the banks of the Ayeyarwaddy about 500 kilometers north of its mouth. Bagan was to be the center of the first Burmese realm about which a wealth of historical information exists. Although even before then in the Ayeyarwaddy valley realms with urban centers had existed, there are only scarce historical sources concerning those earlier realms. Before the Burmans the people of the Mon, related to the Cambodians, and before them the Tibeto-Burman people of the Pyu had founded realms in the Ayeyarwaddy valley or delta, but were in the course of time conquered by the Bagan Burmans. . In 1287 it was over run by the Mongols during their wide-ranging conquests, and it never recovered its position, though a little desultory building continued on Buddhist shrines.
Old Pagan
Old Pagan was a walled city, its western flank resting on the Irrawaddy River. It was the focus of a network of high roads by means of which its rulers could command a large region of fertile plains and could dominate other major Myanmar dynastic cities, such as Pegu(Bago). From the port of Thiripyissaya, further down the river, important overseas trade was conducted with India, Ceylon, and other regions of Southeast Asia. The walls of the old city, within which lies a substantial area of the modern town, probably originally contained only royal, aristocratic, religious, and administrative buildings. The populace is thought to have lived outside in homes of light construction closely resembling those occupied by the present-day inhabitants. The walled city, whose moats were fed by the Irrawaddy, was thus a sacred dynastic fortress. The circuit of its walls and river frontage is some 2.5 miles (4 km), and there is evidence that perhaps as much as the river has washed a third of the old city away. Because building was principally in brick, decoration was carried out in carved brick, in stucco, and in terra-cotta. The earliest surviving structure is probably the 10th-century Nat Hlaung Gyaung. The shrines that stand by the Sarabha Gate in the eastern wall, although later than the wall they adjoin, are also early. These are shrines of protecting nats--the traditional spirit deities of the animist ethnic Burmans.
Buddhism
Between about 500 and 950, people of the Burman ethnic group had been infiltrating from the north into a region occupied by other peoples; these people already had been converted to Indian religion, especially the Mahayana Buddhism of Bihar and Bengal. King Anawratha ascends the throne of the Bagan realm in 1044. In 1056 a Mon monk, Shin Arahan, converts him to Buddhism. Under King Anawrahta (reigned 1044-77), the ethnic Burmans finally conquered the other peoples of the region, including a people called the Mon, who were previously dominant in the south. They transported the Mon royal family and their scholars and craftsmen to Pagan, making it the capital and centre of an official, fundamentalist form of Hinayana (Theravada) Buddhism adopted from Ceylon (Sri Lanka), about 1056. This initiated the period of Pagan's greatness, which was sustained at first by Mon artistic traditions. The enormous number of monasteries and shrines built and maintained during the next 200 years was made possible both by the great wealth of the royal exchequer and by the large number of slaves, skilled and unskilled, whose working lives were dedicated to the support of each institution. The city became one of the most important centres of Buddhist learning.
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