Bagan

Bagan was the capital of the first kingdom to unite the Ayeyarwady valley. Settlements existed on the plain from the 9th century, but the decisive figure was Anawrahta, who came to the throne in 1044, extended his rule over the Mon country to the south and the northern uplands, and made Theravada Buddhism the religion of the state. Tradition holds that he carried off the Mon king Manuha, his scholars and craftsmen from Thaton, and with them the styles that shaped Bagan's architecture. His successors — Kyansittha, Alaungsithu, Narapatisithu and others — ruled a prosperous kingdom watered by irrigation works upstream.

Merit-making drove the building. Kings, queens, ministers, monks and wealthy families endowed temples, stupas, monasteries and libraries, each foundation an act of merit recorded in stone inscriptions, many of them in the Mon and early Burmese scripts that give the language its earliest written record. Estimates suggest more than ten thousand religious structures once stood on the plain; about 2,200 temples and pagodas survive. The kingdom weakened in the 13th century as tax-free religious estates swallowed royal revenue, and Mongol campaigns in the 1280s broke its power. The court moved away and the city declined into a group of villages among its own monuments.

The temples were never abandoned as places of worship, and repairs continued for centuries. A severe earthquake in July 1975 damaged many structures, and another in August 2016 damaged nearly 400. Reconstruction from the 1990s, much of it criticised for inaccurate rebuilding, delayed World Heritage listing, which finally came in 2019. The villagers of Old Bagan were relocated to the new settlement south of the walls, and the old town is closed to permanent dwellings. Another major earthquake struck central Myanmar in March 2025.

Bagan is a living pilgrimage site rather than an archaeological park. Families come from across the country to the Shwezigon and the Ananda to make offerings, gild images with squares of gold leaf, light candles and pour water over Buddha statues; monks and nuns collect alms in the villages each morning; and novices are ordained in processions with music and painted faces. The rhythm of the Buddhist calendar, with its full-moon observances and Lent, governs the year far more than the tourist season ever did.

Alongside temple Buddhism runs the older nat cult, strongest in this part of the country. Mount Popa, visible from the plain on clear days, is the home of the Mahagiri nats, and shrines to them stand at the entrance to many villages and in corners of the temples themselves. Spirit mediums, astrologers and offerings of coconuts and bananas are ordinary parts of religious life here.

Craft is the other half of Bagan's identity. Lacquerware has been made here for centuries: bamboo or horsehair frames are built, coated with layers of lacquer that dry in underground cellars, then polished and incised with fine designs in red, black, green and yellow. Workshops cluster in Myinkaba and New Bagan, and sand painting, woodcarving and palm-sugar making are village trades too. People here are used to visitors and to explaining their monuments, and the collapse of tourism since 2021 has been felt in every guesthouse, workshop and horse-cart stand.

The Bagan area takes in Nyaung-U town, which has a population of about 48,000 and is the administrative centre of its township, along with New Bagan and the villages of the plain. Most residents live in low brick and timber houses in villages set among the temples, with the school, the monastery and the market as the fixed points of the day.

Farming is the base of the economy: groundnuts, sesame, pulses, millet and cotton grown on dry fields, with toddy palms tapped for sugar and drink, and goats and cattle grazed on the scrub. Irrigation from the Ayeyarwady supports vegetable plots along the bank. Tourism, which once employed thousands as guides, drivers, hotel staff, balloon crews and stallholders, has largely collapsed since 2021, and many families have returned to farming or moved away for work.

Days begin before dawn, when the air is cool and the market at Nyaung-U is at its busiest, and slow to a stop in the early afternoon heat. Power cuts lasting many hours are routine, with generators and solar panels filling the gaps, and water supply is a constant concern in the dry season. The war has not centred on the plain itself, but checkpoints, fuel shortages, conscription and rising prices shape life here as elsewhere in central Myanmar.

Bagan eats the food of the dry zone, which differs from the fish-based cooking of the delta. Groundnut and sesame oil, grown in the surrounding fields, carry most dishes; pulses, beans and gram flour appear in soups, fritters and salads; and goat and chicken are more common than river fish, though the Ayeyarwady supplies some. A Burmese meal is a curry cooked slowly in oil until it separates, served with rice, a clear soup, boiled vegetables and a relish based on ngapi, fermented fish or shrimp paste.

Laphet thoke, the fermented tea-leaf salad mixed with fried beans, peanuts, sesame, garlic and dried shrimp, is eaten here as everywhere in the country, and noodle dishes from further north, including salads of thick rice noodles with chicken curry and toasted chickpea flour, are sold in the teashops. Breakfast is usually mohinga, the fish and rice-noodle soup, or fried rice with tea.

The toddy palm is the emblem of the region. Its sap is boiled down into lumps of palm jaggery, eaten as a sweet after meals and sold in the markets, and fermented into a mild palm toddy drunk fresh in village stands. Tamarind grows in the same fields and is rolled with sugar into chewy flakes, a Bagan speciality carried home by visitors. Sweet, strong milk tea is drunk through the day, with free green tea alongside it.