Gateway to Myanmar’s Past, and Its Future
By ANDY ISAACSON
Source:NewYorkTimes
BAGAN, Myanmar — Fires, floods, treasure seekers and
ficus trees have by turns withered this ancient royal capital, but in many ways
it still looks as it might have eight centuries ago.
Andy Isaacson for The New York Times
A renovated temple contrasts with the original
facade in the foreground. Some scholars have criticized the new work. More Photos »
Multimedia
Andy Isaacson for The New York Times
REMNANTS Stuccowork and faded frescoes
embellish a temple that is among an unparalleled concentration of such monuments
in Bagan, on the eastern bank of the Irrawaddy River in Myanmar. More Photos »
Andy Isaacson for The New York Times
A faded fresco inside a Bagan temple depicts the life of
Buddha. More Photos »
Andy Isaacson for The New York Times
RENEWAL There are expectations that Bagan will
become a World Heritage site, attracting greater interest from tourists and
scholars. More Photos »
More than 2,200 tiered brick temples and shrines
sprawl across an arid 26-square-mile plain on the eastern bank of the Irrawaddy
River, remnants of a magnificent Buddhist city that reached its height in the
11th and 12th centuries.
These monuments, on a red-dirt plain thinly populated
by monks and goat herders, are an unparalleled concentration of temple architecture,
featuring sophisticated vaulting techniques not seen in other Asian
civilizations and elaborate mural paintings whose counterparts have not survived
well in India.
“It’s as if all the Gothic cathedrals were clustered
in one spot,” said Donald Stadtner, author of “Ancient Pagan” and “Sacred Sites
of Burma.”
As Myanmar opens
to the outside world — and an influx of tourists — after decades of
totalitarian rule, Bagan is far from the only site that is now of interest to
scholars, many of whom were long put off by the country’s politics.
The Tibeto-Burman peoples from southwestern China who
settled the upper Irrawaddy as early as the first century B.C. left behind large
cities enclosed by brick walls and moats, and evidence of ingenious irrigation
networks.
At Beikthano-Myo, one of the earliest of these
settlements, archaeologists
have found monasteries and shrines, or stupas, resembling those erected by
Buddhists in eastern India, along with ornate burial urns and silver coins
bearing auspicious symbols — marking the site as a staging point from which
Buddhism spread across Southeast Asia.
Well before the political opening, Myanmar’s military
rulers sought to restore historical monuments and establish local museums. In
the late 1970s and ’80s, the authorities undertook a major rebuilding of Bagan,
which an earthquake had devastated in 1975.
The restoration, supported by individual Burmese
patrons eager to earn religious merit and by the United Nations Development
Program, relied mainly on a close circle of domestic experts and has been
sharply criticized by some outside scholars.
Critics took issue with the use of inauthentic
building materials, like cement in place of stucco, and contend that certain
architectural features — in particular the decorative finials that top religious
monuments — were reconstructed according to imagination rather than science. A
few prominent temples contain incongruous elements like disco lights flashing
around the heads of Buddha statues.
“It’s been an unmitigated disaster,” Dr. Stadtner said
of the restoration. “It’s as if every archaeological principle has been turned
upside down in the past. I think there would be universal agreement that the
damage to the monuments has been done, and is irreversible.”
Michael Aung-Thwin, a professor of Asian studies at
the University of Hawaii and a longtime Myanmar scholar, dismisses such
criticism as overstated, calling it “propaganda issued by the dissidents.”
“They made tremendous progress given the resources
they had,” Dr. Aung-Thwin said.
U Win Sein, who was Myanmar’s culture minister during
the 1990s, has defended the government’s renovations, which strived to reconcile
antique preservation with Buddhist concepts of donation and refurbishment.
“These are living religious monuments highly venerated
and worshiped by Myanmar people,” he wrote in a state-run newspaper. “It is our
national duty to preserve, strengthen and restore all the cultural heritage
monuments of Bagan to last and exist forever.”
Elizabeth Howard Moore, an archaeologist and art
historian at the University of London, says she expects that Bagan will
eventually be designated a World Heritage site, a change that will attract
renewed interest from foreign scholars. Many research questions at Bagan remain,
including the nature of Buddhist life in the city and the relationship between
the kingdom and its foreign neighbors. (Several of Bagan’s murals appear to have
been painted by Bengali artists.)
Already, the new political climate has invited more
foreign technical experts to bring the country up to international standards,
and the Ministry of Culture is actively welcoming proposals by outside scholars.
“This was not happening 10 years ago,” Dr. Moore said.
“The lifting of sanctions has not only brought renewed cultural awareness at a
national level, but increased funding for business has started to encourage more
and varied support for cultural and educational programs.”
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