Bagan is a medieval temple city on the east bank of the Irrawaddy River in the Mandalay Region of central Myanmar, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 6 July 2019. From 1044 to 1287 it was the capital of the Pagan Kingdom, the first state to unite the lands that became Myanmar, and in roughly 250 years its kings and wealthy subjects raised more than 10,000 Buddhist temples, stupas and monasteries on a plain of about 104 km² (40 sq mi). Earthquakes, floods and neglect have taken most of them, but 2,229 temples and pagodas still stand, giving the plain its skyline of brick spires, gilded stupas and whitewashed temple towers.
Anawrahta and the Rise of Pagan, 1044–1287
Burmese chronicles claim Bagan was founded in the 2nd century CE and walled in 849 by King Pyinbya. Western historians place its origins later, in the mid-to-late 9th century, when the Mranma (Burmans) moved into the Irrawaddy valley from the Nanzhao kingdom in what is now Yunnan. For about a century it was one of several competing settlements in the dry heart of Upper Burma.
That changed with Anawrahta (1014–1077). Verifiable Burmese history begins with his accession to the throne of Pagan in 1044, and by his death he had united the whole Irrawaddy valley for the first time, pushed Pagan's authority over the Shan hills and Arakan, and halted the Khmer Empire's advance on the Tenasserim coast. In early 1057 his armies besieged the Mon city of Thaton, which fell on 17 May after three months. Tradition says Anawrahta wanted the Theravada Buddhist scriptures that Thaton's king Manuha refused to share, and that he brought back more than 30,000 captives, many of them craftsmen who went on to build Pagan's monuments. The historian Michael Aung-Thwin has argued that this Mon contribution is a later legend with little contemporary evidence, so the story is best read as tradition rather than fact.
The economic base Anawrahta left behind is on firmer ground. A network of weirs turned the parched country around Pagan into the main rice bowl of Upper Burma, and the surplus paid for two and a half centuries of temple building. The kingdom unravelled in the late 13th century. By 1280 between one and two-thirds of Upper Burma's farmland had been donated, tax-free, to the Buddhist clergy, starving the crown of revenue. The Mongols of Kublai Khan's Yuan dynasty demanded tribute in 1271 and 1273, invaded in 1277, and returned in 1287, the year King Narathihapate was murdered by one of his sons. Recent research suggests the Mongol armies may never have reached Bagan itself, but the empire's vassals broke away and the city formally stopped being Burma's capital in December 1297. A place once home to somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 people shrank to a small town.
Ten Thousand Monuments on 104 Square Kilometres
The figure of "more than 10,000" breaks down, by one count, into about 1,000 stupas, 10,000 small temples and 3,000 monasteries. They are spread over the Bagan Archaeological Zone, a block roughly 13 km by 8 km centred on Old Bagan, with the town of Nyaung-U at its northern end and New Bagan to the south. The zone sits 290 km south-west of Mandalay and 700 km north of Yangon, on a bend of the Irrawaddy.
The walled core known as Old Bagan covers just 140 hectares of the roughly 8,000 hectares over which monuments are found. Three of its walls survive; a fourth on the river side has probably been washed away, and the Irrawaddy is still eating into buildings both upstream and downstream. Archaeologists read the small walled area as an elite enclosure rather than the limit of the city.
Building came in waves. In the late 11th century a strip about 9 km long formed along the riverbank, with construction scattered from village to village. The peak came between about 1150 and 1200, when most of the largest buildings went up and the volume of brick used was at its highest. In the 13th century new clusters grew to the east, such as the monastic district of Minnanthu, and donors turned to monasteries and smaller shrines, which some historians read as a sign of shrinking resources and others as merit-making spreading to ordinary families.
Two kinds of building fill the plain. The stupa is solid, usually with a relic chamber sealed inside, and at Bagan it evolved from the hemispherical Pyu form into the bell shape with stacked rings and a "banana bud" finial that later Burmese pagodas copied. The gu temple is hollow, entered through one or four porches, and built for worship and meditation. Bagan's masons vaulted these interiors from the 11th century, earlier than vaulting became common in India, and many of their buildings came through the 1975 earthquake largely intact. The knowledge did not last: when King Bodawpaya tried to build the vast Mingun Pagoda in the 18th century, his builders could no longer reproduce the spacious Bagan vaults.
Five Temples That Define the Plain
Shwezigon Pagoda
Anawrahta began the Shwezigon at Nyaung-U in 1059–1060, and his son Kyansittha completed it in 1102. Its gilded bell stands on five square terraces set with glazed terracotta tiles of the Jataka tales, and it is believed to enshrine a bone and a tooth relic of the Buddha. It became the prototype for Burmese stupas, and its precinct also holds images of the 37 nats, the spirits of the older folk religion.
Ananda Temple
Kyansittha (r. 1084–1112/13) built the Ananda in 1105 on a cruciform plan, with four standing Buddhas facing the four cardinal directions. Its spires were gilded in 1990 for the temple's 900th anniversary, and its white walls are kept freshly painted.
Thatbyinnyu Temple
Sithu I founded the Thatbyinnyu, "the Omniscient", inside the south-eastern corner of the city wall in 1144/45 and finished it in 1150/51. At 66 m to its pinnacle it is the tallest temple in Bagan, five storeys of brick under a white stucco skin. It is not the tallest structure, though: that title goes to the Shwesandaw Pagoda, a stupa Anawrahta built in 1057, whose height is often quoted as 100 m but is probably nearer 50–55 m, a reminder of how unreliable many published measurements of Bagan's monuments are. Its terraces have recesses for more than 500 Jataka plaques that were apparently never fitted. Badly damaged in 1975 and again in 2016, it is being restored with Chinese technical and financial help, a project expected to run until about 2028.
Dhammayangyi Temple
The Dhammayangyi is the widest temple at Bagan, built by King Narathu (1167–1170), who took the throne by killing his father Alaungsithu and his elder brother. Chronicles say he was assassinated before it was finished. Its inner passages were bricked up for reasons nobody has explained, so visitors can walk only the porches and outer corridors.
Htilominlo Temple
Raised under King Htilominlo (r. 1211–1231), this three-storey, 46 m red-brick temple was modelled on the Sulamani of 1183. Its plaster mouldings are its best-known feature. It was among the major monuments that came through the March 2025 earthquake without structural damage.
The 1975 and 2016 Earthquakes and the Restoration Row
Bagan lies in an active seismic zone, with more than 400 recorded earthquakes between 1904 and 1975. The worst came on 8 July 1975, reaching intensity 8 in Bagan and Myinkaba and 7 in Nyaung-U. Many temples were damaged, some, like the Bupaya stupa, beyond repair; the count of 2,229 surviving temples and pagodas dates from after that quake.
Restoration had a troubled history long before then. During the Konbaung period (1752–1885) state-sponsored renovations covered original work in crude plaster and whitewashed the interiors of the Ananda and Thatbyinnyu. In the 1990s the military government restored many damaged monuments to promote tourism, often with modern materials and little regard for original designs. Art historians and conservationists condemned the work, and they were equally critical of the golf course, the paved highway and the 61 m viewing tower built inside the zone.
On 24 August 2016 another strong earthquake damaged nearly 400 temples, among them the Sulamani and Myauk Guni. The Department of Archaeology began surveys with UNESCO, closed 33 of the worst-hit temples to visitors, and the Zamani Project of the University of Cape Town documented 12 monuments with laser scanning in three field campaigns between 2017 and 2018.
Twenty-Four Years to UNESCO: the 2019 Inscription
Myanmar first nominated Bagan in the mid-1990s, convinced that its unrestored temples and its large body of stone inscriptions were more than enough. The best known of those inscriptions, the Myazedi of 1113, repeats one text in Old Burmese, Pali, Old Mon and Pyu, and has been called the Rosetta Stone of Burma because it helped scholars decipher the Pyu script. Yet the site was not inscribed for 24 years, reportedly because of the restorations. It finally joined the World Heritage List on 6 July 2019 at the 43rd session of the World Heritage Committee, as Myanmar's second site after the Ancient Cities of Pyu. As a condition, the government pledged to move hotels out of the archaeological zone into a dedicated hotel zone by 2020.
Dawn Over the Dry Zone: Visiting Bagan Today
Bagan sits in the middle of Myanmar's Dry Zone, sheltered by the Rakhine Yoma range from monsoon rains that exceed 2,500 mm a year on the coast. The dry air, flat plain and low sun at dawn produce the view most visitors come for: hundreds of spires rising through morning haze. Sunrise balloon flights over the plain have become the site's signature image.
Most international visitors fly into Nyaung U Airport, about 20 minutes by taxi from the temples and roughly 80 minutes' flying time from Yangon. An overnight train from Yangon takes at least 18 hours, and an express ferry follows 170 km of the Irrawaddy from Mandalay in about nine hours. Tourism is the local economy's mainstay, alongside the lacquerware workshops of the area, which are the centre of the Burmese lacquer industry and a tourist draw in their own right. The Bagan Archaeological Museum holds the original Myazedi pillars, and a reconstruction of Anawrahta's palace, built in 2003 on the old foundations, shows a conjectural version of the royal buildings.
Bagan is often set beside the other great temple fields of mainland Southeast Asia, and the comparison with Cambodia's Angkor Wat is a natural one, since Pagan rose partly by checking the Khmer Empire's expansion. For the wider setting, from the Irrawaddy delta to the Shan hills, our guide to Myanmar fills in the country around the plain, and Java's Borobudur shows how another Buddhist kingdom built on a single colossal scale rather than in thousands of separate shrines.