Two Thousand Temples on One Plain

The plain around the old capital on the Irrawaddy carries the densest concentration of surviving Buddhist religious architecture anywhere. Some two thousand brick temples and stupas stand, out of a considerably larger number originally built, raised across roughly two and a half centuries. The scale is a direct consequence of the religious economy. Building a temple was an act of merit, the merit belonged to the donor, and the donation was recorded in inscription, so a society in which merit making was the principal religious activity of the wealthy produced monuments continuously and did not reuse the old ones. The turn to Theravada under Anawrahta in the eleventh century is the event the kingdom is remembered for, reinforced by contact with Sri Lanka and by the arrival of Pali texts and ordination lineages.

Tradition attributes it to the influence of a monk from the south and to the conquest that brought texts and relics to the capital. George Coedes placed the episode within the wider adoption of Indian religious forms across mainland Southeast Asia. The name is written Bagan in current Burmese romanisation, and it has no connection at all with the English word pagan, which is a coincidence of spelling in a European language.