BURMA, PAGAN BAGAN

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In the many years I am already living in Burma I have learned that Bagan is beautiful but much more than what meets the eye.
The Bagan story is the story of a kingdom growing from village level size to about 70 percent of the size of today's Burma/Myanmar.
It is the story of 55 Bagan kings, of myth and legends, of nats and nagas, of wars, of political intrigues, of lies, treason and murder, of Ari Buddhism and Theravada Buddhism and the fall from a small but bustling and wealthy royal capital to a quiet, dusty place in Burma's dry zone no one would speak of anymore if it were not for Theravada Buddhism and the magnificent temples and pagodas.
Today’s dry and dusty plains of Pagan are despite a significantly increasing number of tourists still enveloped in a tomb-like silence. They are an impressive tribute to Buddhism, especially Theravada Buddhism but otherwise there is nothing that indicates that this was a powerful political and economic centre.
The present Pagan/Bagan is much different from the splendid place that is in Marco Polo's records written from 1295 to 1298 described with the following words: ".....one of the finest sights in the world" and “The two pyramidal towers entirely build of marble, ten paces in height…. One of these pyramids was covered with plates of gold an inch in thickness, so that nothing besides the gold was visible; and the other with a plate of silver, of the same thickness. ……. The whole formed a splendid object.”
I can only assume that Marco Polo in this description is speaking of one of the pagodas. Which one of the then existing pagodas it might have been I do not know (and as far as I know no one does); maybe it was the Shwezigon Pagoda built in the period from 1070 (?) to 1089 but then, no record says that this pagoda was gilded at that time.
In many of her features present-day Bagan is more like the Pagan that Sir James Scott under his writer name ‘Shway Yoe’ in 1882 (The Burman: His Life and Notions) described with the words:
”Pagan is in many respects the most remarkable religious city in the world. Jerusalem, Rome, Kieff (Kiev), Benares none of these can boast the multitude of temples and the lavishness of design and ornaments that make marvellous the deserted capital on the Irrawaddy. …the whole space is thickly studded with pagodas of all sizes and shapes, and the very ground is so thickly covered with crumbling remnants of vanished shrines that according to the popular saying, you cannot move foot or hand without touching a sacred thing.”
Lifting the curtain of myth and legend and concerning ourselves with the history of Pagan will show that this story is not only one of glory, splendour and beauty. It is also a story of crimes; and here we do not speak of petty crimes. We speak of very, very serious crimes that include patricide, fratricide and murder committed to get to the top and stay at the top.