Outcry greets Myanmar's plans for ancient city

By Vijay Joshi
The Associated Press

	VIJAY JOSHI / AP Bagan, the ancient capital of Myanmar, has more than 2,200 Buddhist temples and pagodas remaining from the 11th to 13th centuries, when more than 7,000 such structures were built by its rulers. The site is a popular tourist destination.
	E-mail this article Print this article Search archive

"It's a cultural crime," said Pierre Pichard, a Bagan expert at the French Research School of the Far East, based in neighboring Thailand. "It will be ... conspicuous and ugly, and it's totally crazy to add such a structure in the middle of an ancient historical site."

The 1,000-year-old temple complex is on a par with Cambodia's Angkor temples — an unmatched vista of thousands of Buddhist temples and monuments spread among rice paddies over an area nearly twice the size of Manhattan.

There are giant circular pagodas with soaring domes, small temples with corncob-shaped spires, and exquisitely proportioned ziggurats, or terraced pyramids.

More than 4,400 pagodas and 3,000 other religious structures of bricks and stones were built in Bagan, Myanmar's former capital, during a 243-year period from the 11th to 13th centuries, the result of extraordinary Buddhist fervor.

Today, 2,237 ruins and temples remain, many of them still used by worshippers.

The junta says the 198-foot tower, roughly 16 stories, will give tourists a bird's-eye view of Bagan and they will be barred from clambering over ancient pagodas that are being damaged by thousands of invading feet every day. About 75,000 foreign tourists visit each year.

Nyunt Han, director general of the Myanmar Department of Archaeology, said the tower, in the southeastern corner of Bagan, is far from the historical heart where a few tall temples are the tourists' favorite.

"We selected the site with care," he said. "It won't obstruct the ancient beauty."

However, tour guides say the brick and mortar edifice, higher than every temple except one, will ruin the beauty of the area. But the fear of the dictatorial junta is such that no one is willing to voice opposition publicly.

UNESCO, the U.N. agency that has the power to grant or withhold prestigious World Heritage status and the accompanying funding, has spoken loudly against the tower.

"It's a very big mistake. It sticks a big eyesore right in the middle of the site," said Richard Engelhardt, UNESCO's Bangkok-based regional adviser for culture.

The project is adding to the severe criticism already heaped on Myanmar's junta for its allegedly unplanned and inaccurate rebuilding of many ruins. Bob Hudson, a University of Sydney archaeologist working in Bagan, said almost half of the 2,237 monuments have been rebuilt, sometimes from the ground up.

"In many cases, ruined piles of rubble have been speculatively reconstructed on the basis of similarity to other buildings," he wrote in Orientations, a Hong Kong-based art journal. "At times restoration verges on Disneyfication."

The outcome is an incongruous spectacle of faux antique temples made with new bricks and cement, housing brown-painted plaster Buddha statues. Replastering in one temple has given the four-armed Hindu god Vishnu two extra arms.

"So instead of ending up with a Bagan-period temple you end up with a 21st-century notion of what a Bagan period temple might have looked like — notions that might have come from cinema and things like that," Engelhardt said.

Han, the Department of Archaeology director general, said his department has old documents that make precise reconstruction possible.

Engelhardt doesn't think all is lost, even if the tower is completed.

"I don't think it has gone to the point where it is irreversible," he said. "We are not at the point where we could say that Bagan is lost to the world."

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company