What are the temples of Bagan?
Imagine thousands of temples — not five or ten, but thousands — rising from a dusty plain under the bright sun, their red brick and white stone glowing like a city made of spice and sugar. That's Bagan, in Myanmar, where nearly 900 years ago, people built so many temples that even today you can't walk a mile without bumping into one. Why so many? And what were they all for?
Around the year 1050, Bagan was the capital of a powerful kingdom. The king and his people were Theravada Buddhists, and they believed that building a temple — funding it, designing it, blessing it — earned you merit, a kind of spiritual good-karma score that helped you in this life and the next. So everyone who could afford it built one. Kings built huge ones. Merchants built medium ones. Even regular families pooled their money for small ones.
