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.

Over two centuries, more than 10,000 temples went up on that plain. Ten thousand. They weren't all the same: some were tall and hollow inside, built for monks to chant in. Others were solid stupas — bell-shaped mounds of brick covering a holy relic, like a tooth or a piece of cloth from the Buddha's robe. Each one was a little different: different carvings, different murals inside, different doorways catching the light.

Walk inside one of the big hollow temples today and you'll find cool dim halls painted floor-to-ceiling with stories: the Buddha's past lives, demons and gods, celestial dancers frozen mid-twirl on the plaster. Sunlight slants through stone windows in thick golden beams. In the center sits a huge Buddha statue, serene and still, watching over the space like it's been holding its breath for 900 years.

By 1287, the kingdom had weakened, and Mongol armies swept through. The temple-building stopped. Earthquakes knocked down many of the structures over the centuries — Bagan sits on a fault line, and every few decades the earth shivers and a few more temples crack and tumble. Of those original 10,000, only about 2,200 still stand. But that's still enough to fill the plain with spires.

Today, Bagan is quiet. Farmers grow beans and sesame in the fields between temples. Tourists rent electric bikes and zip along sandy roads, stopping to climb the safer temples for sunrise views. Hot air balloons drift over the plain at dawn, their baskets full of people gasping at the sight below: a forest of stone and brick, golden and red, glowing like embers as the sun climbs.

Archaeologists and locals work together now to preserve what's left. Some temples get careful repairs — matching the old mortar, replacing bricks one by one. Others are left as ruins, vines creeping over the walls, bats swooping out at dusk. Each one is still a working piece of history: monks still chant in a few, villagers still leave offerings of flowers and incense at the Buddha's feet.

So that's Bagan: not one grand temple, but a whole plain full of them, built by thousands of people over two centuries, each one hoping to tip the scales of karma just a little in their favor. They built so many that even after earthquakes, wars, and 900 years of wind and rain, you still can't walk a mile without bumping into one. And every single spire still catches the light.