Bagan Architecture

Bagan architecture is the Buddhist temple building tradition of Bagan, capital of the Pagan Kingdom that first unified the regions of Myanmar, on the plains of the Mandalay Region from the ninth to thirteenth centuries. At its height in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, more than ten thousand temples, pagodas and monasteries were built across the site's 104 square kilometers, of which over 2,200 survive today. The tradition produced two basic building types, solid stupas descended from earlier Pyu prototypes, which evolved by the eleventh century into the bell shaped form with tapering ring tiers and a banana bud finial characteristic of Burmese pagodas, and hollow gu temples built for meditation and worship, either single entrance one face or multi entrance four face designs, marked by pointed arches and vaulted chambers. Bagan's builders developed masonry vaulting independently, with the earliest vaulted temples dating to the eleventh century, roughly a century before comparable vaulting became widespread in India, and their construction proved durable enough that many of the site's temples survived a major 1975 earthquake intact.