Restoration on shaky ground
The vendor watched as members of an increasingly rare species — tourists — walked through a dirt parking lot toward Pyathat Gyi Temple, one of more than 2,000 religious monuments on a riverside plain in central Burma.
They did not stop to buy her palm-sugar candies, or any of the hats or T-shirts for sale at nearby stalls. It was nearly dusk and she had yet to make the day’s first sale.
“It used to be crowded here, before the earthquake,” the vendor, Daw Soe Moe Thue, said, referring to a 6.8-magnitude quake last year. It damaged 389 of Bagan’s monuments, and broke Pyathat Gyi’s spire as if it were one of her candies. “Now, no one.” Many of Bagan’s monuments were restored by Burma’s former military government in the 1990s, after a previous earthquake, in a way that international experts criticized as heavy-handed. The government abandoned an effort at the time to seek United Nations World Heritage status for the complex.
Now, Burma’s new civilian government is planning a fresh World Heritage bid for Bagan, and experts say that because the 2016 earthquake destroyed some of the military’s clumsiest restoration work, the new bid stands a better chance of succeeding.
But people in Bagan say they worry that officials with ties to wealthy developers, using the UN as a cover, could interfere with religious life or push zoning changes that would further impoverish people who were once evicted by the military to make way for luxury hotels.
Not rebuilding the temple spires, they say, would also make the monuments less attractive and depress domestic tourism.
“World heritage? No one cares about that,” Soe Moe Thue said. “We just need to survive.”
Bagan’s monument complex is a crown jewel in a tourism sector that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and has grown rapidly since Burma, a majority Buddhist country, began a rocky transition toward democracy in 2011.
Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Burma’s governing National League for Democracy political party, has said that any post-earthquake conservation work in Bagan should have support from local people and avoid altering monuments, according to reports in the Burma news media.
Some community groups in Bagan, however, fear that a World Heritage designation would exacerbate existing restrictions on where and how they can build homes or operate businesses in New Bagan, a district on the city’s dusty outskirts where people were forced to resettle in1990 after the military government evicted them from a monument zone downtown.
There is also deep concern here about the archeology department’s decision not to rebuild many damaged temple spires.
“In our Buddhist tradition, not having a top on a temple is like having a person without a head,” said Thay Zaniya, a monk.