13/05/2017
Asia Pacific | Bagan Journal
Myanmar Is Restoring Temples to Rebuild its Heritage
By MIKE IVESMAY 11, 2017
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Hot air balloons flying over the temples of Bagan, Myanmar, in March. Credit Minzayar Oo for The New York Times
BAGAN, Myanmar — 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 here on a riverside plain in central Myanmar.
They did not stop to buy her palm-sugar candies, which she covers with a plastic tarp to keep flies away, or any of the hats or T-shirts for sale at some nearby carts and 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 Myanmar’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.
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Restoration at Pyathat Gyi Temple, which was damaged by an earthquake last year. Credit Minzayar Oo for The New York Times
Now Myanmar’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 United Nations 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.
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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,” Ms. Soe Moe Thue said as she stood under an umbrella in a light drizzle recently. “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 Myanmar, a majority Buddhist country, began a rocky transition toward democracy in 2011.
But even though some of the monuments here were built in the 11th century, tourists often regard the complex as flawed because the military’s 1990s-era renovations — marked in cherry red bricks — are seen as detracting from its authenticity
In the 1990s, the military government abandoned its World Heritage bid because it feared its “really horrible” restoration work would face harsh scrutiny from international experts, said Pierre Pichard, a longtime consultant for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization who first visited Bagan in 1975.
But the 2016 earthquake, he said, could offer Myanmar’s new government a fresh start with Unesco because it destroyed much of the military’s worst construction work, particularly the temple spires that it built in the 1990s.
“It came at the right moment,” he said of the earthquake during a recent trip to Bagan.
Daw Ohnmar Myo, Unesco’s Myanmar project officer, said that the government planned to submit a World Heritage bid for the site by next February and that the complex could be officially
Unesco consultants are now developing a detailed conservation plan for Ananda Ok Kyaung, an 18th-century monastery in Bagan that experts say was severely damaged in the earthquake. A careful restoration there could become a blueprint, they say, for a wider conservation program if the World Heritage bid is approved.
“The good thing about a Unesco tag is that people are always forced to think, ‘Would this be acceptable or not’” from an international conservation perspective, said Gurmeet S. Rai, a conservation architect based in New Delhi who is advising the monastery project.
Otherwise, she said, people working on conservation sites might be tempted to “start cutting corners.”
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Myanmar’s governing National League for Democracy, has said that any postearthquake conservation work in Bagan should have support from local people and avoid altering monuments, according to reports in the Myanmar news media.
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Tourists on e-bikes encountered some cows and sheep. Credit Minzayar Oo for The New York Times
To help rally support for its Unesco bid, the government plans to abolish military-era laws that prevented Bagan residents from opening small guesthouses, said U Aung Aung Kyaw, the director of Bagan’s archaeology department. And to comply with Unesco recommendations, he said, the government will allow rebuilding work at only five of the 89 sites in the monument complex that were either moderately or heavily damaged by the earthquake.
“If we don’t protect our cultural heritage, we can’t pass it on to the next generation,” he said.
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 in 1990 after the military government evicted them from a monument zone downtown.
Instead of leaving the monument zone free of development, the military government allowed for the construction there of several high-end hotels, including one on the site of a former school, said U Aung Shwe, the second secretary at the Bagan Development Committee, a nongovernmental organization that provides free ambulance, funeral and firefighting services for many of the city’s poorest residents.
Thatbyinnyu Temple is among the monuments undergoing restoration. Credit Minzayar Oo for The New York Times
Hotels are still being built in the monument zone, and local elites see a potential World Heritage designation as a source of high-end tourism revenue, not a tool for curbing the city’s glaring social inequality, said U Khin Maung, the chairman of the Bagan Development Committee and a tour guide in the monument zone.
“The new government should take care of its people, not squeeze our necks,” he said.
There is also deep concern here about the archaeology 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 U Thay Zaniya, a monk who lives in a monastery beside the Sulamani Temple, a popular monument where the archaeology department says a spire that fell in the earthquake will not be replaced. “It’s a disgraceful sight.”
Mr. Thay Zaniya said he had reluctantly accepted the department’s decision because Unesco had warned that rebuilding the spire could expose the temple to damage during Bagan’s next earthquake.
But U Kyaing, the caretaker of Dhammayazika pagoda, another popular monument in Bagan, said the price of accepting Unesco’s advice would be shirking his religious duty.
Such a trade, he said, was unacceptable.
“We need to rebuild our pagoda so that the next generation will know what it looks like,” he said on a balmy evening outside the pagoda, as birds swooped overhead in gentle parabolas. “If we don’t, we would lose our heritage.”
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A worker making his way up to the roof of Pyathet Gyi Temple, which is being restored. Credit Minzayar Oo for The New York Times
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