Around 2,000 sacred buildings have been preserved to this day on around 36 square kilometers in the Pagan steppe at the east bank of the Irrawaddy river in Myanmar. Bagan's heyday began with the coronation of Anawrathas in 1084 and it formed the first united kingdom of Burma. Through him the kingdom was consolidated as a religious center of Buddhism and he and his faithful successors had around 6000 pagodas and temples built in the following centuries.

Cycling through the plains offers incomparable insights into the current and former religious life of the Buddhist culture of this country. When we made this trip in 1985, many of the buildings were still in a rather deserted state and the possibilities for overnight stays in this area were limited. Today this should have changed, because the Bagan plain is now the tourist highlight of Myanmar and many of the temples have been restored with great effort - where the stupas were only made of bricks during our trip, the gold coating already shines today and leaves some of the important temples appear extremely magnificent, which should, however, somewhat impair our "Indiana Jones feeling" at that time. A comparison is interesting and in the photos published here we show photographs from our archive of the following sacral buildings: