Myanmar (Burma) Revealed: The Temples of Bagan (Travel Guide)

Travel guidebooks for the ultra curious, Approach Guides reveal a destination’s essence by exploring a compelling aspect of its cultural heritage: art, architecture, history, food, or wine.

Bagan is one of the most magnificent and inspiring sites in Southeast Asia. With over 2,000 temples and stupas dotting its landscape, this ancient Buddhist capital provides travelers a unique opportunity to explore the evolution of Bagan's art and architecture over its 450-year history (850-1300). 

In this Approach Guide, we explore the art and architecture of Bagan, looking at the most important temples and exploring their artistic styles, why each is important to Bagan’s cultural history, and how each evolved over time.

This Approach Guide is broken into two sections:

The first section, an overview, provides travelers with a deep understanding of the two types of religious architecture they will encounter in Bagan (temples and stupas) and the art forms used to decorate them (paintings and sculpture).   To provide a complete picture, we provide floorplans, images that highlight specific features and decoration, descriptions of the prevailing Bagan aesthetic, subject matter, and stylistic development.

The second section provides detailed profiles of 21 specific sites that offer the quintessential examples of Bagan’s architecture, painting, and sculpture.  For each site we first discuss the overall layout of the site, the exterior appearance and decoration, and finally the interior decoration and important architectural elements.

This Approach Guide contains:

• Over 120 high-resolution images.
• More than 20 floorplans with color highlights that make visual identification of key features easier.
• A high-level map of Bagan’s sites to ease navigation and plan your itinerary.

The overall goal of these site profiles is provide the traveler with what is most important, a framework for understanding each site and what makes it special.

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