Bagan is a plain in central Myanmar with more than two thousand Buddhist temples standing on it, and they are the survivors of about ten thousand. They went up in barely two centuries, most of them between the eleventh and the thirteenth. There are so many because building one bought something: paying for a temple earned merit towards a better rebirth. Kings and merchants competed to fund the biggest, and poorer families pooled what they had for a small shrine. Then Mongol pressure broke the kingdom, and almost nothing of consequence was added to the plain again. At first light balloons lift off in the half-dark and drift low over all of it, and from the basket the plain reads as a scattered field of spires with the brick warming to gold.
You cross the ground by pony cart, the driver threading sandy lanes between giants like Thatbyinnyu and Dhammayangyi, stopping at shrines the buses skip. The alternative is an electric bike, the only motorbike a foreigner may drive here. With it leaned against a nameless pagoda, you can have a thousand-year-old temple to yourself. That is the part most people miss. Plenty of these buildings are plain brick from the outside and keep everything within. Through a low doorway the air turns cool and dark around you, and a huge seated Buddha fills the chamber. A guide's lamp lifts the gilded face and eight-hundred-year-old paintings of the Buddha's past lives out of the shadow. Ananda holds four standing Buddhas, one on each side, each over nine metres tall. Nobody climbs the temples now, so sunset is watched from low earth mounds, the spires blackening one behind another across the plain. Dhammayangyi, the biggest temple on the plain, is the one that gives nothing back. King Narathu raised it around 1167, by tradition to atone for smothering his father and poisoning his brother, and he was killed before it was done. Its inner corridors were bricked up afterwards, and the largest building in Bagan stands hollow at its heart.