The city of Bagan, home of Myanmar’s first kingdom in the 11th to 13th centuries, received world heritage status in 2018 for its roughly 2,500 Buddhist temples, stupas and monasteries that dot the city until today. This is an impressive feat (even though some of these monuments date from times after the Bagan period proper), and the citizens of Myanmar regularly head for the city on holiday trips and pilgrim tours. Likewise, the city has become the object of scholarly investigation since the beginning of the 20th century, when Gordon Luce, U Than Tun, the American scholar Michael Aung-Thwin and not last this reviewer wrote about the city and the kingdom of Bagan.1 Several studies of the monuments of the city, by Paul Strachan, Donald Stadtner and Pierre Pichard (to name the most important ones) completed these efforts to study of the archaeological side of the city.2 But what has been neglected so far are the state of the kingdom outside the city of Bagan. Temple building was not limited to the capital but spread across the whole realm. The present book is virtually the first attempt to take stock of the monuments, sites and stories connected to them that were built or existed during the Bagan period. The author has visited a good number of the places she describes and analyses, and her two collaborators, Tampawaddy U Win Maung and U Win Kyaing, have supplied her with material from the sites she could not visit, as well as local legends and any other sort of useful information. In result, we have a large volume of about 450 pages, which presents a first attempt to give a wider picture of the kingdom. It is also a befitting bequest to the research community on Bagan, as the author passed away on 13 January 2024.

The book is basically divided up into two parts. First comes a discussion of the landscape and its irrigation works, the archaeological and architectural evidence of the built landscape, and the persons connected to the places – kings, monks and tutelary deities. These are presented in three chapters. Following that, we have one long chapter presenting the places one by one, arranged in smaller units going mostly along Myanmar’s river valleys. At roughly 150 pages, this is the longest chapter of the book and clearly its focal part. At the end of the book then comes another slightly odd chapter, in which the small units are brought together in nine bigger clusters, but without proper explanation as to what this chapter actually serves. The units do not agree with contemporary units of administration (e.g., kharuin, tuiṅ), nor do they follow any environmental features such as river valleys or coherent regions. The criteria for the listing of the places are, however, pretty clear. The size of bricks and their finger-marking, constructional features of the temples and stupas (at least as far as still recognizable), surface finds and other archaeological evidence, or artistic items such as Buddha images or representations of local deities serve as much as historical markers as stories of kings and legends of people of piety do. Above all, local evidence as told by villagers or chief monks has also been given due regard. This combined approach resulted in a work that can serve as a first-hand catalogue of Bagan-period sites in Myanmar from the upper reaches of the Ayeyarwadi river down to the southern parts of Tanaingthariy (Tenasserim), including a brief look at the more marginal areas such as Shan States and Rakhaing (Arakan).

There are, on the other hand, some features that mar a full usefulness of the book. One thing are the non-standardised spellings in the text and the maps. For instance, there is Kon Taung and Kone Taung as well as Nyaung Yan and Nyaungyan on pages 277 to 279 in the book. The transliteration of Myanmar names is difficult (and the transliteration reform in Myanmar in the 1990s has not been helpful either), so the best thing we say is that the text always gives the names in Myanmar script as well, enabling the reader to go back to his or her preferred transliteration. This really helps identifying the places easily. Another problem is the somewhat ambiguous terminology concerning votive tablets and andagus. The former are clay-made and burnt imprints from a mould showing (mostly) one or many Buddha images; the latter are cut from a white-coloured pyrophyllite or steatite stone and usually show the eight great scenes from the life of the Buddha. They originate possibly from India, though they were quite common in Myanmar during the Bagan period.3 The discussion on pp. 104–107 obviously talks about andagus (two of them are depicted on p. 107, and one more image is on p. 380 of the book), but there are other instances where it is left to the reader to decide whether a votive tablet or an andagu is meant (for instance p. 203). The index is of no help either. Generally, a clearer terminology would have been helpful here.

More concerning is the way the information has been collected and the role inscriptions have (or have not) played therein. As said, the author has visited herself most of the places she talks about, and her Myanmar informants have supplied her with a good amount of additional data. Taken together, there may be certainly more than a hundred cases where she quotes from letters and personal information given to her, and often this went straight into the book. But neither she nor her collaborators put much emphasis on inscriptions, and the way these are employed varies much. For the Shwe-mot-taw temple south of Natogyi, for instance, the dates of all inscriptions that have been found are given (p. 215). Sometimes, the references from the official She-haung edition are given (for instance on p. 261), but at other places, a mere picture of the inscription shed (p. 213) or the ornamentation of the stone seems to have been more important (p. 293), whilst some of the inscriptions are simply mentioned without any further information on date or contents at all. This affects virtually all areas, as the following example will illustrate.

The case refers to Sunye village in the eastern Kyaukse area. One may note here again the variant spellings Sun Ye (p. 287) and Soon Yeh (p. 293) already pointed out above, but more importantly, the latter page reduces the village mostly to its lake. The text says that “a Bagan-period inscription has recently been recorded”, but gives no further details. However, Sunye has been the site of a 12th century temple and probably a sīmā (ordination hall) as well, which is attested in an epigraph, and has produced at least five more Bagan-period inscriptions, all written on webu stone (a kind of mica-schist) that is typical for the Kyaukse area during the Bagan period.4 The lake seems to have existed during the Bagan period as it was mentioned in one more inscription of the late 13th century.5 The point to be made here is not to highlight the importance of inscriptions and the information they provide once more, but to point the enormous gap – here and in other cases – between the data gained from an on-site visit on the one hand and information gained from contemporary sources such are inscriptions. In the above case, we have mention of one very vaguely described (no date, no number of lines, virtually no other information) and a lake (which, as said, must date back to at least the 13th century, but may have been earlier) and a vast amount of data provided by the epigraphs, beginning with the fact that there is a Hsudaungpyi temple northwest of Sunye village that received a donation from a local officer (saṅ-krī) in the year 559 (or 1197 CE), as Pl. II 116 says. This is the earliest record we have from the place. All this information could easily have been included but is simply missing from the book.

The concluding overall assessment of the work is therefore mixed. The book on the one hand presents a solid effort to take stock of the wider situation in Myanmar during the Bagan period, looking at the built environment as much as at local myths, epigraphs, and artefacts. This exercise is done with great care and quite broadly, and I have to admit that some of the local legends of saintly monks or mythical creatures were new to me as well. On the other hand, the information brought together is patchy and has severe gaps especially in the field of epigraphy. Sometimes, this is just an updating of the published epigraphs plus finds from the past years, but in some cases such as Sunye village in Kyaukse, more information on the place could have been gathered from a broader and fuller assessment of all available evidence. This begs naturally the general question of how complete and how reliable the information presented in the book really is. What about ruined and long forgotten temples, what about artefacts that have gone abroad without being properly recorded, what stories so common that no villager ever mentions them? We can raise those questions here without being perhaps ever able of giving an answer to them. All these critical remarks and thoughts made, however, we have to state that essentially this is a volume that no researcher of Bagan, and particularly the Bagan kingdom outside the capital, will be able to neglect, and if nothing else, the book is an inspiration to look at the Bagan kingdom in a wider perspective than just the capital and its monuments.

Notes:
1 The most important monographs on the dealing with the history of Bagan are: Gordon H. Luce, Old Burma – Early Pagan, New York 1969–1970; U Than Tun, History of Buddhism in Burma, A.D. 1000–1300, in: Journal of the Burma Research Society 61 (1978), pp. 1–266; Michael Aung-Thwin, Pagan. The Origins of Modern Burma, Honolulu 1984; Tilman Frasch, Pagan. Stadt und Staat, Stuttgart 1996.
2 Paul Strachan, The Art and Architecture of Old Burma, Whiting Bay 1989; Pierre Pichard, Inventory of Monuments of Pagan, Paris 1992–2001; Donald Stadtner, Ancient Pagan. Buddhist Plain of Merit, Bangkok 2013.
3 See the overview in Claudine Bautze-Picron, Between India and Burma. The ‘andagu’ stelae, in: Don Stadtner (ed.), Art of Burma. New Studies, Mumbai 1999, pp. 37–52.
4 Gordon H. Luce / U Pe Maung Tin (eds.), Inscriptions of Burma, vol. 2, London 1955, Pl. II 116, Pl. II 134a+b, Pl. III 327a+b, Pl. III 328a and Pl. III 341. Two more stones from the village date to the 14th century: Pl. IV 440a and Pl. IV 442b.
5 Ibid., Pl. III 285, line 5.